VE Digital

Tag: Branding

  • 7 Websites to Look for Unique and Free Fonts for your Brand

    7 Websites to Look for Unique and Free Fonts for your Brand

     

    7 Websites to Look for Unique and Free Fonts for your Brand

    Typography has a big role in design. From product packaging, website design, mobile apps, and more, the font you use plays a huge role in making your designs attractive and inviting. Today, we will be talking about the best places to get unique and free fonts to take your content and graphic designs to the next level.

    The Importance of Typography

    1. Comprehension

    A person’s process of understanding and comprehension can be highly affected by the type of font used. 

    2. Focus

    A well-formatted copy will grab the reader’s attention and will keep it on the content.

    3. Hierarchy

    Typography can help make the most important elements in a piece of content stand out. Ex. Highlight the benefits or product features by using bullet points.

    With great typography, your content will be easy to read and will be able to show what your brand is about. This will help drive traffic and increase conversions.

    Here are 7 websites you can visit to look for unique and free fonts for your brand.

    7 Websites to Look for Unique and Free Fonts for your Brand

    DaFont

    Dafont is a popular platform where you can find thousands of free fonts. The majority of the fonts here only support personal use, but there are plenty that comes with commercial licenses as well. The category system of this website makes it stand out as it lets you browse its collection of fonts based on different themes, which makes it easier for you to quickly find the fonts you need for different types of projects.

    Google Fonts

    Google fonts have a large collection of web-ready fonts. Offering more than 900 different font families, Google fonts is the place to find and customize free fonts. 

    The best thing about this site is its font preview tool. When you find the font that you like, you can type in your content and generate a preview to see what your copy looks like in that font. You can select how you want to display your content, whether in paragraph or sentence form. You can also customize the font’s pixel size. This is a recommended site to check out for high-quality resources of free fonts. 

    Creative Market

    This website puts a spin on the free fonts marketplace. They offer free fonts, but these fonts change every week. By signing up, you can download their featured fonts and graphics for the week – free of cost. About 23,000 designers are contributing to their platform, and six different freebies are offered each week, and they are wonderful.

    What’s great about Creative Market is that you can avail of these featured fonts free of charge which would normally cost a fee on normal days. Be quick, though, because when Sunday comes, the free stuff won’t be available anymore, and you’ll miss out on those great things. 

     

    fonts

    There’s a large collection of free fonts on Befonts that are submitted by professional designers all over the world. The downside is that majority of the fonts on the site are free samples of premium fonts, meaning they include fewer font weights, and you can only use the fonts on your personal projects. Despite this, the high-quality fonts on the site are worth checking out.

    FontSpace

    Fontspace has over 72,000 fonts from over 2,000 designers, and all are legally licensed and ready for you to download for free. You can use FontSpace to find plenty of beautiful, unique and free fonts for your personal and commercial projects. And what’s great here is that it is clearly stated if a font is for commercial use or personal use only. 

    If you become a member of the site, you can create a personal favorites collection to easily access your favorite fonts. You can also contact the designers and even donate to them if you like.

    1001 Fonts

    Contrary to its name, 1001 Fonts contain more than 9,000 fonts, and this site features a collection of high-quality fonts that are often updated. And many of these fonts are available for commercial use. You can browse different fonts according to style, size, and even font weight.

    Graphic Design Freebies

    This is another site that features a wide selection of freebies – including illustrations, templates, mockups, and fonts. It has a section of free fonts with hundreds of modern and stylish fonts for free. Most fonts on this site are for personal use only, but there are a few that are for commercial use as well.

    Your fonts are important and you don’t have to spend money getting great ones because there are a plethora of resources online where you can get free ones. If you are looking for unique and free fonts, definitely check out the websites listed above. 

  • 15 Best Ways Personalizing Your Brand For Your Business

    15 Best Ways Personalizing Your Brand For Your Business

    15 Best Ways Personalizing Your Brand For Your Business

    As we progress, the ways things work change through time. Before, if you wanted more sales, you just have to blast your message to more and more people. However, that’s not good enough today. These days, for a company to succeed, they don’t have to allot a huge marketing budget, instead; they need to focus on connecting with their target audience. In this post, we will talk about personalizing your brand for your business. Let’s start!

    People connect with people, not objects, not with products or services, not even with companies. Success is not solely dependent on the size of your marketing and advertising budget, but the depth of your branding. The key to success is personalizing your brand because having a connection is vital.

    Decades Ago

    Let’s start with a scenario some 50-60 years ago. In those good old days, if you went into a store, you’d find that there were not that many products on the shelf. As you walk into the store, there’d be only so many options of shampoo or laundry detergent. Back then, the key to successful marketing was brand awareness. With only a few options on the self, it was easy to tell the difference between the products and brands. The speed of imitation was slow.

    If you wanted to sell more, all you needed to do was to get more brand awareness. You could run more ads in the newspaper, more billboards, and more commercials on tv or the radio. Before, the companies with the biggest ad budgets win because they could outspend their competition to get more brand awareness.

    During that time, there was almost no such thing as terrible publicity. A bad commercial was still publicity and still relatively good for business because it spreads your brand across the people who saw it. Today, awareness alone is not enough. Having the best product or service in the market doesn’t guarantee success. Again, to succeed, your business must connect. And since people connect with people, Personalizing Your Brand you must develop the personal properties of your brand. Today, the marketplace winner is always the company with the most personalized brand.

    In the past, the trend was all about brand awareness. Then it was all about features. Years after it was all about features and benefits. Now, we’re in a new era, that favors connection, meaning, relevance, and emotion. We moved from a time when any attention was great to today’s era, where the wrong message can seriously damage and hurt your brand.

    Personalizing Your Brand

    Good VS Right

    A few years ago, good was hard. Good photography, good video, good website – these were hard to achieve before personalizing Your Brand. It was slow, and it was costly. Today, good is relatively easy and cheap. We can shoot a 4k video using only a phone. Technology that yields excellent results is in the hands of so many people now that you can have an excellent website, good design, good video, and photography, all of these you can get easily and at a cheap price. The real question now is “is it right?”. Today, being good is not enough, you need it to be “right”.

    Your company’s long-term success depends on your brand’s ability to develop and maximize differentiation, connection, experience, and meaning. And the best way to do that is by personalizing your brand.

