Steps to Build a Successful Brand

The only way to stand out from the crowd of competition in the market is to build a brand. It applies to both businesses and individuals.

For individuals, brand building helps them be more independent, give options to explore, learn, and collaborate with industry experts.

For businesses, building a brand help is strengthening their relationship with the customers and earn their loyalty.

Branding defines your company’s vision and positioning in the market. It is all about how you want your customer and audience to perceive your company/individual.

Proper branding will increase your sales and motivate your customer to advocate the product or service to others. 

Every element of your business should be aligned to your branding, representing the company in a positive light. This includes the tag line, logo, website color, mission, vision, etc.

Now let’s take a look at the steps to build a successful brand.

Step 1: Identify Your Niche

For any business, identifying the niche is crucial. Most businesses would have recognized the niche even before starting. But the common mistake by many companies is not to stick with a niche or focus on multiple niches. 

Riches are in the niches. Businesses need to identify their micro/macro niche to build a brand.

Read more about how to identify your niche here.

Step 2: Define Ideal Customer Persona

Once a business identifies the niche, the next step would be to define the ideal customer persona. 

Some of the questions you could ask yourself to define your ideal customer persona.

• How old is your ideal customer?
• Are they male or female?
• What is their marital status? 
• Do they have children?
• What is their personality?
• Where do they live? 
• Do they own a house or live in rent?
• What is their income?
• What is their purchase behavior?

The more in-depth and detailed you define your ideal customer persona, it will be more useful to represent your product/service and marketing strategies.

Step 3: Define the Vision & Mission Statement

Vision and Mission statement is your brand’s purpose, your customer feels more connected with your message, and they become brand advocates.

The statement guides to having a common message/strategy across all mediums without deviation.

Your vision & mission statement should be about how you could add value or solve the ideal customer’s pain point or how you could make their life better.

Step 4: Competitor Analysis

Analyze what your competitors or existing players in the market are offering to their customers. Evaluate how you give more value or differentiate your brand from them. 

What matters is how much value you are adding to your customers and how they feel about it. If they are happy, then even small changes in the process will be a huge impact.

While doing competitor analysis, document every competitor’s work & strategy. It will be useful for you in the future.

Step 5: Creating Value

As mentioned earlier, the value delivered for your customer matter more than everything else. Your focus should always be on how you could provide more value and provide a unique experience for your customer. 

Value delivery is one of the best ways to help your brand stand out from your competitors.

Step 6: Create Brand Guideline

Based on your message, vision, and mission statement, define your brand guideline. It is crucial to have consistency across all the channels to help your customer recognize your brand easily.

The brand guide is about what to do and what not to do while creating content for your brand.

Step 7: Market Your Brand

Of course, just creating content and the digital asset is not enough. No one would be able to know it. You need to promote and share with your potential audience. 

Identify the channels where your potential customers are active, and you could have already identified this while doing competitor analysis and customer persona.

Now make sure to leverage all the channels to reach your target customer. Don’t try to be everywhere initially; start with the most prominent channel, where most of your potential customers are active. Once you master the channel, then you could expand your participants in other mediums too.

Brand building is an ongoing process, and you will keep working on it to stand apart from your competitors.

Conclusion

Build a brand for yourself and your business to stand out in the crowded marketplace. This article primarily focuses on brand building for business, but most points & steps apply to individuals.

If you are interested in building your own brand, I have a step-by-step video course where I teach how to build a personal brand for yourself. Click here to know more details about the course & process.