As a business owner, you have probably heard a fair bit about branding – it’s certainly central to our own digital marketing services here at PENNInk Productions. But you might not have the fullest understanding of exactly what effective branding does for a business, and how you can begin to make your own firm’s branding processes not just deliberate, but effective.
So, let’s distil things down to just three of the key stages in the branding process, and how your firm can make yours more targeted and impactful in all the right ways.
Carrying out research
You might feel that you already have an instinctive understanding of what your business’s brand essentially ‘is’, including what your firm basically stands for, and even what implications that might have for obvious branding elements such as your company logo and website colours.
But even if all the above seems to be the case for you, there will still be a need to conduct some research to help ensure your branding approach is really fine-tuned.
That research will need to look at elements both inside and outside of your company. By ‘inside’, we’re referring to such things as whether all of your key people agree on what the defining values of the business are, and as for the outside, you will need to undertake market research. That will mean examining what your most successful industry rivals are doing, and considering what makes them excel from a branding perspective.
Being clear about strategy
Once you have undertaken the research that will give you an improved sense of what the surrounding business ‘landscape’ looks like, it will be time to drill down more into your own brand.
This is the stage at which you should be getting really clear about the main values of your business, and the positioning that you wish to occupy in the customer’s mind. Is your brand, for instance, at the ‘premium’ end of its industry in terms of the quality and prices of its products and services? Or maybe you place the emphasis more on everyday affordability?
Whatever answers you have to the above questions, it is also crucial to ensure your organisation’s actual attributes back up how you present your firm from a branding perspective. In other words, are your products and services quite as ‘premium’ and ‘high-quality’ as you present them as being?
This is also the stage at which you should be looking to the future, and the steps you might take to translate some of your broader ideas about your company brand into concrete actions that are well-aligned with your desired ‘image’.
Putting together a visual identity
When we talk about “concrete actions”, some of those are covered by this stage of the branding process. But we aren’t talking about jumping straight to the production of business cards and flyers, as you will first need to develop a ‘big picture’ sense of what your brand will generally look and feel like.
Your firm’s visual elements will be crucial to giving your business a compelling identity that people will remember, and that they will associate with your most treasured values.
If you have a graphic designer on your team already, this will be the time to start talking to them about your brand’s broader ‘signature’ design elements, including colour palettes and typography. But if you don’t, never fear, as here at PENNInk Productions, we can provide the branding and graphic design services that can really help infuse your brand with a captivating and relevant personality.
Branding is something worth getting deliberate about!
The right branding may seem almost like a mere ‘optional extra’ or ‘nice to have’ for a business. But with branding being seriously powerful for positioning your firm in the most advantageous way in the customer’s mind, getting this element right could even be the difference between your business’s failure or survival in the long run.
Branding isn’t really an ‘optional extra’ at all. To discover more about the digital marketing services we can provide to help your firm separate itself from its competitors and convert more potential customers into buyers, please do not hesitate to contact the PENNInk Productions team today.
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