What is Brand | How to Build Brand Strategy for Your Business | Follow 13 Easy Steps of Becoming a Brand

by Kuldeep Yadav | May 4, 2022 | Business, Marketing

Can I ask u a simple question? When did you last visit your nearby market? Today, yesterday, or a day before yesterday? Well, we often visit markets and see a lot of products there.

Do you know we can’t identify which company made most of the products, but why we can identify some of the products, through the wordmark, symbol, logo, marking on the products, or colours? Because they’ve become a Brand by keeping their brand voice consistent.

You must be thinking about what a brand and brand voice is? Don’t worry, we’ll be including everything like what is a brand, what is brand voice, what is brand strategy, how to build brand strategy, why brand strategy, digital and visual branding trends, and monitoring the brand and its voice.

Let’s start the journey and explain!

What is a brand?

We all know that this is the most economical and digital era so far. There’re thousands of products in today’s marketplaces, and all of them are being rapidly commoditized. Then, in this situation, a brand helps you in standing out from other products in the market.

Some people think that a brand is just an identifying symbol, logo, mark, colour, name, word, or sentence used to distinguish the product in the marketplace.

But, a brand is the collection of associations of all the expressions by which an entity intends to be recognized. An entity can be any person, company, country, organization, or business. It is the way a product, company, or individual is perceived by those who experience it.

When we talk about brands, we have a feeling that we’re talking about a company, country, organization, or business. Most people don’t see any individual or a person as a brand, because businesses have brands, and people have personalities.

But nowadays on the basis of personalities, people are building their own personal brand, and as its name suggests, it’s called personal brand, and the process by which an individual achieves it is called personal branding.

Well, your brand is something that helps people in determining how they feel about your business or your personality, and how they would describe it to others.

A brand includes

• Style
• Communication
• Behaviour

Our brands should be consistent in brand style, brand voice, and communication strategy wherever customers interact with our brand. When you’ll put a glance at DigiAvtar’s different social media channels like DigiAvtar’s Facebook Page, Instagram Page, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest, you’ll find the same colour schemes, logo, communication strategy, and marketing material.

If our brand is well defined then it’ll help our businesses be consistent and recognisable when people will interact with the brand on different channels. Facebook insights and Google insights are so much helpful in knowing how users are interacting with your brands and can give us valuable information about the behaviour and demographics of the users.

To keep it consistent we need a brand message, voice, and a strategy to make it consistent in every single place customers can interact with it.

How to create a brand for our Business?

Creating a brand isn’t that difficult task if we know the basics of how to create a brand. Well, from my own perspective there can’t be anything more advanced than the basics. If you’ve followed all the basic steps of building a brand, rest assured, that it’ll soon be going to be recognisable by the community you’re building it for.

We’ll include everything in the next 5 steps of how to create a brand for our Business?

1. Define Your Brand: Origin of The Brand: – First step is all about who you are! This is all about your brand, when did it start, what problem did you try to solve with the help of your brand, and what is your current approach to solve that particular problem. Create an origin and evolution story of your brand by including starting year, problem, and the approach to solve the problem. It will you outstanding from other brands.
2. Define Your Goal: Mission and Vision of The Brand: – Well, we all know that without a purpose none can achieve anything and be always motivated. In the motto of our brands, we include what we do and why we do it. What is the ultimate aim our brand wants to achieve with the particular approach? This will keep our users engaged with us, and they’ll feel confident and excited by connecting and becoming part of our goal.
3. Define Your Identity: Build Colour Pallets and Logo: – Well, how do you feel if you’ll find inconsistency in the colours on the website or any platform. You’ll just want to get away and leave the platform, right? So, to avoid this problem, we need to define our colour pallets so that our colour combinations will be distributed uniformly on every platform and every design. Also, build your own logo having the same colours you’re using in your colour pallets. Your brand’s visual identity is the look and feel of the business. Keep the colours, logos, and visuals the same in every physical or virtual place, including your marketing materials.
4. Define Your Brand Voice: Tone of Communication: – It’s important to know how you want to represent your brand, and that all depends on the tone of your communication. Decide what type of tone you want for your business, serious or funny, formal or casual, a matter of fact or enthusiastic? It depends on you what type of brand voice you’re going to choose but choose according to your customer persona, which you created on the basis of your target audience.
5. Be Consistent: – Creating a brand is just a piece of cake if you’re following every step mentioned in this post, and keeping everything consistent on every single marketing platform. If you’re not consistent with your colours, logo, and marketing materials’ tone of communication, then you’ve lost track, and you’re never going to achieve the title of a Brand. It depends on you, but the thing that matters is to keep it consistent. Consistency is the key to creating your brand.