    Benefits of Personalizing your Brand

    • Loyalty
    • Recall
    • Relatability
    • Differentiation
    • engagement
    • Anticipation
    • Meaning

    Perks of Having Personalized Brands

    • Increased revenues
    • More margins
    • Increased ROI on marketing spend
    • Greater employee retention
    • Customer loyalty
    • Increased message reach

    “Brands give us a shorthand. In a distracted and confusing world, these shortcuts help consumers make sense of all the options. And if you’re trying to stand out, finding shortcuts is critical.” – Sally Hogshead

    It’s not enough to have a great product or service. It’s not enough just to shout that you exist. In a distracted world, the business that provides the clearest shortcuts wins.

    What Does Branding Mean?

    Branding is more in the mind than in the eye.

    Many businesses think their brand is their logo and that their logo is their brand. Even among marketing specialists, the word logo is often used to describe what we like to call your visual foundation. These are your logos, graphic elements, and color palette. The pitfall that trips up most people is they think their brand is all about what they see. However, what we see is only a part of that brand. Branding is more like inscribing an experience in our minds.

    A brand is human. You must define your brand in terms of human qualities and attributes. All too often, companies make the mistake of taking the life and personality out of their brand. The goal here is to help identify and then harness the personal properties of brands.

    “Strive for humanness. Great brands achieve a high level of humanness.” – Guy Kawasaki.

    People connect with people, not with products or services. Therefore, humanizing your brand is vital for connection.

    Branding is all about giving the right pieces. Companies do not make their brand; their audience does. Companies only provide the pieces their audience uses.

    Faced with competitive pressure, brands imitate. The key to branding is finding out who you are and being more of it. 

    “Building a strong brand comes from paying attention to all those details that make up the whole experience for users. – Joe Gebbia (AIRBNB)

     

    6 Steps to Developing the Personal Properties of Your Brand

    Now, we are going to talk about how to maximize your effectiveness by developing the human properties of your brand.

    Human properties are valuable because they offer distinction, connection, emotion, and relatability. Humanized brands provide a sense of complexity and depth, resulting in greater customer loyalty, higher margins, better recall, and more.

    To develop the personal properties of your brand, you need to develop and define your brand’s PERSON, which means:

    • Personality
    • Experience
    • Relevance
    • Separation
    • Offer
    • Narrative

    To compete in the marketplace, personalizing your brand is the only way to stand out, connect, create a consistent experience, and develop a sense of meaning.

    Step 1: Define your Brand Personality

    Define who you are, not just what you do, define your overall personality type. In a distracted world like ours, businesses that provide the clearest shortcuts win.

    Define your brand look. What is your brand’s style, design, feel, aesthetics, and so on? Your brand looks will impact all your touchpoints such as your physical store, website, social media pages, signages, and prints. It’s the first thing your audience recognizes and remembers you by. The look of your brand should be distinct. Be sure to specify your brand’s photography, graphics, texts, and colors.

    Define your brand voice. Define your brand’s overall messaging, tone, and volume. Your personality dictates what you say, how you say it, and where you say it. Your brand voice is presented through your website, social media channels, videos, blog, email, in-store, packaging, and more. So make sure you focus a lot of your attention here because your brand’s personality is revealed the most through what you look and sound like.

    Define your brand values. Identify what your brand believes. What you believe drives what you do and how you do it. Having values is key to creating your “we-believe” statements. These are the core of your brand. Your brand beliefs are your “why” that drives the “what” of what you do. Your values and beliefs make your organization deeper, more complex, and more human.

    Define your brand meaning. Developing your brand personality means defining your brand’s meaning. Here’s the key: customers want their purchases to say something about them. Our purchases define us. People crave meaning so much that we will align our purchase choices with anything that echoes the purpose of our lives.

    If you don’t define your brand’s meaning, the public will do it for you. Choosing your brand means customers are aligning their lives with your brand’s reputation, values, beliefs, and personality. So if your brand meaning is unclear, inconsistent, or undefined, your brand will not help people tell their story and they will probably ignore your brand. Personalizing Your Brand

    Develop your brand’s personality by defining your overall identity, look, voice, values, and the meaning of your brand.

    Step Two: Define your Brand Experience

    There are two major principles for a well-branded experience: predictability and humanity. A well-branded company is predictable. People love predictability. No one wants to go to an unpredictable restaurant. No one wants to buy an unpredictable technology or car. Predictability is key. 

    Consistency

    Every time people go to your website, it should be consistent. Every time someone comes into your store, it should feel, look, and sound the same. Customer service or social media should also be consistent every single time. All channel experiences should feel like the previous channel experiences.

    Alignment

    Now alignment means that the website experience looks, feels, and sounds like your in-store experience, the same thing with your phone and social media experience. All experiences in one channel should feel like the experiences in other channels.

    The key to building a powerful brand is consistency and alignment. To develop a consistent brand experience, you must define your desired brand experience, and then communicate it to your entire team. Companies that do not articulate their brand experience leave it up for interpretation by every single employee.

    Define your desired brand experience in terms of human attributes. Focus on emotions, and how you want people to think or feel about your brand. As your company grows, you’re going to have more employees, more locations, and more channels. So having a clearly defined brand experience and how each person and channel fulfills it is vital.

    Step Three: Define your Brand Relevance

    Brand relevance is all about defining your target audience. When defining your brand’s target audience, focus on two major areas – personality and problems.

    We use the term “brand relevance” because relevance is defined by how practical and applicable something is to someone. Your brand needs to matter to a large segment of people, your target audience. Personalizing Your Brand

    Define your target audience’s personality. When developing your company’s brand relevance, the first thing to focus on is your target audience’s personality. This is psychographics, not demographics. We are not talking about age, gender, income level, education level, geographic region, and stuff like that. All of that is just superficial. It’s not universal, it’s not even always that accurate. And it’s not a collective representation of who you’re aiming at. Your target audience comprises a very diverse set of people. Even though each individual is unique, they have personality traits that are in common. Your job is to find their common threads.

    The other key to defining your target audience is by identifying their problems, emotions, and needs. When you identify your customers’ problems, they recognize you as a brand that understands them. Emotions make your brand relatable because emotions are universal. What you did today is likely different from what I did today. But how you felt today is probably similar to how I felt. Focusing on emotions makes you more relatable.

    Another reason you need to define your target audience’s emotions is that customer emotions drive purchase decisions. We make purchases using the emotional processing side of our brains, not the linear processing side.

    To personalize your brand, develop your brand relevance. Identify your target audience in terms of problems, emotions, needs, and personality.

