How to Create a Strong Business Identity
Cultivating a strong business identity is among the most potent tools for offline and online ventures. However, the tactics for each can be combined for a powerful strategy that increases results. Here are some ideas, from competitor analysis to establishing an online presence.
Maximize Exposure with Promotion
Promotions are vital for any business. Visual branding is one of the more powerful tools in a marketing arsenal. You can make a powerful impact with the right combination of colors, slogans, and imagery. Successful marketing campaigns stick in customers' heads, build associations, and invoke nostalgia. Marketing options such as double sided banners, posters and even billboards are hugely impactful and should always be part of the budget.
Look at Competitors for a Strong Business Identity
According to Investopedia, as many as 90% of startups fail, with many businesses shutting down within the first five to ten years. However, you can look at what the competition is doing to reassess your brand and make some changes for a more positive impact:
Analyze their brand messaging, such as their values and emotions.
Look at their target audience to reveal who their service and products are designed for.
Assess engagement, such as response times, and determine how to do it better.
Cater to a Unique Audience
Gaining audience trust isn't easy; you can waste time and money trying to cater to everyone. However, a product for everyone is usually a product for no one! One of the biggest secrets of marketing is to laser-focus your attention on a specific audience segment. This is known as niche marketing, and a niche is the topic your business is involved in. This makes it easier to understand the audience and tailor all marketing efforts to them.
Stay Consistent Across the Board
Customers don't like inconsistencies. To appeal to any audience, certain expectations must be met. Figuring these out depends on market research and getting to know the customer. Once you have done this, identifying with them and meeting their needs is relatively easy. However, a solid brand is always reliable. This means using the same tone of voice in marketing, keeping the values the audience expects, and even using the same visuals.
Strike a Visually Strong Business Identity
Further to visuals, don't dismiss how powerful the impact of a strong business identity can be based on the imagery side of things. Only around 50% of consumers trust the brands they buy from, but powerful visuals remind customers your brand can be trusted.
Understand identity vs. image
These are often put together, but they aren't the same thing. Identity is the aim of how you want to be seen. Image is how the world sees your brand. You can use identity to position your brand to the place you want it to be. But this also depends on conveying a specific image.
Come up with a unique style.
Brand identity design relies on many factors, culminating in a public perception, but a unique style is the underlying factor. Of course, there needs to be visual direction, but the overall visuals must appeal to the core audience and what they have come to expect.
Aim for instant recognition
The golden goose of branding is instant recognition. This leads to association with a product or even lifestyle. You think burgers, you think McDonalds, right? This kind of recognition for in-store branding comes with increased sales, but it's also a quasi-seal of approval.
Research Buyer Persona
You can't know every customer personally. Through solid market research, you can get an overall view of a niche audience, but they aren't all the same. You will even have atypical customers who don't fit the overall niche. However, there is usually an ideal customer; you can get to know this through the buyer persona. You can build a picture of a perfect customer using data gathered from market research, including age, interests, and lifestyle.
Appeal to an Audience's Emotions
There are not many things more powerful for marketing than audience emotional appeal. Major brands such as Coca-Cola and McDonald's are masters at this. Can you remember a time when you didn't associate Christmas with Coke? This appeal to a target audience can have a long-lasting impression that converts people into lifelong customers. Coke does this through nostalgia. If you can figure out how to emotionally trick customers, you have struck gold!
Craft a Strong Business Identity Online
An online presence for a brand is more important than you might think. 49% of shoppers use Google before anything else to find products they want. That's why Google gives priority to well-branded companies in results pages. Today, it's easier than ever, so give these a try first:
Spread your brand across the web with service directories for the niche.
Tailor every piece of content according to solid on-page SEO research.
Use social media platforms that are most popular with your niche target audience.
Refer Back to a SWOT Analysis
There are various ways to analyze your company, each with its use cases and benefits. One of the more potent for marketing is SWOT analysis. Here is a quick overview of SWOT.
Strengths
Internal and positive: what do you do well, what do customers like, and what are your unique selling points?
Weaknesses
Internal and negative: What can be improved? What is customer dissatisfaction? What do you lack?
Opportunities
External and positive: Trends to ride, market penetration, and areas of less competition.
Threats
External and negative: what competitors are doing, how weaknesses affect you, and the economy.
SWOT can be used throughout marketing and branding, offering insights into more extensive scale projects. By addressing SWOT queries, you can build a reliable plan moving forward.
Summary
Gaining more exposure using offline and online ads will help build a strong business identity that resonates with an audience. However, the most trusted brands are also visually striking. SWOT analysis can help develop a branding project by addressing specific queries.
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