If you are a startup owner and are seemingly lacking visibility, it is time to take steps to establish your brand.
Even though startups hold massive potential for growth of the economy and success of an industry, small businesses often have a hard time raising awareness and building a brand that lasts in the mind of customers.
Especially, in today’s fast-moving world, creating a brand identity and establishing an image is crucial for a business’s success. A proper branding strategy that helps establish your brand has a lasting effect that differentiates you from your competitors and builds customers’ trust in your product or service.
In this article, let us see the steps startups owner can take to establish a brand that resonates with their audience and aids in business growth.
Different Ways to Establish Your Brand
Establishing your brand awareness from scratch might involve different measures and focus on different areas to get the desired results. Some ways to establish your brand are:
Define Your Brand Identity
In a startup, before delving into any strategy, it is always important to do in-depth research and be able to define what you want to do.
First, start by identifying your vision and mission. This will give you a head start on your business strategy. Identify your target audience, research your market, and find areas of strengths, weaknesses, and areas of opportunities. Additionally, create your Universal Selling Point (USP) that sets you apart from the saturated market competition.
Finally, create your brand voice, tone, and personality depending on your target audience and the type of business. This helps you humanize your brand and connect with the audience on a deeper level.
Doing all these will set up your branding profile which will help you define and devise your ongoing strategies for branding efforts.
Craft Your Brand Name, Logo, and Message
A brand becomes an icon and stays in the hearts and minds of people depending on the way you make them memorable. Is there a better way is there to remember a brand than by its logo, name, and the message they convey?
Choose your brand name wisely that enables you to resonate with the audience and is easy to pronounce, is easily scalable, and does not limit your growth potential in the longer run. In the same way, design your logo so that it effectively communicates your brand values with your audience and reflects your professionalism.
Crafting an iconic brand name and logo, and creating a compelling story and message also add to your brand’s identity. Additionally, creating a unique and authentic brand story that connects with your audience on a deeper level and crafting a slogan or tagline that is concise, iconic, reinforce your brand message and your universal selling point can be influential.
Build a Strong Online Presence
With the whole world moving towards digitalization, it has become quintessential for brands to build a strong online presence to create awareness about their brand.
Start with building a fully-functional website that services the customers, is visually appealing, easy to navigate, and provides details the customer is looking for.
Making use of online methods like e-mailing, blogging, social media, and content creation can help out you on the map of digital marketing. Moreover, taking efforts to improve your on-page and off-page SEO can help you stay above other competitors making their digital presence.
Though building an online presence might be a tricky venture, considering the level of competition, working with a startup branding agency can help you formulate strategies and plans to professionally and organically strengthen your online presence.
Provide Exceptional Customer Experience and Support
It can be quite arduous to acquire leads and convert them to customers, thereby making the customer’s time with you all more important. This is where an exceptional customer experience and service help captivate them.
Focussing on providing an exceptional customer experience about your brand with the help of your website, service, and support provided establishes a sense of trust in the hearts and minds of your customers. It is also necessary to take measures and strive to meet the customer’s needs, expectations, and demands at every touchpoint, from the pre-sales to post-sales.
Moreover, customers love personalization. If they could get what they are looking for in a simplified and straightforward way, customers would feel more satisfied. Therefore, it is necessary to collect customer data, process it and devise metrics to enhance customer personalization.
Providing proactive customer service and support, being available when customers need you, and solving their problems would help you secure the goodwill and support of your customers in the longer run and foster brand loyalty.
Engage Your Target Audience
Finding ways to engage with your target customers in the best way possible is an effective method to establish your brand.
Make use of storytelling, which helps you drive your brand’s story, connect with your customers emotionally and inspire them. You could take it a notch ahead and build a community around customers and provide them with a sense of belonging.
Allowing the customer to share their experiences, feedback, and testimonials helps establish your credibility and acts as a form of user-generated content (UGC) to attract more customers and win their trust.
Moreover, making use of influencers to widen your reach and engage the audience can help maximize the impact of your marketing strategy and scope of customer engagement.
Track and Work on Your Brand Performance
Taking measures to establish your brand amongst customers and audiences can be quite a hefty task. The brand establishment might involve multiple strategies and mechanisms and the help of the workforce to help you achieve it.
In order to see the full potential of how these efforts, it is important to see how they perform, track the metrics, and measure the results of all your efforts. You can in turn use various tools and techniques to measure and analyze your brand’s performance and help gather analytics data from the customers.
Identifying and setting specific KPIs that touch upon different aspects of your business such as awareness, customer conversions, customer satisfaction, and even, turn-down rates could help you identify areas of improvement and work towards nullifying them.
Final Thoughts
As much as starting a brand and getting it up and running is an arduous task, so is taking efforts to establish your presence in the market and amongst customers.
This is an ongoing process that needs to be looked upon, measured, and refined depending on the perception of the customers and target audience. Moreover, this requires immense strategic thinking and creativity to create compelling content and establish a strong presence that makes your brand stand out from the competitors.