    Step Four: Develop your Brand Separation

    What makes your brand stand out from your competition? What makes you different? This focus goes beyond a difference in functions, features, and benefits. It’s easy to define what makes you different from your competition in terms of functional differences or product offerings. But those differences are superficial. They’re temporary, and they don’t serve as an adequate source of distinction. Earlier, we learned the first step in personalizing your brand is to define your brand personality. This step is like that.

    To personalize your brand, define your competitive landscape based on their collective personality, not functions and features, not even demographic differences. Your brand personality makes you different, authentic. To stand out, your brand’s personality must differ from your competitors.

    Remember earlier that in face of competitive pressure, brands imitate. Functions and features are so easy to copy, but personality is not. When competitors try to copy each other’s personalities, they come across as inauthentic and fake. It’s vital to understand your brand personality considering your competition’s personality.

    Knowing who you are will protect you from falling into the trap of imitating your competition. To personalize your brand, define the collective personality of your competition. 

    Step Five: Defining your Brand Offer Personalizing Your Brand

    Your brand offer is what you sell. Most business leaders think the offer is the actual product or service. But really, what you should focus on is to define your product or service in terms of it being a solution to a problem, or else you risk at being ignored.

    To personalize your brand, tell people how your brand can improve their life. People buy products and services to enhance their lives. People won’t buy your products or services unless they feel your offer justifies the cost and trouble of purchasing it in the first place.

    Focus your solutions on emotions. As said earlier, emotions make your brand relatable because emotions are universal. Focusing on the emotional aspects of what you offer is not only more human but also more effective.

    When you position your offer as a solution to a problem, and it’s anchored in emotion, you increase the perceived value of your product. The point here is you want to find not just the functional benefit of your product, but also the emotions. Maybe you sell convenience or speed, or maybe you help save time and hassle. Focusing on emotions increases the value of your brand offer. Personalizing Your Brand

    Customer emotions drive purchase decisions. People don’t make purchases out of the analytical processing side of the brain but on the emotional processing side. Therefore, you must clarify the emotional benefits of your offer.

    Create that shortcut for the customer. Most companies waste time and money focusing on the functions, features, and details of what they offer. However, personalizing your brand means focusing on the human attributes of your offer. When you position your offering as a solution to your target market’s problem and anchor it in emotion, you gain trust, loyalty, connection, and value.

    Step Six: Define your Brand Narrative

    The goal of your brand narrative is to focus on developing a verbal foundation and to ensure the clarity of your brand message. Your verbal foundation starts with developing a communications framework. This framework serves as your source of inspiration and guidance for all brand messaging. The most important components you’ll want to define include your modifiers, verbs, emotions, and we-believe statements.

    A brand’s personality is most clearly displayed through its attributes and actions. So modifiers and verbs are vital, you’d always want to make sure you spend some time developing a strong list of your modifiers and your verbs.

    Modifiers and Verbs Personalizing Your Brand

    The modifiers are the attributes of your brand. So when you go to step one in defining your brand personality, list the attributes. How are you? Are you trustworthy, real, humble, kind? Whatever those attributes are, those are your modifiers. These words describe who you are on a personality level.

    Now your verbs. What do you do? Do you give, serve, help, know, grow? Whatever your words are, look at the actions that your brand does and make a list of all your actions. Your attributes and verbs reveal your brand personality the most. 

    “We believe” statements frame your company’s internal mindset and can also be used front and center in your advertising. These statements are magnetic, and they serve as the “why” to the “what” that you do. They are a driver for brand loyalty, and they reveal your brand personality, galvanize customer loyalty, and more.

    Developing your brand narrative is vital at any stage of your company’s growth. But as you grow with more employees, more locations, and more channels, it becomes imperative to develop the verbal foundation for your company.

    As stated earlier, people connect with people, not with products or services, and not with entities or organizations. So developing your communication framework is vital for consistency, alignment, and making your brand feel like a person. Personalizing Your Brand

    Final Thoughts and Application

    You need to create a brand guide. This is a document everyone in your organization can share. This will serve as a guide for testing current touchpoints and creating new ones. If you are going to create a brand new website, logo, graphics, video, photography, or anything else, you can consult your brand guide. 

    If you’re bringing on a new employee or a new agency partner, you will want to use your brand guide. This is setting the expectation of what you want out of your employees, and it’s also setting the expectation of what needs to be delivered through this agency partner.

    Your brand personality can also serve as a piece of your employee review process. And it’s also a point for performance evaluation where you can say, “Listen, you are not holding up to our standard.” If you don’t have a brand guide, it’s hard to use this in that kind of context.

    Human properties bring a sense of complexity, connection, relatability, and loyalty. To succeed in business these days, you will need to stand out and connect. We are bombarded with over 30,000 marketing messages a week. So you need to develop a clear brand. Humanizing your brand by developing the personal properties of your brand is the key.

  • Your Personal Brand: Nurturing Your Community

    Your Personal Brand: Nurturing Your Community

    Your Personal Brand

    Finally, we are at the final phase of our personal branding series and phase three is all about nurturing your community. After phase two, you will now have articulated your value proposition, built your destination (which is your personal website), created and completed your social network profiles. Now, it’s time to be active and social, and if you are good at this, you’re going to develop some influence to elevate your personal brand.

    Practice Social Listening

    Being in social media can be compared to being in a house party. And if you’ve been to one, you might have experienced the awkwardness of trying to belong and get into a social circle. People standing in circles are often having conversations on just about anything and everything. One circle might be talking about politics, another might be talking about business and stock prices. One might be talking about what their plans are for the weekend, another might be talking about their current favorite Netflix show. That is similar to social media.

    There are fragments of different conversations on just about any number of topics comprised of people with various levels of familiarity with one another. Then there’s you – someone who is eager to talk and be heard. Before you can speak and be heard though, you have got to listen first.

    As an introvert, I can pretty much say that I am good at listening. I tend to edge into circles in these events by smiling first and then waiting for a social cue to enter. It can be a nod or a wave, and then I smile, maybe laugh a little bit, nod and agree, and just become an attentive listener. This is a passive engagement, just like liking, commenting, and sharing in social media.

    Eventually, as the conversation goes on, the attention turns to us and we are asked to speak. This is the time to be a good house party guest and there are a few things that you need to avoid at all costs.

    Be a good guest and avoid the following:

    • Inappropriate or illegal activity
    • Harassment
    • Divulging confidential information
    • Lies or misrepresentation
    • Rants about colleagues
    • Non-inclusive language

    To be in sync with the conversation of the day, there are a couple of things that you need to do and that is to learn the field.

