Building a great brand is the best way to make a connection with your audience, to build a relationship, earn their trust and ultimately turn them into paying customers.
It’s an absolutely essential piece of the puzzle if you want your business to stand out.
So in this blog and video I’m sharing 13 important things you NEED to know if you’re building your brand.
Tip #1: The brand is the personality, the heart and soul, the feeling of what a company is. Often people associate brands with colours, fonts or a distinct look and that definitely forms part of it. But a strong brand is created by what the business stands for, the mission and the vision of the founder and the values the company lives by.
Tip #2: When you position your brand’s values clearly, it creates a way for customers to identify with it. It’s about highlighting those shared beliefs between the company and the customer, which will make people want to stand with that brand (or not!).
Tip #3: Ask yourself what values you actually want to infuse into the essence of your business. When you show up for your audience, how do you want to show up? Who do you want to be for them? When it comes to FEA, for example, I’ve always positioned it as advice from a best friend, rather than an expert, and that then informs the brand voice.
Tip #4: Get clear about your brand voice, this is what creates emotion and helps customers identify with the brand. The right tone of voice will build relationships and give your audience a clear idea of how the brand makes them feel.
Tip #5: As you’re doing this, the biggest thing you have to figure out is who your audience actually is. A lot of entrepreneurs misjudge the situation and build the business from their perspective, but your business is not about you, it’s about your audience. You have to build the brand for them, thinking about what you’re going to do that will resonate with them, that will blow them away, that’s going to make them trust you and help them get to know you.
Tip #6: Create an avatar that represents your ideal customer. Get into the mind of that person and understand who they are, how they live, what they are like. Discover who he or she is and how you can connect with that person. Get clear on their fears, doubts, worries, beliefs and dreams, the problems and the challenges they face.
Tip #7: Get clear on who that person is in relation to who the company is and how you can serve them. You need clarity around how you help them achieve something or overcome a certain challenge.
Tip #8: Remember that there’s no such thing as unique messages, only unique messengers. We are unique messengers so we have to show up and stand for something specific and distinct.
Tip #9: When it comes to physically creating the look and feel of your business, as the founder, you must get involved in the design process. This is YOUR vision coming to life, you’re the one that determines the feel of the company.
Tip #10: If design and creative thinking doesn’t come naturally to you and you struggle with this, then outsource the design tasks (but stay involved and give direction) to an amazingly creative person that can help you craft that brand vision.
Tip #11: Don’t compare your chapter 1 to someone else’s Chapter 20! When I first started FEA, I built the website myself and it looked terrible! But it has been an evolution to get to where it’s at today. Try your absolute best to make something look professional, but at the same time, don’t beat yourself up if it’s not completely incredible looking, you will get there!
Tip #12: There are so many amazing tools, like Canva, that will do a lot of the heavy lifting for you when designing with lots of amazing templates you can use. It’s become so much easier to create professional-looking graphics even if you’re not a graphic designer!
Tip #13: Put together a brand mood board so that your design style is consistent across all your platforms, is in line with your brand’s values and allows people to recognize your brand at first glance.
I hope you find these tips useful and I can’t wait to see the success that building an amazing brand will help you achieve!
