If you want to run a business, merely coming up with product ideas and registering a company is not enough. You need to work on branding your business.
Branding a business involves certain activities, most of which are digital, that need to be carried out in order to turn your business into a brand that your customers can identify with. In the competitive world we are living in today, avoiding business branding makes your business invisible and does not allow you to make any sales.
No matter how big or small your company is, you need to allocate time and budget to brand your business in the right ways. But before branding your business, you need to work on defining your buyer persona and carefully identifying your niche.
Once you know who you want to sell to, what marketing approach you want to adopt, and how you want to position yourself in the eyes of your customers, you are ready to work on branding your business.
7 Key Ways to Brand Your Business
Here are 7 different strategies that will guide you on how to brand your business.
1. Preparing Your Brand Logo
A company or brand’s logo is more than what we think. It represents the company’s name, culture, values, and objectives as an icon. It has the colors that are associated with the brand.
Preparing your logo is among the first steps you need to take for branding your business. Without a logo, your business almost does not exist. Many popular brands, such as Coca-Cola, spend thousands of dollars to get their logo designed. Large companies believe in using Feng Shui and other techniques to create a logo that they believe has the potential to make the brand successful.
The logo, once designed, is used in the company’s signage, on the website, as profile photos on social media pages, on all its advertisements, and in any other place where the brand is mentioned. It’s a simple way to express the brand.
The logo is sometimes a uniquely designed font of the brand name itself, while other times just a unique shape or typography that uses a combination of the brand colors. Either way, getting your logo ready is the first step in your business branding. Once the logo is ready, you can move on to preparing the other items that contribute to branding your business.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
2. Claiming Social Media Handles
Since social media marketing has become so important for promoting a brand, creating social media handles is the second step or action you need to take for branding your business. To do this, you first need to decide which social media platforms are you going to use to establish the existence of your brand. Companies usually use over one social media site to promote themselves these days.
For instance, if a company is offering consumer products that require a lot of product photos for advertising, using Instagram stories is a suitable means for marketing it on social media. Another business that’s offering web development services might want to start a YouTube channel, and publish videos that give knowledge to the audience on the importance and techniques of website development.
Your selection of the social media sites that you use plays a crucial role in your business branding. If you use an irrelevant media, your branding will not make sense to the audience, and you will lose potential sales. For example, if you use LinkedIn as the only social media site to promote fashion wear, your audience could not resonate with your advertisements. They might even get annoyed with your posts because, as they look for job opportunities scrolling through their LinkedIn account, the product photos of the dresses and jeans you’re selling keep showing up in their feed.
Once you have created all the relevant social media accounts, channels or pages for branding your business, you need to have the link to each that can be inserted into your website, landing page, or other spaces where you promote your brand. These links are called your social media handles.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
3. Building a Brand Website
This is the most important step for branding your business. It is absolutely crucial that you have a solid online presence for your brand, or else your brand name will not even be discoverable in search engines. The first thing anybody who hears your brand name would do is search for it on Google, and try to find your brand website.
A brand website serves as the central point of providing information about your business across the internet. It is easy to build a simple website these days that serves the purpose of showcasing your products or services. By using a website building tool like Strikingly, you can get a complete website ready, up and running in a matter of just a few hours.
Image taken from Strikingly
You only need to take the following steps to build a website on Strikingly.
- Sign up for a free Strikingly account.
- Select a suitable template for your website.
- Add in your website content using our latest drag-and-drop feature.
- Design the header and footer, and insert your brand logo.
- Don’t forget to create a contact form and/or write your contact details.
4. Creating Custom Email Accounts
A properly established organization needs to have custom email accounts for its staff. Thus, creating custom email addresses is the next step for branding your business. Even though many businesses use Gmail for their corporate email accounts, having emails on your brand’s own domain is usually more preferable. It gives the impression that the company has its own organized internal systems.
Having custom email addresses for your employees also helps to keep your information secure. If an employee leaves the company, they cannot access the email account anymore because it is hosted within the company.
Personalized email addresses also come in handy in your outreach campaigns. It makes your brand appear more professional and takes your marketing efforts to a new level.
If your website is built on Strikingly, you can create personalized email accounts. For this, you will need to register a custom domain with Strikingly. Once you have a custom domain, you can follow these steps.
- Log into your Strikingly dashboard.
- Click ‘Emails’ and then ‘Add Email Account’.
Image taken from Strikingly
- Key in your new email account name.
- Then click on ‘Purchase Email Account’ to be billed on the spot.
- Your new email account will be in pending status for a while until the email address is created.
- Once it is ready, you will receive an email on your primary email address (i.e. the one you entered during registration) with login credentials of the new email account.
5. Coming Up With Slogans and Taglines
The next step for branding your business is to come up with catchy slogans or taglines. These are quick statements that reveal the goal of your organization. They will be used in your adverts and on your social media pages.
Slogans reveal your passion for your business. They exude the vibrance of your brand that sticks in the minds of your target customers. Without an attractive and snappy slogan, your business branding will be incomplete.
6. Preparing Other Brand Items
When you reach this step, you have covered all the major steps for branding your business. Now you can look into the extras. These extra items further enhance your business branding by giving you more things to distribute to your customers to keep them reminded about your brand.
These extra items can be T-shirts, mugs, pens and other stationery items, shopping bags, and even notebooks that have your brand name printed on them. You can place these items in your office and give them as gifts to your staff to use. You can also reward your customers from time to time with some of these items if they do you a favor, such as recommending your online store to a friend. The branded shopping bags can be used in your retail store.
7. Opening Channels of Communication With Customers
The last step for branding your business is to open as many avenues as possible for your customers to get in touch with you. Some ideas for channels of communication are as follows.
- Build an online community where your customers can share their ideas and opinions about your brand and products.
- Encourage your customers to contact you through social media messengers.
- Create a contact form on your brand website that anyone can fill up and submit any time.
- Send newsletters to your subscribers regularly to keep them informed about your brand updates.
These steps can serve as a basic guideline for how to brand your business. You can always come up with your own creative ideas as well to enhance your business branding. For instance, new social media platforms keep emerging that give rise to new ideas and ways for businesses to promote their products.
Branding your business can be a fun process if you are passionate about your business idea from the start. Many of our users in Strikingly enjoy engaging with us in getting support for building and maintaining their website. We are all in providing you with any kind of technical or non-technical support regarding your website development. We are happy to see you prosper and look forward to having you as our next user in Strikingly!