    1. Read what the leaders and influencers are saying
    2. Be aware of the moves being made
    3. Get to know your intended audience

    To start with, you have to follow industry leaders and influencers. This includes personal accounts, journalists, news stories, industry publications, and more. Curate a feed of insights and information that will keep you up-to-date with the trend in your field. Get into the habit of checking in and being aware of the moves being made, as well as the conversations of the day.

    Figure out the valuable players, follow them, and create lists. Keep track of people you want to follow and sort them based on the importance of your particular objectives. 

    For example, if you are trying to win some new business, try following some key decision-makers and interact with them gradually. Wait for them to follow back and engage with you. Once there’s enough familiarity and trust, reach out to them with a link to an article they’d appreciate or even an invitation to an event that you think they’ll be interested in. Play the long game on social media. Give, give, give, with no expectation of return.

    You’ve got to set up several jabs before you could go for the right hook. – Gary V.

     

    Your Personal Brand

     

    Engage Meaningfully

    Once you’ve earned some attention from being a good listener, it’s time to engage. Start putting your flare on the contents you’ve shared, or even putting out your own content. There are several things you can do to gain engagement. Through managing several accounts, five types of content perform really well.

    • Useful Content – helps people learn or sharpen a skill.
    • Amusing Content – this is content that gets anything from a smile to a hearty belly laugh.
    • Informational Content – this content gives the audience new knowledge or a different understanding.
    • Inspiring Content – this is content that fires people up and compels them to act.
    • Critical Content – this is content that challenges people’s perspectives.

    This list is helpful for all types of content, from tiny tweets to long-form blog posts. Your content needs to meet only at least one of the following criteria. Don’t feel the pressure to infuse all five ingredients.

    Now, when it comes to maximizing engagement, there are a few things you need to do:

    1. Summarize your story
    2. Use first-person language
    3. Be visually presentable
    4. Provide all necessary details about who you are and what you do
    5. Participate in like-minded conversations
    6. Publish relevant articles, videos, podcasts, or presentations

    If you do this right, a few things will happen. 

    • You’ll find opportunities
    • You will generate leads.
    • Gain advice and knowledge
    • Expand your networks
    • Enhance your profile and awareness
    • Make Social Connections
    • Improve communication skills
    • Increased confidence and happiness

    Discovering, articulating, expressing, and building your personal brand online correctly should yield all of these outcomes and more. 

    Build Thought Leadership

    Congratulations! You’ve made it to the final action of this personal branding series – build thought leadership. If you follow all these steps, you’ll start to notice that your online influence will grow. Eventually, you’ll be considered an authority on the subject that you’re intentionally applying yourself again.

    To make this step effective, give this 90-day game plan a shot. It’s an excellent way to re-orient your account if you’ve hit a plateau. This is the 90-day game plan:

    1. CURATE (30 days): Amplify other voices and become synonymous with select topics
    2. COMMENT (30 days): Add your perspective to conversations
    3. CREATE (30 days): Once you have enough permission space, create original content

    For the first 30 days, follow the foremost experts, influencers, publications, and thought leaders on the internet. Like, repost, and/or retweet their content. Let your audience get used to expecting these kinds of content from you.

    Then for the next 30 days, gradually add your perspective to the conversations. Repeat the steps in the curate phase but now quote tweet instead of a retweet. Add your own captions instead of using theirs. Your audience now knows what you are passionate about and what’s you’re gonna talk about. It’s time to let them know what you think about what you are sharing. 

    By the 60-day mark, you’ll have earned sufficient permission space to start creating original content related to the topics you’ve been curating and commenting on. This is your time to shine. Your audiences are dialed in. They’ve adapted themselves to the new brand promises you’re making. They’re used to a certain type of story being shared, and they’ve stuck around waiting for more. So give them what they’re here for. 

    The Game Plan is just a Template

    Of course, this game plan is just a template, and reorienting your brand might take shorter or longer. Feel it out and pay attention to your analytics. Do more of what gets more engagement and less of what doesn’t. 

    Perhaps, an executive recruiter will type in your name into Google after seeing it on a resume, maybe it’s an event organizer clicking on your Instagram handle after seeing it tagged in a photo, or maybe it’s a friend recommending you for a speaking engagement based on a blog post you wrote. These are all real scenarios. No matter the situation, if you aren’t treating your personal brand as an asset, it’s probably becoming a liability in ways that you’re unaware of.

    It doesn’t matter if you’re a student, a job seeker, or an executive, having a well-defined personal brand is critical. Don’t leave it up to someone else to craft your story because chances are, they’re harming your brand. Your big take away from this blog series should be this: Do things, tell people. 

    Here’s a quick recap of everything that you’ve learned in this blog series:

    1. Identify your brand perception gaps
    2. Discover your reason for being
    3. Articulate your mission (in 8 words or less)
    4. Select your channel mix
    5. Complete your social profiles
    6. Create a personal website
    7. Practice social listening
    8. Engage with purpose
    9. Build thought leadership

    Do what the best brands and most influential people do. Do things, tell people. And do it over and over and over again. 

    You can never get tired telling your story because chances are, someone is hearing it for the first time. – Dr. Julie Payne-Kirchmeier

    Become your own great exhilirator. Get excited about your personal brand. It should be easy because you’re already doing important work, and you’ve got an incredible story to tell. All you’ve got to do is define your personal brand, put your best foot forward, and nurture your community. The rest will fall into place.

  • Personal Branding: Putting Your Best Foot Forward

    Personal Branding: Putting Your Best Foot Forward

    Personal Branding: Putting Your Best Foot Forward

    While phase one centered on defining your personal branding, phase two is all about polishing your online presence and putting your best foot forward.

    PHASE 2: Putting Your Best Foot Forward

    Select Your Channel Mix

    There was a time earlier when we all didn’t know any better that we thought we had to be in every single platform. Aside from the basics – Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, we thought we also needed to be active on Tumble, Pinterest, Snapchat, Foursquare, and many more.

    This can be very overwhelming and it won’t be worth it because of the diminishing returns. To make the long story short, be only on platforms where your audience congregates. Find out where you get the most engagements and the platforms that yield results and concentrate on growing there.

    Platforms suggested are Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and a personal website. If you have to choose one, choose Linkedin because this is where the most influential online networking takes place. Have a personal website, and depending on your line of work, be on platforms that will be good for your career. For instance, if you’re an actor, spend time on IMDB; if you’re a graphic designer, spend time on dribble; if you are a vlogger, spend time on YouTube. 

