How to Successfully Create a Brand for Your Digital Company
A brand is essentially a business’s identity. It consists of all the customer touchpoints involved in a customer’s journey, potential journey from becoming aware of your company, getting in touch, making a purchase, and any post-sale interactions.
In a way, your company does not have a single brand identity; it is an intangible and unique perception that exists in the mind of each person who is aware of your business. Many entrepreneurs think of a brand as a logo and a website, but it is much more than that to create a brand for a digital company.
People always remember how a brand made them feel, whether related to a company’s advert, an interaction, or an element of customer service. Ultimately, a brand’s identity and reputation depend upon aligning goals and values with customer perceptions and interactions.
Whatever branding is, it’s big business. In 2010, for example, the Coca-Cola brand was valued at over $70 billion, which is more than the GDP of Bolivia, Kenya and Bahrain combined! It’s not just companies that can be branded; products, services, people, and places can all have their own unique brand.
What is Branding?
A brand is a set of unique values. Once used to identify cattle ownership, branding was later used on cases of wine to identify that the contents came from a good source or location. The branding of wine was a form of reassurance or even quality control.
Why is Branding Important?
Brands are both strategic and financial assets. Once you establish a brand that is regarded positively and becomes front of mind when people are researching a product or service, your company will reach and generate more customers for a lower cost. Loyal customers don’t need to be marketed to as much, and brand advocates will do marketing for you.
In addition, a well-established brand can potentially charge more for identical products or services because people trust the branded product or service more.
How to Establish Your Brand Values
As mentioned earlier, a brand is much more than just a logo. To set down the foundations of your brand, you must identify the purpose of the company, along with its values.
The brand values will ultimately dictate decisions that the company makes, which will relate to how you communicate and how you do business. Brand values should be actionable, memorable, and unique. Employees can then use the values to communicate with their target audience and make decisions daily. They should also be memorable and unique.
Zappos provides an excellent example of brand values, which you can find on their website. These values were built so that the company could create a specific reputation. They inform much of what they do, including how they interview and choose employees.
Identifying your brand’s values can help narrow down your target audience and your ideal customer persona. Who are you targeting, and what does your most profitable customer or client look like in terms of demographic and lifestyle factors and details. People tend to gravitate to familiarity. If you can research your target audience, find out what they talk about online, and match your values to their values, that is a good starting point.
To further narrow down your brand values, consider what reputation you want your business to have and how you want it to stand out from the competition. Think about how you want your customers to feel and how you want them to talk about your business. Start with unique words that represent what’s important to your company and how it does business, and then look to expand these into sentences that can guide the business leaders and employees. Remember to communicate your brand values both internally and externally to your target audience.
Create a Brand for Digital Company: Identify Your Unique Selling Point
Your company’s unique selling point (USP) and strong selling points are essential for creating a brand. To establish a USP, you must complete an audit of your competition. Also, look at the trends and the opportunities in the market. Using Google Trends and Exploding Topics can be a good place to look at trends and opportunities. Reviewing your competitor’s online feedback can be an excellent place to research their strengths and weaknesses.
Think about why you started your business – did you spot a gap in the market, or did you pursue a genuine passion? How can you reflect this in your brand and your products and services?
Brand Values & Design
Once you have established your brand values, brand’s story, and selling points or proposition, use this to inform your brand’s design elements and assets. This may include the logo, website, photography, print assets, social media design, video, music & sound, typography, communication style & tone, and online ad graphics and media. You want a level of consistency across all of the design assets and platforms.
Establish what fonts you will use for your website, blog, and print literature. Also, look to establish a color palette. Typically you will want to use 2 or 3 colors in a logo and 4 or 5 colors on a website.
You may also wish to consider what marketing channels you will use at this point. Advertising and having a solid presence on LinkedIn, for example, will tend to communicate different values compared to having the same presence on TikTok.
The Importance of a Human Touch
Creating a personal and human touch to each of your customer touchpoints can make a huge difference if you are a small business. Remember that people remember how your brand made them feel. When you call a bank to make a payment and use an auto-attendant switchboard, you are unlikely to feel valued and important.
You can make people feel valued and important by adding a human touch to interactions whenever possible. For example, on your website, you could add a 24-7 managed live chat service so that people get to speak to a customer service representative instantly. You could also consider using a 24-7 telephone answering service or virtual receptionist service to ensure that all customer calls are answered promptly and politely. According to Moneypenny.com’s recent blog post, very few callers will leave a voicemail, and a human touch can make all the difference when it comes to customer experience.
Create a brand for digital company: conclusion
Establishing a brand as a small business can help you to stand out from the crowd. For example, if you are a tradesperson and you invest time and effort in defining and creating a brand, you may already have a headstart on the competition. In addition, should you ever come to retire from bricklaying, for example, your brand will be an asset that you can sell. In addition, if you have many people searching your brand name each month, a website with lots of monthly visitors, and social media channels with high levels of engagement, your brand has an objective value that you could look to the franchise.
Remember that customers and your target audience are constantly judging your company. Ensure that you create the right impression from the pre-purchase stage of interaction, right into the post-purchase stage with after-sales care and re-marketing to try and create repeat customs. Many of them will help you build your brand through word of mouth and online reviews if you delight customers.