We’ve been talking about brand voice, either you’re running a business or just have started then you’re probably familiar with the concept of brand voice, it isn’t just a tone of communication. Well, it’ll be better to say that in marketing everything is overlapping, you’ll get to know when you’ll deep dive into the ocean of branding strategies of marketing.

What is a brand voice?

Your brand voice is how your brand sounds and feels each when people communicate with it across all the marketing platforms. It is the embodiment of the origin, identity, mission, vision, and values of your business. In the scenario of personal branding, all the attributes will reflect who we’re as an individual. Keep it always consistent everywhere for the safety of your brand, whether it’s on your website, social media, or tutorials. It is a must to keep a consistent brand voice for your brand strategy.

Why does Our Brand Voice Matter in Marketing?

Your brand voice is the key to creating trust in the market. It stands for loyalty, trust, faith, and premium-ness depending on how it’s promoted.

You yourself think if someone is talking in two different tones of communication, you’ll be confused about what that person wants to convey, and we will not trust that person again? It’s the same with the brand voice, if we don’t keep it consistent, our target audience will get confused.

Keep it consistent and let the audience know what you stand for!

How to keep our brand voice consistent?

There are many ways of keeping the brand voice consistent, but we will be listing some of the ways here, to make sure that you follow the right path. The things that should be followed to keep your brand voice uniform are the following:

1. Know who you’re talking to Creating Customer Personas
2. Keep an elaborated and clear origin story
3. Be clear about the mission, vision, and values
4. Keep a clear vision of what you’re not
5. Decide how you want to make feel to your users when they interact with you.
6. Decide your tone of communication: – Inspiring, Motivational, Funny, Formal, or Serious?
7. Create Your Brand Style Guide: – This is the most important thing, it’ll include everything from rules for copywriting, graphics, colour pallets, fonts, and all of our businesses’ branding details included from points 1 to 5. It is a document that contains everything like who we are targeting, how we will describe our origin story, what are our mission, vision and values, and what the tone of our brand voice is?
8. Audit Marketing Materials: – Examine everything in your marketing materials. Are you having the same colour pallets in all the marketing materials, and images depicting your brand or not? Is everything consistent, if not then keep it uniform in all the marketing materials?
9. Audit Your Marketing Platforms: – Auditing everything will tell us what we need to improvise, and it’s the best way to uplift our branding strategy. Audit your marketing platforms, for the hashtags, the headlines, the tag line about the business, colour pallets, fonts, etc. See if the logo you’re using is the same on all the platforms.
10. Improvise Time to Time: – It’s best to keep updated with the market. If we don’t keep ourselves updated with the marketing trends, then we’ll lose in the long run. So, always keep an eye on the marketing trends, and see what you can include in your branding strategy.

You must’ve heard a famous saying, “we’ve come so far, but there’s a lot to do”. We also need to learn a lot in this blog, so take a deep breath and move ahead.

Well, we all know now what a brand is, how to create a brand, what brand voice is, and how to keep it consistent?

Let’s move to the next topic and learn about what a brand strategy is?

What is a brand strategy?

It’ll be very difficult to keep clear your goals in marketing if you don’t have a brand strategy. It’ll be very difficult to make your users understand your mission, vision, and values without it. Even they will get confused about the message you want to convey through your brand. If you want that your users will understand your mission, and the values you want to provide them in terms of your services then having a brand strategy is your trump card.

Why having a brand strategy is the need of every business?