    A non-negotiable is having a website. You will need an online destination for people to learn more about you as they engage with you and your work online.

    Complete Your Social Profiles

    What’s the number one activity on social media? Stalking, and you and I are both guilty of doing it. The mindless scrolling through feed and timelines without purpose, it’s like repeatedly returning to your kitchen to open up your refrigerator expecting something to be different in there. You know it’s pointless but you still do it anyway because it’s habitual and compulsive. 

    One thing you can do is to play to that and make it work for you. Play into the reflex of people scrolling and stopping to stare and then clicking to learn more. The last thing you want is for a potential client, someone who will prove beneficial to you, to arrive at your profile and not be impressed with it because of a lack of information.

    At the very minimum, you are going to need the following:

    • a user handle – your handle should be easy to remember and state who you are.
    • an account name – your account name should be recognizable because this is what the users see the most.
    • a bio – your bio should talk briefly about who you are and what you do. This is the perfect place to plug in your mission statement.
    • links – the link in your bio should be the most important platform to your desired goals, such as the website we’re about to create or your blog or a portfolio, or another social profile
    • visuals – stories are better with pictures. Make your profile picture clear and unchanging. Use your cover photo as a tool to reinforce some themes around your mission.
    • content – the lifeblood of your social media as it keeps your story current.

     

    Personal branding

     

    Mastering your Social Posts

    To be consistent with your personal branding, you will have to be well-versed with all your social media content. Be consistent in all of your platforms, here are some things to keep in mind: when appropriate, include a call-to-action. An engaging content contains a call-to-action, “click on this link” or “comment below” are two typical examples.

    When sharing links, have it shortened. The goal of an effective post is to drive a link click. Use a shortening tool such as bit.ly to create a trackable, easy to input link. 

    Use visuals. On Twitter, for instance, tweets with images receive 18% more clicks and 150% more retweets. The adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” is very true online. All of the social media platforms, from Facebook to Instagram, don’t merely place a photo just for the sake of posting it. Visuals are everything because it acts as the permission to play.

    Think about it, when was the last time you clicked on an article on Facebook that didn’t have a thumbnail? Even the motivational quotes on Instagram are given careful consideration in terms of font design and layout. 

    Use hashtags for connecting with community, campaigns, and other related content. They can also be used humorously and for afterthoughts, but don’t hashtag basic nouns. 

    Don’t cross-post. Tweets are for Twitter, Facebook posts are for Facebook. Unless you’re Taylor Swift, don’t link them, or fans who are following you on both might stop engaging altogether. And remember that timing is everything. Use your app’s native built-in analytics to find out the best times for you to post. If you want to invest in a central social media dashboard with really robust analytics, check out Hootsuite or Sprout Social. 

    When it comes to Linkedin, make sure you go the extra mile. Consider the following: 

    • Linkedin profiles with photos are 14 times more likely to be viewed 
    • Linkedin profiles with skills are 13 times more likely to be viewed
    • Complete profiles are 40 times more likely to receive opportunities

    Also on Linkedin, it’s important that you illustrate your work and your job descriptions. A simple title and location are not enough. Write down what you did and use this basic structure to tell a better story: I did X which resulted in Y. For example, “I lead a team of 10 marketing professionals to render professional services to more than 50 clients. Pro tip: use numbers generously and then illustrate your contributions with links and media. 

    Lastly, get endorsed and recommended. Think of your social profiles as spokes in a hub and spoke model. The spokes republish the traffic drive to the hub, and the hub helps drive conversions to the spokes. The hub is important because, without a hub, the spokes would just be standing on properties not tied to any specific goals or strategy. The hub and spoke model are tied together.

    They need to be done in tandem because without the spoke content, promoting and distributing, the hub wouldn’t get enough traffic to be successful.

    Build a Personal Website

    The next action in this phase is to build an online destination aka your website. Don’t worry, you will need zero design coding experience to do this because all you need is about.me. about.me is a professional, authentic, and simple page that presents who you are and what you do in one link. It will be a single centralized destination that will allow you to showcase who you are from your work to your passions. And it will be super easy for your audience to learn more about you. The best thing is it’s free and search engine optimized!

    Head over to about.me and get started. Make sure that your website has the following components: name, title, profile picture, short bio, links to social media, published works if you have any, and a clear call to action. And that’s it, you will now have a simple and effective online destination that you control.

    This concludes phase two of the power of personal branding blog series. The last part will be up soon. For more fabulous digital marketing content, don’t forget to visit our blog!

  • The Power of A Personal Brand

    The Power of A Personal Brand

    The Power of A Personal Brand

    Having a personal brand is the key to building a solid foundation for effective communication of telling the world who you are and why you matter. Nowadays, posting your story online and sharing it with the world has become easier and more accessible. The big challenge now is to compete for attention, because when it comes to social media, attention is everything.

    Whether you are a small-time entrepreneur or a seasoned executive, having a strong personal brand is essential to succeed in this highly digital economy. Building a strong online presence can open up new opportunities, create demand, mobilize people and drive outcomes that are vital to winning in our fast-paced, mobile-first, and highly modern world in which the majority of the people’s expectations are ever-changing.

    The goal here is to empower yourself to discover your personal brand and use it both online and offline to gain success in the modern economy. Whether it’s for unlocking new opportunities, pursuing a new job, earning a promotion, or landing a new client, your profile is a portal where your prospects can learn more about you. Investing in your personal brand has been proven by studies to influence things such as raises and promotions. 

    People that create a strong online brand have a competitive edge. Brand narratives are furthered when ambassadors do things and tell people. Because when stories are told, meaning is made.

    Who is telling your story? 

    Are you the one telling your story? If you are and you’re doing it well, it means that you know yourself. If you’ve established an incredible online presence and you are actively networking to further both your professional and personal goals, then congratulations! You probably don’t need to read the rest of this post, but stick around anyway because you might learn a thing or two to take your game to the next level.

    But let’s go back to the question of who is telling your story. And the answer is it should be you, but it can also be your friends, your family, your co-workers, and maybe your boss. Online, it’s probably your fans and followers across your social media networks. It’s also going to be your future employers, customers, investors, partners, supporters, etc. 

    You probably know this already because you do it, too, but the natural reflex before, after, and during our interaction with people is to look them up online to try to get a peek of who they are. And when there is missing information, what do we do? We fill in the blanks based on our first impression of their online presence. For us pattern-seeking human, we naturally fill in the blanks to fill up the void. If you are not telling your story online, someone else is, and they’re probably doing a poor job. So don’t leave it up to others to tell your story. 

