By Caroline Davis
Make no mistake, a well-loved brand can be your most valuable asset. For this reason, building a strong brand is important. After all, a brand is more than just a well-placed advertisement or a shining logo. Either is not enough.
If you’re a small business owner trying to compete with established competitors that already have following and loyal customers, you need to find ways to differentiate yourself and here are five ways to start building your brand.
1. Customizing Your WordPress Website and Design
All businesses need a strong online presence. But having a WordPress website is not enough. You need to make it memorable – and that your website should create trust in the first place. How do you do that? Your website and its design should meet your users’ needs and that’s what a customized website can give.
Why does a personalized website matter? You get what you pay for a customized website because it conveys your brand’s message.
Its design, including its font, font colors and theme are coherent to the overall message, voice and personality of your business. And with a customized website, you get to choose all the aspects that integrate your brand’s personality into the design.
Bottom line: Being unique is good in online marketing and branding.
2. Exploring Social Media Channels
According to this source, the use of social media on devices is growing by 30% annually and two million businesses are using Facebook advertising to promote their products and services. Indeed, social media has become a driving force and an important element in marketing and business support.
If used correctly, social media can become the most powerful tool to help in enhancing your company’s image. A few ways to use it include maintaining your reputation and brand image on social media channels once your profile on each of them is set up, staying active, updating your content, and spending time to communicate with your customers.
3. Researching Competitors
Learn how to research brands within your niche, but never copy what the established brands are already doing. Instead, know what they do well and what they do badly. Get inspiration. Never copy.
Next, you should try to differentiate your business from your competition for the goal of convincing buyers to choose you over your competitors. You also need to research and study how other niche brands have gone about building a branding.
When done, answer the following questions:
- What kind of quality do their products/services have?
- Are they consistent with visual identity and messaging across all channels?
- Do they have online reviews to read or social media mentions to check?
4. Understanding Why Consistency Matters
When you don’t understand why you’re doing things, you’ll find it hard to put any plan into action. One reason you need consistent branding is to project professionalism. After all, cohesive elements coming together make a brand look more professional.
Consistency also matters because it establishes authenticity and identity – something the brand you really are – and not something you just created for the sake of having one. And with consistent branding, you also show clarity, preventing any confusion about what you’re standing for and what your organization is.
5. Creating a Clear Message
How do you want to get your message across? Determine the strategy to use for putting forward your image and characteristics. You just need to do your homework, be logical and choose your communicative and creative elements according to your target audience and your message.
You may want to consider clear fonts, neutral colors and streamlined visuals if professionalism is the main characteristic to project. Nevertheless, create coherent visuals, including business cards, logos and other graphic elements and of course a personalized WordPress website that come and work together coherently.
Putting All the Pieces Together
Building a strong brand image isn’t something to achieve overnight. Instead, it’s a continuous process that develops over time. But with proper planning and consistency in all your efforts, a WordPress website, social media channels and creative elements (logo, business cards…) and other things that matter, you can glue everything together and make them work as one towards your branding’s success.