If you want to convey your brand message clearly then it’s the best suitable way you develop it as soon as possible. Having a crystal clear and efficient elaborated brand strategy can be the most powerful tool for improving the success of your business. It will not only help your users to get acquainted with your brand but also will help you and your employees with what your business is about and in which direction you’re heading. There’re so many benefits of having a solid brand strategy are the following:

External Benefits of brand strategy:-

1. It makes your logo, fonts, and colours recognizable
2. Build trust in the market
3. Improve Sales and Growth of Business
4. Helps in Keeping your business Outstanding in the Market
5. Remove the confusion about your brand
6. Increase Customer Loyalty

Internal Benefits of Brand Strategy:

• Keeps everyone on the same page
• Having a sense of purpose
• Increase Productivity
• Easy Auditing of Social Media Platforms
• Easy Implementation of Marketing Strategies

We’ve seen how much you can get benefitted if you’re having an efficient brand strategy. So, must be thinking, about how to create a brand strategy? Even I would say you would be thinking will I be able to succeed in establishing myself as a brand? Don’t worry it’s as easy as making bread for your breakfast.

Let’s build a brand strategy for your business!

How to build a brand strategy?

There’re so many things included in the brand strategy. Every marketing company and every marketer keep its own perspective on how to create a brand strategy? Well, there may be many steps in developing a brand strategy, but the most basic steps of designing a brand strategy are the following:

1. Pick Your Niche: – Everybody says that before starting try to find out in which niche you are comfortable to work with. Well, what’s a niche?

Well, in simple words Niche is the area in which you want to establish your brand. There’s something interesting about the niche, as much as it can narrow down your target audience as much it’s the best.

Niche takes you from generalization to specialization. We all want to learn from the experts in the education, and we all want to be treated by the expert in the hospitals, that’s why it’s the most essential to identify your niche and become unique in your field.

When you’ll narrow down your target audience you’ll need to target only some of the consumers and it’ll save your marketing cost, and time, but you’ll get higher results.

It’s the best way to reduce the cost and increase the profit with fewer efforts.

Let’s move on to the next topic!

2. Knowing Your Users: – It’s better to know whom you’re selling than what you’re selling. Knowing your buyers is the first step in designing a brand strategy. So, research the market, and find out your target potential customers. Build an effective customer persona to keep in mind your users. Having a buyer persona will keep you many steps ahead of the rest of the market. Must be wondering how to create a user persona, well, we’ve already written a blog on how to create a marketing persona. You can check it out here.

We need to create it because the brands that are user-centric are the most successful. If we build our products focussing on what our customers need and desire, then we’ll see returning customers. We all know that it’s easy to maintain the current one and then find a new one.

If you’ve built a base of loyal customers in the market then they will automatically refer to your business to their friends, families, or relatives, and will act as a brand advocate. Must be thinking it’s just an imagination, but no it’s reality. Always be relevant to your brand, because relevancy, authority, consistency, and user signals are the most important factors in creating a solid brand strategy.

3. Define Your Brand and Marketing Goals: – Keeping everything on paper is easier and best rather than keeping everything in mind. So, defining your Business will help you in identifying, interacting, targeting, and converting your audience into customers.

Consider your marketing goals, they can be short term or long term, how do you want to be after 2 years, 5 years or 10 years of establishing your brand.

4. Maintain Consistency Across Your Brand: – We’ve already talked about what a brand voice is and how to maintain a consistent brand voice. So, follow the steps mentioned above in the blog to keep consistency in your brand.

If we keep consistency across the brand then it’ll increase the visibility and our users will be able to recognize our brand at the first sight. Recognizing our brand at the first sight will turn in higher profits. To maintain consistency you may create a set of rules on everything like what type of colour pallets you will use?

You know there’re many types of colour pallets you can use depending on the colour wheel like analogous, monochromatic, triad, complementary, square, compound, shades, and so on. You may also create your colour pallet by clicking here.

Build brand guidelines that will help you in keeping all of your marketing material and marketing team on the same page, and maintain consistency across the brand.

5. Tap into Your User’s Emotions: – Emotions play a wide role in becoming a customer. I’m sure that you already know that every colour is associated with a particular emotion. So, choosing the good combinations of colours may be the first step toward tapping into your users’ emotions. If you’ll see the colour pallets of Digiavtar or its logo, you’ll find out that we’ve chosen two colours one is dark blue (Cetacean Blue), and the second one is a combination of light purple & red (Rose Bonbon). Blue colour depicts the loyalty, trust, dependability, and faithfulness, while in the second one light purple (Rose Bonbon) represents the love or affection for someone very special, and as its bright colour has red colour shading so also represents passion, boldness, enthusiasm, and danger also (because of this we choose the second colour a combination of two colours).

