Five Useful Tips for Branding Your Business

Branding is an essential part of business identity and marketing. A brand is any unique feature that identifies and associates a product to its seller or manufacturer. Branding features may include the business name, logo, slogan, product design, trademark, artwork, or even a symbol like the actual Greek symbol of strength.

Your branding approach can easily make or break your business. It’s, therefore, essential to tick all the crucial boxes when it comes to branding your business. Here are five useful tips to help you come up with an ideal branding strategy. 

Understand The Power of Your Brand

Before you even get started, you need to understand what a strong brand can do for your business. Branding is one of the critical facts that should set your business apart from competitors. A brand helps consumers identify your product and associate it with your company.

A majority of consumers only buy products from brands that they recognize and trust. If your brand is well marketed, its distinction can be a valuable marketing factor. What’s more, Google and other search engines often prioritize branded listing in organic search results.    

Maintain Consistency

Being consistent with your branding is very important to avoid confusion among your customers and even in your workplace. For instance, once you choose a theme color, logo, or catchphrase, stick to it throughout your branding process. Ensure that your products, website, and even marketing campaign are directly related through branding. Avoid mixing things up unnecessarily, and never try different branding approaches in the live market.

Define your brand carefully from the very start. Although you can always rebrand in the future, rebranding is often expensive, difficult, and sometimes ineffective.

Keep it Simple

There is no need to overcomplicate things when it comes to branding. Small businesses can learn valuable lessons in simplicity from giant companies like Apple, Google, and Coca-Cola that have some of the simplest and yet most recognizable and influential branding features.

Be precise about your branding and focus on just a few aspects. You don’t need to use a rainbow of colors as your color scheme – just one or two colors will do. Settle on only one catchphrase, one symbol, and one graphical element. Simple things and ideas are easy to remember; a good example is the “Just do it” slogan from Nike that is recognized and known all over the world. Plus, the world is shifting to a more minimalistic approach to most things, filtering out the unnecessary noise and focusing on the essentials.

Be Accurate

You need to be factually accurate when designing and marketing your brand. Even the law requires there to be some truth in your brand’s slogan and message. Besides abiding by the advertising laws, fact-check your branding features to ensure that they communicate the right message, and represent the brand in the right way. For instance, you can use the Greek symbol of strength to demonstrate durability and power.  

Come up with A Brand Usage Policy

After developing a unique and compelling brand, you have to protect it from competitors and also ensure that third parties appropriately use it on your behalf. Every use of the brand’s features, such as the logo must clearly represent your brand. Implement a brand usage policy and also trademark some of the unique features so they can only be used by your business.

Remember, competitors can copy your branding ideas and tweak them a little to confuse or steal customers from your brand. This is a common black hat marketing strategy and is legally actionable in most parts of the world, but only if you have protected your branding using trademark and copyright laws.

Branding is a crucial marketing and self-identity element. If done properly, branding can help your business dominate its niche and vastly outgrow its competition. You can always consult branding experts to help you design and implement a branding design if you’re not confident enough to do it on your own.