Brand development is the very foundations of your business.
Firstly, let us define brand development. Brand development is not just how your logo looks and what your favourite colour for your website header is. Brand development is a strategic process that encompasses your entire business, it is truely the holistic development of your business, aligning your brand with your businesses objectives and distinguishing you from your competitors in what you say, when, where, how and to who, in pictures, words and actions.
Brand development is what everything else is built on, and just like the foundations of a building, if you don’t spend enough time building and getting them right, eventually everything will come crashing down around you. When it comes to your marketing it’s about maintaining the quality and assets within your business. Your marketing should give your customers complete trust in you and your brand. It’s an ongoing process, that, just like your building, requires continued examination and testing as it gets bigger to ensure that those foundations hold everything up.
Brand development isn’t a on-off, tick the box and it’s done job. It’s an ongoing process that regularly needs revisiting and keeping well maintained. As your business develops or changes, your brand needs to evolve with it. Changing your tagline and logo colour isn’t enough. Your brand identity and brand positioning is much more than colours and pictures, development is the process that involves market research into how your customers see your business, understanding what they want from you and the value you can offer them.
social:definition can help you through your brand development process:
- Defining who your target client is
- How do you make your customers feel?
- Understanding why your clients or customers trust you?
- Establishing who are your top competitors and what distinguishes you from them
- What value do you bring to what may already be a crowded market?
- What pain points do you solve for consumers?
- What type of personality do you or your company have?
Need Some Help?
If you would like to find out more about how we can help with your brand development give us a call on 0208 883 464 or complete the form for a call back or email:
Brand Development Website Enquiry
Knowing Your Business
What does your business stand for and where does it fit in?
This is one question that many businesses struggle with, but it’s one that needs to be answered before you can begin your brand development. If you are struggling with this question we will help you to determine the two relationships that will answer it for you – the relationship between you and your customers and you and your competitors and develop a solid strategy to build your customers and out-smart your competitors.
You & Your Customers
We can help you to understand how your customers think, thoroughly questioning what is inside their heads.
- Do your products or services solve their problems? – If so, how, and why would they change?
- If they do, what or who are they currently using to solve their problems? Why are they not using your products or services?
- If they aleady have their solution, why are you a better option? What one key point do they need from you to make the change?
You & Your Competitors
We will take you through a SWOT analysis (SWOT standing for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats).
- Strengths – What makes you the better choice. Do you offer an award winning service?
- Weaknesses – What do your competitors have over your business? Do they already hold your target audience in their hands?
- Opportunities – What can you capitalize on? Do you have services that fill the gaps your competitors have?
- Threats – What is happening around you that may cause problems for you?
From this understanding of your customers and competitors we will be able to help you create your core message and positioning statement.
Knowing Your Audience
Just like traditional marketing, promoting your brand to your target market means knowing your audience. We will help you understand your audience, who they are, how they purchase, where they live, their everday lives. Thinking that you can sell anything you have to anyone won’t define your brand or build a loyal customer base.
When you know your audience this deeply we are able to help you to create targeted content that they will respond too. Content that helps them to understand your brand, your values, your products and services.
Many businesses believe that they know who their customers are because they have sold something to this person or that business. If you pushed them to tell you the key traits of any of these people they probably wouldn’t be able to tell you, but it is this knowledge that is the most important. Understanding the key traits and likenesses of your customers makes it easier to create content that others, exactly like them, will respond to.
Creating Your Assets
Having helped you understand your customers and competitors we are now able to help you to build your brand assets. If you are already an established brand, it is now time to review your existing brand assets and make the adjustments needed to correctly position your brand message.
Your Base Assets
No matter how big or small your business there are a number of key elements that you must have in place before you can successfully move forwards:
- Style Guide – This will grow with your business as other assets are added. It will contain all of the mechanics of your brands physical looks that must be followed at all times to build a consistent brand and brand message.
- Content Strategy – You won’t be successful creating random content without a purpose. You need to be creating purposeful, on-brand content from the outset.
- Logo – The focal point of your business. Clip-art with your business name beneath will not set you up as a forward thinking professional business. Your logo must portray your brands message with confidence.
- Tagline – A single short sentence that captures your core values and key customer message.
- Website – Your online castle. Easy to navigate, designed within your brand style, customer focussed and easy to make contact with you. Above all, your website must be commercial – just because you can make things move, bounce or pop-up does not mean it is right to do so!
Your ongoing assets
Your ongoing assets are those that will be used to promote your business. Just like your base assets, they will all follow your brands style guide:
- Social Media Posts – Always centred around your content and focussed on your business and brand at all times.
- Blogs – Your social posts will lead potential customers to your blog posts. Your blog posts must always express your professionalism and be helpful.
- Ads – Purposeful advertisements on or offline which enhance your overall brand standing and follow your brand growth strategy. Never place random incorrectly targetted ads, they devalue your brand quickly and damage the good work you have already carried out.
- Search – Again, linked with your content strategy ensuring that your business is found be the right people, at the right time and are guided to the right information they are looking for.
- More – Above are the first of your ongoing assets. You may also include video, infographics, events and many other routes to market your business – if they work with your target audience and enhance your content strategy.
Brand Management For Your Brand Growth
It is all very well and good planning your brand development, understanding your customers and creating great content that attracts potential new business, but if you don’t track both wins and failures you won’t truely know the impact of your hard work has had on your business.
We will put in place methods for tracking (amongst others):
- How your website search traffic is working
- Social media reach and growth reporting
- New lead generation tracking