Choose your brand’s colours, and typography wisely, it can take your business to a whole new level. Keep your tone friendly and conversational because it’s easy to believe in brands that are friendly. Tapping into your users’ emotions will help you in building a loyal customer base and it’s obvious if someone is loyal to you, will advocate your brand with free exposure.

So, once again, be authentic, genuine, and friendly!

6. Conduct Research on Your Competitor’s Brands: – If you want to set yourself apart from the rest of the market, then competitors’ analysis is the best thing you can implement. You’ve heard many people saying, “It’s not a good idea to build something in a bubble”. I hope you get it, it’s where brand research becomes so important for your business. After the analysis, you will get creative inspiration and strategic insights that will help you in establishing your business as a brand.

You’ll get to know about a lot of things like which areas your competitors are doing great, where they’re lacking, which marketing strategy is working for them, and what kind of brand strategy did they use to establish themselves as a brand.

You will need to be excellent in the areas your competitors are good at, and unique in the areas they’re best. It’s the easiest way to set you apart from the rest of the market.

You may some of the steps of making a brand strategy a little time consuming and boring, but believe me, it’s worth it. When you’ll know how other brands have made their logos, which shapes and colours they’ve used, what typography they’re using, what types of images they’re using, what’s their mission, and what values they’re promoting, then you’ll be able to define everything for your own brand.

7. Be Unique: Spotlight What Makes You Different: – Becoming the best isn’t going to make you a fortune, be being unique can. You must be thinking I want to offer the same services as others are offering then how can I be unique? Well, the solution is brand messaging. How you’re representing your business in the market is the key to making your products or services one of their kind. You can follow the simple steps that are following to stand out your business as unique in the market:
   • Address users according to your Niche and Buyer Persona Only.
   • Keep your Mission & Vision Statement Clear and Concise in Nature.
   • Keep your core values personalized
   • Define the origin story of the brand as a person.
   • Provide a concise and crystal clear description of what you’re solving and how you’re solving it.
   • Talk about benefits, not about Features.
8. Provide Exceptional User Interface & Experience: – You know what is a user interface, and user experience?
   • The user interface provides users with an interface to interact with your business, it can be any type of platform. E.g. a website, any type of social media like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or any kind of application or platform like Google My Business that enables you to interact with your audience is called a user interface. Its look and field should be unique and I would suggest you focus on your website the most, because unlike social media you’ll have full access to every resource of your website, and no factors can affect your growth.
   • User Experience means how the people are feeling after interacting with your platforms. Are they feeling comfortable, enthusiastic, happy, excitement? If yes, then these are good signs, and if not then you’ll need to improvise your user experience by using different typography, colour combinations, shapes, and much more.

Customer Experience can be the key to success because you’ve so many competitors in the marketer. It doesn’t matter if someone is providing products or services at a cheaper price than you if their user experience isn’t good. They’ll come to you if you’re providing them exceptional or slightly better customer experience because they’ll be willing to spend a little more money for a better user experience.

Providing a good user interface and experience will help you in getting good reviews, and recommendations for your business, and will work as a mini-market of your own with no cost.

9. Be Personalized and Get Involved with Your Community: – Some users don’t want to hear from an entity, brand, or organization, they want to hear from someone. So, being personalized can be the solution for this, we’ve already aforementioned in the starting that people have personalities, but businesses have brands. But, we all know that everything is forgettable, the same happens with personalities and brands. To make it unforgettable, we’ve to connect both. The solution is “Represent your business as a person”.

Once you’ll be able to figure it out, what kind of person would it be if your business would be a person (real or imaginary), it would be easy to establish a personalized experience with your customers. Think about the tone, voice, style, characteristics, values, mission, vision, and everything that comes to your mind.

Once you do that, you can include those things in your branding strategy to provide a personalized user experience.

Now, it’s time to get engaged with your community. Engaging and embracing your local community in your locality will result in more transactions with your business. When you engage with people and put a face to your brand by attending local events, then it will be more appealing and human, and I have already said, people want to listen from a person, not from an entity.

