Branding is an essential element of a successful business. It can inspire strength and confidence for both you and your audience. Let's dive in how to start believing in your brand.

What is Branding?

Branding consists of a many aspects of your business, including the values, personality and tone of voice. Your brand identity is the most visual and recognisable part of your brand but this is only one part of your branding.

Branding is the active process of shaping perceptions about the business. This involves creating an emotional relationship between a business and its customers.

When does this happen?

All the time.

The customer touchpoints on a website, social media and face-to-face conversations are all considered branding. Every time you communicate to a customer is a chance to enhance their thoughts of your business.

How can you improve your branding?

Pay attention to the experience that customers have when they interact with your business.

A key part of branding is to understand your foundations and know what your business is and what it is not. For example a pet food company can serve busy people who want the best food options for their pet. But do you also cater to an older audience who want healthy and nutritious food for their pet?

Understanding the specifics of your business will allow you to identify your uniqueness and stand out from your competitors. With this in mind, you can then create the messaging and assets required to shape their thoughts about you.

Benefits of branding

Increases your credibility and professionalism

A professional-looking brand will make people more likely to listen to you. Did you know that it takes only 0.05 seconds for a person to form an opinion about your brand? 

When we meet someone for the first time, the first few seconds are also crucial to their impressions of us. The time is essential to building a solid first impression.

By having a clean design with strong attention to detail, it positions you as an expert in your field. You come across as a well-established business, focused about sharing your wisdom.

Builds a cohesive experience

Having recognisable and distinct branding ensures that customers will get a consistent message from you, regardless of what channel they are using.

Creating a brand style guide or brand templates can be useful. It ensures that all brand collateral looks are cohesive. The visual and written language of a message should also complement each other. Each element should not detract, but rather enhance each other to influence your message.

By taking the time to develop your style, you can meaningfully connect with your audience.

Strengthen in the minds of your customer

Your branding is unique to your business. By taking advantage of what makes you stand out from the crowd, your customers will think of you first when they think of your industry. Good branding can even result in your customers willing to pay more for your premium products.

Branding myths

As we have already established, branding is super important. However, there are some myths circulating around. Here’s some things to keep in mind:

Branding is only needed at the start

Branding is not a quick solution, and not something only for the beginning of a business. Instead, branding is a long term strategy. While it won’t transform your business overnight, it is an exercise that evolves your brand over time.

Branding is too expensive

This is a common criticism of design. However, branding is an investment which will yield long term benefits such as

• Time efficient - by creating branding templates and style guides, you can constantly reuse them. There’s no need to create an entirely new design for each branded content.

• Sustainable - developing a good, long-lasting branding system means that your branding can stand the test of time. Without a strong design system, you can easily be swayed by new or overused design trends. Within time, this can look outdated. 

Branding is a long-term investment for your business.

Branding is too complicated

It is true that there is no “one-size-fits-all” to branding. For some people, this can be seen as a detriment of branding. However, each business is different, and therefore you can tailor your branding unique to you.

In actual fact, branding can simplify your work tasks by

• Defining and segmenting your market so you know who to appeal to

• Developing content pillars for marketing so you’re not stuck confused about what to post

Conclusion

Branding is definitely not a quick or easy exercise in the short term. However, there are numerous benefits and reasons as to why it can help a business enhance its reputation. Ultimately, it’s about providing value and establishing a cohesive presence whilst also having fun.