    Storytelling is Timeless

    Staying on top of social media can be overwhelming, but not participating online can come at a real cost. If you are gone for an extended period, you can experience a decline of leads, sales, engagement, website traffic, blog reads, and all other metrics that are relevant to your business. The advantage of having stories is that they are platform-agnostic. Storytelling is timeless, it’s human nature. Stories are a fundamental unit of human understanding and it’s how we construct meaning.

    Every leap in communication technology has shared one common denominator, transmitting stories. From the Orrell culture through the phonetic alphabet, Gutenberg press, universities and publishers, telegraph, radio and television, personal computers, to the internet, and social media. The mediums may have changed, but the purpose has remained constant and that is to share stories. With that said, the fundamentals of personal branding online in this digital age are no different than they were at any point in the evolution of communication technology.

    Do Things, Tell People

    Something powerful happens when a story is told. Have you ever heard of the Zeigarnik Effect? The Zeigarnik effect occurs when an activity that has been interrupted may be more readily recalled. This effect states that people remember incomplete or interrupted tasks better than the completed ones. It’s human nature to want to finish things once you’ve started them, and you can easily make this work in your favor. Tell a good story about yourself online where it’s easy to be found, where people are already paying attention. 

    Nobody hears the stories that aren’t told. – Dr. John Austin

    The Power of A Personal Brand

    PHASE 1: Defining your Personal Brand

    Define your Personal Brand

    This action is all about looking inward and discovering the essence of your brand. So what is a BRAND? A brand is an idea, an essence of something. Consider the brand, Apple. You may think you know the business they’re in but think again. What is it that they’re really selling? It’s creativity and simplicity, the feeling of being part of a community that just gets it. Their slogan: Think different.

    Take Nike for another example. Nike sells shoes, sporting gear, apparel, etc. But what Nike is really selling is performance, the idea that anyone can be an athlete. If you’ve ever laced up a pair of Nikes, you might have felt an extra bounce in your step. Not necessarily because Nike is a superior product, but because the brand stands for something more. Their slogan: Just do it. Disney is another example. They sell movies, theme park experiences, toys, merchandise, etc. But what is Disney really selling? It’s happiness, nostalgia, magic, smiles. Their park’s tagline: Where dreams come true. Coca-cola sells beverages. But what are they really selling? Refreshment. Their current tagline: Taste the feeling.

    These brands are doing an incredible job at harmonizing the various dimensions which comprise up the people’s perception of their brand

    Every brand is comprised of two elements. Perception and experience. 

    Perception is a combination of three things:

    1. How you see yourself
    2. How you want to be seen
    3. How others see you

    Experience is:

    1. Activities that the brand engages in
    2. Interactions it has with the others
    3. Time – total time that your brand has been doing both

    You can also do this to your brand perception. Start answering the questions and make sure you talk to other people to qualitatively assess how others see you. 

    When it comes to the best brands mentioned earlier, the answers to how they see themselves, how they want to be seen, and how others see them are either identical or very tightly grouped. That is brand integrity. 

    Brands with low brand integrity have different and competing answers to those questions. A person working at the company, a fan of the brand, and someone with limited brand awareness – all may have different answers. That’s not good. Fortunately, you can engage in activities and have interactions that will reinforce your brand integrity, and you can do this over time. The goal here is for the answer to all three questions to be the same. 

     Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room. – Jeff Bezos, Founder & CEO of Amazon

    When you combine perception and experience, you get a brand. In this way, your brand is a promise and a story. Stories are after all the fundamental unit of human understanding.

    Discover your Reason for Being

    Have you ever heard of the Ikigai concept? Ikigai is a Japanese concept meaning a reason for being. A reason to wake up and get out of bed each morning. Your driving force for your WHY’s. 

     

    The Ikigai Framework is comprised of four sections: what you love, what the world needs, what you can be paid for, and what you’re good at.

    There are several questions you can answer relating to each of the four elements that will help you articulate your why. To discover what you love, ask yourself the following: Is what you’re doing something you’re genuinely passionate about? Could you enthusiastically talk about your industry or profession for hours on end? Are you emotionally connected to the result of your work? And if you weren’t concerned about money, would you still do what you’re doing.

    Then to discover what the world needs, ask yourself the following: Are you helping to solve an actual problem? Is the marketplace demanding what you have to offer? Are people willing to part with the resources such as money, time, attention, trust, loyalty, and love to buy what you’re selling? Will this work still be needed 10 years from now? 100 years from now? If not, will the value of your work today increase over time?

    Then to answer what you can be paid for, ask yourself the following: Have you ever been paid for what you do? If not, are other people being paid for this work? Are you already making a good living doing what it is that you’re doing? Can you eventually make a good living doing this work? Is there a healthy amount of competition in your industry? Are there other people who can do it better? 

    And lastly, to discover what you are good at, ask yourself the following: Are you useful? Is what you do something that your friends, family, or community have sought your advice or opinion on before? Are you among the best in your workplace or community at this? With some more education and experience, could you master what you do? 

    And if that’s too complicated or time-consuming of a process, here’s something that you could do but it’s something kinda different and also kind of dark. Write your eulogy. And if that’s too dark, write your lifetime achievement award acceptance speech instead.

    “What do you want other people to say about your brand when you’re not in the room?” – Jeff Bezos

    The exercise is simple, and you can get it done in one sitting. Get into the right headspace. Simulate the circumstances that a loved one might experience in preparation for delivering your eulogy. Then grab your favorite writing pen and paper, then start writing it all out. Write out what you hope your family, friends, colleagues, co-workers, and customers might say about you. Get into their mindset and imagine what you said, what you did, how you made them feel, and the impact you had on their lives and the lives of others. And then take a break. Once you’ve finished, do step away from the eulogy. Do something light and happy that will take your mind off what you’ve written. Congratulations because you’ve written out one of the most important things you’ll ever write!

    When you come back to your eulogy, skim, and look for attributes, adjectives, and values. Highlight the keywords and phrases you find. Start to compile them and find the promise that things that you’ve highlighted will comprise the promise you hope to have in this world. Arrive at the core statement of how the world will be different as a result of you being in it. That is your value proposition. That is your personal brand.

    At the end of this exercise, you’ll end up with a strong WHY. Most people position themselves online and offline starting with the WHAT. They typically lead with their company name or their position. It’s ineffective especially if you have a confusing title and work in a not so well-known company. What you really want to do is to start with the WHY. Lead with the impact you’re making and how the world is changing as a result.

