Understand Your Brand Identity And Why It’s Important For Your Legacy
If you haven’t noticed, a major theme around here is personal branding. Since we didn’t really talk about brand identity, I thought we should take some time now being that it also forms the basics of developing a powerful brand.
In as much as you have a personal brand, you also need a powerful brand identity.
What’s brand identity?
Brand identity is the collection of elements that a brand uses to distinguish itself from the competitors. Most of these elements are encompassed around what the brand stands for and what it does.
There are different branding elements. Some are internal, while others are external. Here are some of them:
Website: a website forms the cornerstone of your brand marketing strategy. It is central to all your marketing efforts. With a website, you can target and retarget leads to purchase your offers.
Logo: You need a compelling logo for your brand. A logo should be something simple and bold. It should capture most of the other elements such as brand color, symbol, and tagline.
Here is the Big Marv brand logo.
As you can see, the symbol is my head wearing a hat. There are also my brand colors.
Brand colors: different colors convey a different meaning. So, it’s worth checking out the color that can give energy and growth for your business.
Typography: your brand needs a specific type of font. If you have noticed, I’m using two font types in all my landing pages and website. Yours, too, should have a unique font.
There are other branding elements. I will handle this topic later. For now, let’s learn what brand identity is.
Your brand identity needs to have the following characteristics:
It should be cohesive: each branding element should be poised toward a common goal. They shouldn’t mean different things.
It should be unique: it should set your brand apart from the competitors. Make it rare. Something rare is valuable to consumers.
It should be memorable: it should create a lasting impression in the mind of consumers. If you see the Amazon logo, it makes a lasting memory. The next time you see it, you don’t need to be told it belongs to Amazon; you just know it.
Should be scalable: you need an identity that can grow as your brand. As you craft it, ensure it’s scalable.
Why is it important in business success?
Why do you need a brand identity? Well, this is why:
It builds credibility and trust: A powerful brand identity triggers trust. Customers will see you as more credible and hence trust you. Believe me; customers only buy products and services from people they trust.
Most of the brands like Coca-Cola, for example, have a strong brand identity. Almost anyone has ever drunk a bottle of coke.
Gives you a competitive edge: A brand identity gives you a competitive advantage over your competitors. The more people in your tribe come in contact with your brand, the more they will develop trust, purchase your offers, and grow your business.
Enhances customer loyalty: Anything unique is always rare. So, since anything rare has value, customers will learn to value your brand and develop loyalty because of its uniqueness. I have seen people wearing Nike shoes for years. I have seen others using the same type of product for years because of being loyal to that brand.
Helps introduce new products into the market: If you are introducing a new product into the market, a strong sense of brand identity will help in the fast uptake of products. If Apple were to introduce a new series today, people would purchase it fast since everyone wants to be seen with a new iPhone.
That can only happen if you build a strong sense of brand identity.
How can you do that?
Well, here are the steps:
- Perform a thorough research
The first thing is always to undertake thorough research. Research will always help to uncover new insights. You need to know a lot about your brand and target audience.
Know what you can offer best, how you can do that, and where to do that. You also need to know your threats and opportunities. It’s only through research that you can unearth all these things.
- Create audience personas
A persona is just an illustration of your target audience. It helps to personalize your marketing message and increase conversions. You can even create different personas if you are targeting more than one segment of users.
Another good practice is to give a name to your persona. It helps to humanize the persona because that will enhance the personalization.
- Craft the message you want to portray as a brand
What do you stand for as a brand? Which gap are you willing to fulfill?
The unique message you want to portray to your customers gives a strong sense of brand identity. It’s the same message that should come whenever anybody looks at your logo, website, or sign.
It shouldn’t really be something long. Even a two-word phrase can work. Look at how we have developed a powerful brand identity using the phrase ‘automation king.’ You can do the same.
- Establish branding elements
With the message set, you just need to craft your branding elements. Start with the basic ones, such as your brand color, because it’s what you will use to design the logo and website.
You can ask a branding expert to do all these for you if you feel your branding techniques are not up to par.
- Develop your brand
The next thing is just to develop your brand. You can do this through marketing via various digital channels. You can also employ excellent customer care services.
As more and more people come into contact with your brand, they will develop trust and loyalty to it.
Get the 100 days blueprint
I have written an in-depth book that talks about branding. Inside this blueprint, you will discover the same exact strategies I used to develop the Big Marv brand from scratch and how you can do it, too.
It’s a free book. So you have nothing to lose. Get it here
One Love,
Big Marv
0