Welcome and What Exactly is a Brand
This is an exciting series that I can’t wait for you to get started reading, learning, and implementing. It’s going to make a massive difference in your business dreams because it’s all about Branding and Developing Your Brand. You’re going to learn why branding is essential and how branding involves all aspects of your business. First, let’s learn what a brand is.
What is a Brand?
If you look at the dictionary definition (dictionary.com) of a brand, it seems boring and maybe even unimportant.
“a type of product manufactured by a particular company under a particular name.”
“a brand name.”
“a particular identity or image regarded as an asset.”
It goes on and on in this vein. But the truth is, in marketing, a brand is so much more than just your mark or logo or what you call your business. It starts with that, but it’s got a lot more to do with the feelings your marks, words, logos, and ideas evoke to your ideal audience.
Because of this, when it comes to branding and developing a brand, you’re going to want to “brand” more than your logo and mark - like your voice, your personality, your niche, and more. Everything you do signals the way you want people to think of your business, and if your brand is personal, you.
In many ways, your brand is the voice or personality of your business. Representing the way that you want the world, and especially your audience, to see you and think of you is how you brand yourself. This occurs through the colors, fonts, images, words, and temperament you share with your audience through your content.
Branding Involves Giving Your Business a Personality
If you think of your business as a person, sometimes you may get confused between yourself and your business. Sometimes your company and you are one and the same, this happens a lot with life coaches, consultants, and those who use their name as their primary business name, and they consider their business one and the same. That’s perfectly fine to do it that way.
For some business owners, this can be confusing because you don’t want your business only to be associated with your name, you, and your personality. You want to build something that can be successful without you being involved someday. Therefore, you should assign a personality to your business that is separate from yourself, starting with choosing the right name for your business. The personality you choose should be attractive to your ideal customer.
Choose a name that fits the personality you want to convey. Choose a design for your website and business that fits that personality, too. Think of how you want the business to communicate. Do you want to be serious or perhaps you like the idea of your business persona being a funny, irreverent wisecracker? It totally depends, of course, on your audience, what you do for them, and how you want them to feel about your business.
Yes, You Need to Become a Brand
You may be wondering, what does it mean? Become your brand? It simply means that to promote your brand, you need to truly live it and be it. Okay, you don’t really have to become your brand, but your business must represent the branding you’ve created for it, and if the business is known due to your influence, it’ll work out better if your personalities match. This is especially true for online businesses.
If your brand is more personal, as mentioned before regarding coaches, consultants, and other experts who truly are their business, then you will become the brand because the business is you. But either way, the business itself must become the brand for it to be felt by the ideal audience and the community at large.
This is so important because:
· Branding Creates Trust – This is one of the most essential factors in the know-like-trust principle. If you are known as the owner of a business that represents one thing and personally, you are found to represent something else that opposes that branding, you will lose trust. That’s one reason it would be hard for a non-vegan, for example, to become a very popular vegan blogger. The mismatch would create distrust.
· Branding Improves Awareness – When you are consistent with your branding all the way around including the words you say, the ideas you promote, and the way in which you do it in terms of personality and tone, people will start to know your work the minute they see it. This improves awareness exponentially by increasing recognition.
· Branding Makes Marketing Simpler – When you focus on branding, you will speak in the same voice, to the same audience, in the same way through the channels they like to view your work in. These efforts will be more consistent when you have branding worked out. You’ll know the type of content you want to promote, how it should look, how it should sound, and most importantly, how it should make your ideal audience feel.
· Branding Boosts Revenue Generation – Because branding can encourage your customers to have trust in your offers, you will end up making more money. Even though branding can seem like an added expense, it’s really an investment in your business because branding is woven throughout your entire business - from product creation to customer service.
· Branding Increases Business Value – If you ever want to sell your business, the best thing you can do for yourself is to focus on the branding of your business. When the branding is right, in that it appeals to your ideal customer invoking the know-like-trust principle, it will increase the value of your business so that when you want to sell it, you’ll get a good price.
When doing business online, most of the time you will network online as yourself using your own name as a representative for your business. Sometimes the business name and your name are the same. Sometimes the personalities are the same. That’s great, and it is easier to brand yourself in this way but consider branding your business as a separate entity to make it sellable in the future.
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