Getting engaged with the business community and interacting with them provides you several benefits like it create healthy relationships, spreading awareness about your business, establishing a wonderful reputation in the community, building an unforgettable image, helps in turning loyal customers into brand advocates that will result in returning and new customers, last but not least, you’ll be able to understand your customers’ needs and desires, in result, you’ll be able to provide more tailored and customized services to your customers. Thus, you’ll be getting so many benefits and customers also will be happier than you by getting tailored services.

10. Develop Content Marketing Strategy: Maintain a High-Quality Blog: – Building a blog and maintaining it with high-quality content can be the best decision you’ll ever make. People like to consume content, and before transacting they go and search about the product. So, if you’re publishing high-quality content in the same niche and product they’re searching for, it’ll create trust in your users’ minds.

It will increase your online visibility and reputation, and as we all know that branding is all about making your brand recognizable to everyone, so when the people will consume a lot of informational content on your platforms, then they’ll become familiar with your brand’s logo, colours, and name. Your business will be easily identifiable in the crowd with the help of blogging, if you want to know how to start a blog, then we’ve already published a blog post for setting up the blog.

We’re educating the people about everything in the marketing, you can also visit our blog to get to know about everything in the marketing. For your information, we’re in the era where we’re facing the situation of “Content Shock”. It’s a situation where your content will not work if you’re not following a strategic approach and creating high quality, valuable, problem-solving content. Click here to get to know more about “Content Shock” and the Future of Content Marketing or Blogging.

While blogging choose the topics on the basis of your users’ needs and the problems they’re facing. Blogging is the way to provide your users with solutions to their problems. If you’ll just use blogging to get familiar with the people, or for getting traffic, I’m sorry it’s the biggest bad idea. Solve the queries of the people, rest will follow itself.

11. Eye-Catching Visual Identity and Experience: – Research was conducted and it came to know that 62 to 90 % of snap judgements were made because of the colour of the brand.

Every colour has a particular emotion associated with it, and these associated emotions reflect in terms of responses.

So, choose everything carefully after researching, I know it takes a little bit of time, but it’s for the goodwill of your branding.

12. Develop Strong Social Media Presence: – Building strong social media influence is the revolution factor in the field of marketing. Now, you must be wondering, Oh God, there’re hundreds of social media platforms, which one should I use?

Just ask a simple question to yourself, which one do you prefer the most, and why? If you are able to figure it out, don’t worry we’ve published a blog on the most popular SMM platforms, you can visit the blog, and can choose the perfect one for you.

Here, I want to suggest you something, don’t try to build your business community on more than 3 social media channels, because it’ll not be easy to manage and target consumers. Be focused and start with just one social media channel, after that you may move on to the second one. Your time is the most precious thing you’ve ever had, so don’t waste it trying out on every social media, choose one perfect for your business with a good amount of users, and start working.

Maintain consistent cohesive brand voice and visuals. Choose a platform, and start building a robust social media presence. Give people different types of social media content according to their needs and wants. Consistency of colours and brand voice will make you more reliable than your competitors, and you will be able to set yourself apart in the whole market.

13. Monitor Your Brand and Track Interests: Google Alerts: – Monitoring is the key to improvement, if you’re not monitoring how your business is doing, and how the users are feeling about your business, then I’m sorry you’re not going to survive in the market. All factors of brand strategy should be monitored as to how people are feeling about your business, user interface, social media presence, online presence, and how is their experience with your brand.

We know that every single day millions of posts are being published and a lot of content is bouncing online, so to keep yourself up to date Google Alerts can be a boon for your business, it’ll automate the entire listening process for your brand in just a few clicks. You can set up google alerts for your business by clicking here.

Whether you’re a freelancer, solopreneur, entrepreneur, or a small business owner, google alerts will help you in keeping eye on your niche, brand, and industry, and also hone your business strategy. You’ll be able to do brand monitoring, competitors monitoring, niche monitoring, industry monitoring, and everything with just a single handy simple tool named google alerts.

Conclusion

Let’s conclude this blog here and have a recap of what we’ve included in this blog: In conclusion, we’ve finished everything starting from what is brand, how to create a brand for your business, what is brand voice, why our brand voice matter in the marketing, how to keep our brand voice consistent, what is brand strategy, why having a brand strategy is the need of every business, to how to design a brand strategy and 13 steps for building your own successful brand strategy.

Building Community For Your Business – Yay or Nay? 4 Tips to Remember

by Sonal | Apr 18, 2022 | Business, Marketing

Why Having Online Community is the Founding Stone in your Business?

