For entrepreneurs, launching a new brand is exciting and enticing, but it’s also a lot of hard work. Once the business is up and running, you would be forgiven for thinking that the hard work is done, but this is simply not the case. You now need to look for ways to sustain your business and keep it going.
A great tactic you use do to ensure the success of your business in the long term is to establish your brand. Branding is key to differentiating your business from your competitors and building a recognition and reputation in the mind of your consumers. Now, the internet has made it easier to brand your business than ever before if you know what you’re doing. Keep reading to discover more.
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Finding Your Identity
The first thing that you need to do when branding your business is to find its identity. After all, branding is all about ensuring that your business is easily recognisable to your target market. There is a lot that goes into building this recognition, one of the most important being the logo and the colour scheme.
Your logo needs to be memorable; it also needs to make sense for your business. The colours used in the logo, or complimentary colours, should then form the basis of your business’s colour scheme. Having a good slogan or tagline is often also beneficial. This is because they will likely be used on all marketing materials and correspondences used by the business, including your website. Having a great logo, cohesive colour scheme and a good slogan will be key. To help achieve this, you should partner with a bespoke web design agency which can build your business’s website. Experts that are trained in designing websites will be best placed to help you find your identity.
Developing a Social Media Presence
Social media is an invaluable tool when it comes to branding your business digitally. Before you begin to sign up for different social media platforms, you should first take a step back to work out where your target market spends the most time. It doesn’t make sense to waste your time cultivating a presence on social media platforms not frequented by your potential consumers.
Luckily, most social media platforms have in-built features which are designed to make advertising easier. They have branding tools and ad targeting programmes. Posting quality content regularly is also a great way to build more brand awareness as well as increase your followers. You can also offer a reward scheme to your loyal followers in the form of incentives like discount codes.
Don’t Underestimate the Importance of Customer Testimonials
While customer testimonials are unlikely to form a part of your brand as a whole, they do help to reinforce your brand and add an air of authenticity to it. This is why you should push for reviews. Whenever a customer makes a purchase from your business, you should give them a couple of weeks and then send a follow-up request for a review of the product and your business as a whole. It allows you to demonstrate to potential consumers that you don’t just talk the talk; you walk the walk too. The testimonials and perhaps even picture reviews can be showcased on your website or your social media platforms. Your business becomes more approachable and reputable in the eyes of your consumers.
Prioritise Customer Service
Finally, branding your business is all about cultivating the right reputation, not just among new consumers; you want to ensure repeat business. Your customer service processes are key to making sure that your consumers will want to offer you their repeat business going forward. You need to ensure that your consumers are happy and catered to. Ideally, your customers will be happy from the get-go, but this is not always possible; they will occasionally have issues, comments, concerns or complaints, all of which you need to deal with. Think about your current customer service processes. Do you strive to be responsive and answer queries satisfactorily and in a timely manner?
What avenues do consumers have to go through in order to access your customer service team? Some businesses prefer to push a phone call, although this only tends to make sense for smaller businesses that can handle the flow of incoming calls. Otherwise, emails or social media messages might make more sense as long as you have stated how long your consumers can expect to wait before they get a reply. Most businesses tend to strive for a 48 to 72 hour reply window. Offering a survey after dealing with a customer’s queries can help you to improve and refine your processes.
The Bottom Line
While it might seem like a challenge, branding a business in the digital era is actually easier than it might seem. There are a number of resources, tools and programmes that you can utilise, as well as consulting with digital marketing experts to build your brand. The above advice can really help you when it comes to cultivating your presence and branding your business.