    Articulate Your Mission (in 8 words or less)

    Why in only 8 words or less? Because constrains breeds creativity. By forcing yourself to be concise, you will cut out all the unnecessary, distracting things you’re believing about your mission and get right to the heart of it. Once you have your nucleus, you can build it outwards. Your mission is the business you’re in and it can change based on the phase of your life and the role that you’re in. 

    The structure of a good mission is as follows: VERB + AUDIENCE + OUTCOME.

    In other words, what you do, who you do it for, and how the world is going to be different as a result. Here are a few good examples:

    • TED: “Spreading Ideas.”
    • Coca-Cola: “To refresh the world.”
    • Google: “To organize the world’s information.”
    • Richard Branson: “To have fun and learn from my mistakes.”

    Your mission statement should basically answer these three questions:

    • What do you do? What business are you in?
    • Who are the people you serve?
    • How is the world different as a result?

    Well-articulated mission statements enable you to know yourself better and to stay focused on your reason for being. Know yourself, and once you do, everything else falls into place and you’ll find your personal brand.

    This is just phase one of three. Practice the exercises and come up with your unique personal brand. Phase two will be posted soon!

  • Differentiate Your Brand Effectively

    Differentiate Your Brand Effectively

    How to Differentiate Your Brand Effectively

    Aѕ a buѕіnеѕѕ оwnеr уоu mау bе wоndеrіng how to differentiate your brand for ѕuссеѕѕ. Differentiating your brаnd іѕ оnе оf thе bіggеѕt mаrkеtіng сhаllеngеѕ. Onе key рrіnсірlе whісh уоu ѕhоuld nоt оvеrlооk іѕ gіvіng bасk. Bеlіеvе іt or nоt, buѕіnеѕѕеѕ thаt dо not рау attention tо giving bасk dо nоt рrоѕреr and wіll еvеntuаllу dіѕарреаr. Thе buѕіnеѕѕ wоrld recognized this рrіnсірlе аt least twо dесаdеѕ аgо when the іdеа оf thе “triple bоttоm lіnе” еmеrgеd. Thіѕ іdеа suggested thаt most  buѕіnеѕѕеѕ nееdеd tо pay attention nоt оnlу to their рrоfіtаbіlіtу but аlѕо to thеіr ѕосіаl аnd еnvіrоnmеntаl іmрасtѕ. In оthеr words, fіnd wауѕ to gіvе bасk tо ѕосіеtу.

    Differentiate Your Brand Effectively

    Promote Social Entrepreneurship helps differentiate your brand.

    This principle іѕ саllеd corporate ѕосіаl rеѕроnѕіbіlіtу, соrроrаtе ѕuѕtаіnаbіlіtу, оr ѕосіаl entrepreneurship. Currеntlу, 95 percent of thе Fortune Global 250 multinational соmраnіеѕ offer extensive public іnfоrmаtіоn оn their sustainability роlісіеѕ аnd реrfоrmаnсе. Businesses that are ѕеrіоuѕ аbоut thіѕ рrіnсірlе have dеvеlореd іntеrnаl mесhаnіѕmѕ аnd аudіtіng processes tо rероrt rеgulаrlу tо thеіr ѕhаrеhоldеrѕ. But you dоn’t have to be a Fоrtunе 500 оr a global multіnаtіоnаl соmраnу. Buѕіnеѕѕеѕ of аnу size саn fіnd many opportunities fоr lеvеrаgіng ѕосіаl еntrерrеnеurѕhір initiatives аnd using them to buіld thеіr brand fоr success.

    Tаkе active responsibility for the environment and society.

    To аррlу this рrіnсірlе to a раrtісulаr buѕіnеѕѕ, start by tаkіng a lооk at how уоur еntеrрrіѕе аffесtѕ others. Tаkіng асtіvе responsibility fоr thе еnvіrоnmеnt аnd how a buѕіnеѕѕ іmрасtѕ ѕосіеtу іѕ a worthwhile investment of уоur resources. Tо аdорt this principle as a wау оf doing buѕіnеѕѕ, you dоn’t have tо invent new wауѕ; just take a lооk аt what your buѕіnеѕѕ іѕ already doing аnd mаkе some аdjuѕtmеntѕ. Stаrtіng ѕmаll, thеn gаіnіng mоmеntum іѕ the way tо gо. Evaluate уоur results аlоng thе way regularly tо check уоur performance and note any роѕіtіvе оutсоmеѕ. Yоu mіght nоtісе changes іn the wау уоur сuѕtоmеrѕ view уоur business, оr ѕее attitude changes іn your еmрlоуееѕ.

    Sоmе quick wins include managing thе еnvіrоnmеntаl footprint оf аn еntеrрrіѕе bу rеduсіng wаѕtе, rесусlіng and reusing. Othеr examples іnсludе еthісаl manufacturing аnd ѕuррlу рrосеѕѕеѕ (fоr example аvоіdіng ѕоurсеѕ whісh uѕе сhіld lаbоr), fаіr trаdе роlісіеѕ, рrоduсіng еnvіrоnmеntаllу frіеndlу products аnd расkаgіng. Yоu mіght аdорt a роlісу оf рrеfеrеntіаllу uѕіng lосаl рrоduсtіоn tо rеduсе carbon еmіѕѕіоnѕ. Cоmmunіtу іnvоlvеmеnt through volunteering and sponsorships аrе оthеr wауѕ to give bасk through a business. Vоluntееr іnіtіаtіvеѕ nоt only help the соmmunіtу аnd рrоmоtе уоur business, but соuld аlѕо hеlр уоur employees dеvеlор vаluаblе nеw skills, whісh they uѕе productively оn thе jоb.

    Invest in sustainability for increased profits.

    When соrроrаtе ѕосіаl responsibility or sustainability іnіtіаtіvеѕ аrе рrореrlу іntеgrаtеd іntо уоur enterprise, thе buѕіnеѕѕ саn get a ѕіgnіfісаnt strategic advantage to differentiate your brand. Suѕtаіnаbіlіtу іnіtіаtіvеѕ can also lead tо new рrоduсt and business орроrtunіtіеѕ, as well as grеаtеr соmmunіtу ѕuрроrt аnd gооdwіll. Aссоrdіng to rесоgnіzеd ѕuѕtаіnаbіlіtу expert Jоhn Frіеdmаn, “Brаnd rерutаtіоn оr ‘gооdwіll’ іѕ аrguаblу thе most vаluаblе asset a company hаѕ оvеr the long-term. A соmраnу that has a роѕіtіvе rерutаtіоn hаѕ a соmреtіtіvе аdvаntаgе.”