Do you often see yourself on the edge of the cliff with all the adrenaline rush, ready to jump, ready to take a plunge but then you just step back because you don’t know what might happen?

Do you feel paralysed by the continuous chatter in your mind?

What if this also doesn’t work out? 

What if you put in your efforts and people just don’t buy your product? 

What sort of products to create so that people like them?

How do know what people are looking for?

Almost everyone must have been through this ‘Analysis Paralysis’ phase when you are not sure of yourself. You have an idea but either you don’t know how to execute it or you are just afraid of the results you might get.

Now, you must be thinking about how all this analysis paralysis theory is related to building a community. Right?

Let me connect the dots for you, my friend!

I want you to imagine that you have a small business and now you are eager to launch a new product but you have absolutely no idea of what your audience wants. What will sell in the market?

What will you do, then?

One method is to do thorough market research, analyse and figure out where the potential lies.

Another could be to just go ahead and ask people who are connected with you through social media platforms about what they are looking for?

You might also check out the latest trends using some tools.

But all of these efforts might or might not bring you the results.

Let me give you another scenario now – Imagine that you have a community where you are connected with your target audience, your existing customers or people who have shown interest in your products/ services and now you want to create a product and conduct research about what people are talking about.

Which scenario will yield you positive results? No gifts for guessing the right answer 😀

Your online community is your audience, your tribe, people who like your product/ service, people who like you, people who would like to stay connected with you and they will be the first ones to help you create your product. In Fact, you can just announce the launch of your product, pre-sell your product to your community, take a poll on what they are looking for in that product and then do the effort and create one keeping their needs and goals in mind. Isn’t that a perfect win-win for everyone?

Let me tell you another solid benefit of having a community. 

You must have heard about marketing funnels, right? 

Don’t worry, I am not gonna go all ‘techie-teachie’ now, but the last part of the funnel is when your customers become your advocates and help you with ‘word of mouth marketing’ which most definitely increases your revenue because people are more influenced to buy a product or service when other people like them are recommending it. This might also decrease your ad spend and hence double benefit for your business.

Where do you think your existing customers can connect with you, give you feedback, and share their opinions and stories so that you can give them what they want? 

Again, no prizes for guessing – In your community!

Pro tip: Choose a platform for your community where they would like to hang out (having a Facebook Page or Group) is a hands-down winner keeping in mind the increasing number of users and their level of activity.

Creating a community is one thing and keeping them engaged is another. Allow me to share some strategies to keep your community active, alive and kicking!

Keep your communication channel open

I believe in a very simple equation 

engaging communication = thriving community

The better you communicate, the better it gets for your followers to talk to you. It’s super important for your success here since the people, your tribe just want to connect with you, engage with you and listen to your stories and get inspired.

Provide Value

• Use social listening to uncover your audience’s pain points. 
• Ask questions on Facebook – “How can I help you guys out?”. 
• Host Q&A sessions and find out what your community members are struggling with.

Your aim is to gather as many community pain points as possible before addressing them via content.

You can create awesome blog content that educates them and helps them overcome obstacles they’re facing, and you can also leverage influencer marketing to address your community’s pain points.

Instead of creating content for social media that promotes your brand, create content that actually helps your community members. This could include bite-sized how-to videos.

Read a great book recently that your community could really benefit from too? Tell them about it on social media! Share your thoughts and a link to where they can get it from. It’s the same with any podcasts or Youtube videos you’ve been watching lately.

I firmly believe that the more you give, the more you’ll get back. Remember, few people really care about your brand. But they will start to care about you the more you give.

Reward Your Top Contributors

If you’ve got a Facebook group, the top contributors are your most dedicated fans. They’re the ones who engage with your posts the most on social media. They’re awesome and you’ve gotta treat them well.

Tell Your Story

Your story is what creates an emotional bond with your audience. It’s where they see your values resonating on their own. Share your story to have a deep, emotional connection with your tribe and inspire them to take action.

Conclusion

Growing a community doesn’t need to be treated as ‘hard work’, Instead, it’s something that should be done out of love. You need to be genuinely passionate about what you do, and passionate about who you do this for.

Learn to love your community, give to them, involve them and excite them, and they will give you back a thousand times in return.