Marketing plays a significant role in businesses everywhere. Essentially, marketing tells potential customers or clients out there that you exist. Without any advertising efforts for your company, you’ll soon fall behind competitors that have already built a reputation for your shared target market.

Throwing your hat in the ring’s going to take a lot more than hanging a few posters or sharing a few photos on Facebook—the first step to marketing your company is coming up with a solid brand identity!

What Is Brand Identity?

When you build a brand, it takes a lot more than just giving your company a name. Brand identity’s how you want your brand to be perceived by the public. Are you looking to be revered and respected as a formal type of business? Or are you leaning towards more of a friendly and approachable outlook? Once you’ve developed a good brand identity to start with, you move on to brand management, where you’ll assess how it’s perceived and create plans to achieve your goals.

To create a strong brand identity, follow these steps.

Step 1: Start With an Extensive Brand Audit

Instead of jumping right into it, you have to first assess where your company is at the moment. A complete brand audit includes going through the basic questions, such as:

  • What product/service am I offering to the public?
  • Who’s my primary target market? How about secondary?
  • When does my business excel the most?

But the audit doesn’t stop there. You’ll need to put numbers into fruition and measure what can be measured. You’ll see the changes in your revenue and the costs you take every month. Lastly, you’ll find out how many products you sell on average or clients you gain and lose in a span over one business quarter.

If your business owns a website, check the analytics and see how much traffic you gain, how high your conversion rate is, what your demographics are, and so on!

Step 2: Identify Your UVP and USP

A UVP is a Unique Value Proposition. It involves aligning the value of your product or service to your market. It identifies what value your brand has to your audience. Effective brand management aims to build customer loyalty even if prices shift or certain services are no longer available. Therefore, the value proposition has to be honest and memorable.

Unique Selling Proposition, or USP, is a device that tells audiences what makes your product or service different from others in the market. You can have several USPs depending on what you offer, but only one UVP.

Step 3: Build Your Brand’s Creative Voice

This is where the creativity should kick in. Once you’ve identified where your brand stands, it’s time to tailor your social media presence, packaging designs, and other marketing collateral to reflect your brand’s voice.

Step 4: Continuously Refine Your Brand Identity

Once you form your brand identity, it’s important to keep up with brand management due to the ever-changing market. Your brand identity can evolve after some time in order to stay relevant and align with new goals every time you hit a milestone!

Consult Professional Brand Strategists

Branding’s a crucial part of marketing your business and shouldn’t be neglected by any company. If this is something that you need assistance with, then the best solution is to hire brand strategists to help guide you through.

Brand Management by CloudMellow

For a fully realized brand strategy and proper brand management, you need to seek professional services that know how to innovate and consistently grow your brand. CloudMellow is a digital marketing agency that can take your brand to the next level. Unlike other digital agencies, we know our way around traditional marketing and branding. Having both conventional and digital marketing working together creates a well-rounded marketing plan for businesses of all sizes—from SMEs to enterprise-level corporations. Call or contact us today and get a free digital audit!