5 Branding Best Practices for Your Business

Written by ocreations guest blogger, Elena Stewart from elenastewart.com

As a new business owner, you want your brand to stand out. But what if we told you branding is about much more than just finding the ideal color scheme or working out the perfect logo? Ocreations Design Solutions has the advice you need to start strong and attract your dream customers.

Think of Branding in a Broader Sense

You might think of branding as a spiffy logo and a catchy tagline. But there’s more to branding than those basics. As Fast Company elaborates, branding extends to multiple touchpoints in the client experience.

Branding is more like a company ecosystem than a catchphrase and color scheme. Your business’s tone, marketing materials, customer service responses, and product quality all combine to equal a brand perception.

Making branding work for you means considering every facet of your company and polishing up each angle. It also means narrowing down your audience and promoting only to them.

Pinpoint a Target Market

The most important piece of branding is knowing who you’re selling to. Defining your ideal customer characteristics will help you determine what will appeal to that audience.

Describe customer traits like geographic area, age, income level, industry, and pain points to construct a client avatar. You may even want to create a visual and give your customer a name.

For example, if you are a skincare business focused on products for women, you may describe your customer as Susan, a married 40 year old mother of two, living in the suburbs outside of Pittsburgh, PA.

After you finish sketching a profile, the avatar will guide your marketing efforts and even new product developments. When you have a specific person in mind, it’s easier to decide which direction to go to appeal to your client base.

Track Down Your Audience

When you have a concept of who your audience is, it’s time to go find them. While conventional marketing methods like in-person event marketing can still be effective, most marketing today happens online. Digital marketing allows you to reach a global audience if you know where to meet them.

For example, HootSuite’s social media data confirms that 41 percent of Facebook’s 2.9 billion users are age 45 or older. Snapchat features an audience that’s 82 percent 35-and-under. Instagram trends toward more female users, while Twitter trends toward more male users.

Once you know where your audience is, it’s easier to create a targeted campaign to market to them.

Generating social media content is the next step in your branding campaign, and you may be able to DIY it. Yet you may want to outsource specific tasks to save time or frustration (or both).

Hire Out Specialized Tasks

Not everyone is a whiz with graphic design or launching a website. As a business owner, you can’t do everything, so it makes sense to outsource tasks that are time-consuming or difficult.

If you’re building up a social media marketing strategy or hoping to release an app for your consumers, it’s time to get specialized help. Businesses commonly recruit freelancers for one-time or long-term work on coding projects, website development, product launches, graphic design, and more. Whatever support you need, there’s a contractor (or team) to help make your vision a reality.

Collaborate Smarter (Even Remotely)

If you’re outsourcing help for specialized tasks, it helps to have a streamlined way to communicate, especially if your collaboration is remote. After all, even digital communication can go awry.

For situations requiring emailed documents and PDFs, you could try a PDF online editor. You can share your thoughts and feedback with sticky notes, drawings, text, and highlighting. Your collaborators will get the message — and in far fewer emails, too.

Branding is a complex creature for any size business, but it’s crucial to get right for small startups. Developing your brand enables you to reach customers, create a memorable experience, and keep them coming back for more.

For logos, website design, graphics and much more, call ocreations at 412-532-8282!

Written by ocreations guest blogger, Elena Stewart from elenastewart.com