    Suѕtаіnаbіlіtу hаѕ аlѕо a роѕіtіvе impact оn еmрlоуее еngаgеmеnt. Studies hаvе shown ѕіgnіfісаnt increases іn рrоduсtіvіtу, сrеаtіvіtу, ореrаtіng margins and рrоfіtаbіlіtу аѕ a rеѕult оf employee engagement. Other bеnеfіtѕ іnсludеd hіghеr employee ѕаtіѕfасtіоn, commitment аnd соllеgіаlіtу, rеtеntіоn of thе bеѕt talent аnd happier сuѕtоmеrѕ. Rоbеrt Lawless, рrеѕіdеnt and CEO, MсCоrmісk & Cо. Inс. еxрlаіnѕ that “bеіng socially rеѕроnѕіblе allows уоu tо аttrасt tаlеnt, bесаuѕе good реорlе will аlіgn with the соmраnу thаt really саrеѕ аbоut еmрlоуееѕ and соmmunіtіеѕ. We lіnk ѕосіаl responsibility to tаlеnt rеtеntіоn.”

  • Product and Service Branding Strategy

    Product and Service Branding Strategy

    Product and Service Branding Strategy

    So, you have a business, but уоu’rе nоt getting the number of customers you need and trу аѕ уоu might. You’re just not getting any new сuѕtоmеrѕ and without a proper branding strategy. Yоur business feels stale and you are at a loss as to hоw tо grow your business and make people know уоu аrе out there.

    Product and Service Branding Strategy

    Why Need Branding Strategy?

    One thіng mаnу business owners fail to realize is that consumers rarely wіll go searching for you unless they know you, іn fасt, how can someone look for you when they don’t know уоu? They can’t, thus you must make thеm knоw you. You must create a branding strategy thаt wіll pull them to you so that you can amaze thеm wіth your product or service and get them tо соmmіt to you. It’s rather like a courtship.

    Branding: Hоw do you get them to соmе to you?

    • Advertise.
    • Market уоurѕеlf tо them.
    • Shout it frоm thе rooftops if you can.
    • Purchase аdѕ оn рорulаr mаrkеt sites or on free market sites.
    • Purchase іntеrnеt аdѕ that will appear on websites that have something іn соmmоn wіth your product or service.

    These wіll get реорlе clicking, get them to your page, and get them reading about уоu. Yоu might even be lucky enough that they lіkе уоu enough to spread the word about you to their friends! Thіѕ wоn’t happen unless you advertise.

    Branding Strategy: Register Your Brand

    Register your ѕіtе with еvеrу directory уоu саn. Send it to search еngіnеѕ. Advertise your site in forums that have something in common wіth your рrоduсt or service. Even if only one person clicks оn an ad, that could be enough to start a chain rеасtіоn thаt will give you the exposure you are looking for.

    Branding Through Social Nеtwоrkіng Sіtеѕ

    Another great аdvеrtіѕіng tооl fоr you to get your name out there is social nеtwоrkіng ѕіtеѕ. People spend countless hours a day on thеѕе ѕіtеѕ аnd it is a networking Mecca. You can use this networking Mecca tо rеасh thousands of new customers or just to get your nаmе оut thеrе. Mаkе a Facebook page for your company аnd рrоmоtе yourself there.

    Tell people аll аbоut yourself and your goals. Connect with them on a human tо humаn lеvеl. Let them see your true self and that you are an honest реrѕоn trуіng to make a company work. People like hаvіng a face thеу can put on a company, it makes them feel safer doing business wіth that person. Try opening up a discussion раgе whеrе реорlе can talk to you directly with any of their ԛuеѕtіоnѕ or соnсеrnѕ about your business. Let them give you feedback so that уоu саn bеttеr improve yourself and your business strategies.

    Branding Awareness

    If уоu use thеѕе branding strategies, you will see your brand become more known tо the niche you are trying to reach whісh wіll allow уоur business to grow. It will start off ѕmаll but уоu will get thеrе. Think оf it as a seed that with brand awareness and nеtwоrkіng wіll grow into a beautiful tree.

  • Here Are 5 Factors on How to Grow Your Brand

    Here Are 5 Factors on How to Grow Your Brand

    How to Grow Your Brand

    If you find your brand ѕtrаtеgу isn’t working for you and you don’t hаvе thе position in the market that you want how to grow your brand then mауbе іt is time to give your brand image a mаkеоvеr. If you feel frustrated because you don’t have the brаnd rесоgnіtіоn that you deserve then it is time to gо bасk to basics and make ѕurе уоur brand image is communicating thе rіght things about your business.

    B – Business – Does your brand image rеflесt уоur product and service and tell people whаt you do.

    R – Responsibility – Does your brand image еxрrеѕѕ уоur ethos and brand promise.

    A – Awareness – Does your brand image stand оut above your competitors.

    N – Niche – Dоеѕ уоur brаnd image appeal directly to you niche target market.

     

    How to Grow Your Brand

    BUSINESS 

    Think about your brand іmаgе аѕ bеіng a complete sensory package, the ” Pеrѕоnаlіtу”, lіkеѕ and dislikes of your brand. It is not just аbоut a рrеttу picture. A brand image can рrоduсе subliminal thoughts linking it to smells, tastes, ѕоundѕ, еnvіrоnmеntѕ and so on. Take a coffee shop for еxаmрlе. A nісе luxurious rich coffee colored visual will make you think оf ѕmеllѕ, tаѕtеѕ and the environment you associate thеm wіth. Thіѕ principle is just as relevant for corporate business to business іdеntіtіеѕ but on a less direct level.

    Whаtеvеr is conjured up in the mind of thе vіеwеr or potential customer when they see any раrt оf your brаndіng is what is going to have a lasting impression оn thеm. If уоu have managed to hit the nail on thе hеаd with your branding then even when someone ѕееѕ something completely unrеlаtеd but іt is in the same color or has the same feel as your brаnd image they will immediately think of уоur buѕіnеѕѕ.

    It is important therefore that your brаnd іmаgе does in fact reflect and еxрrеѕѕ what уоur business is about. Your slogan is equally important аnd wіll have mаѕѕіvе impact in expressing the value and to grow your brand. Your slogan ѕhоuld rеflесt thе right emotion or action for your business аnd be ѕоmеthіng that people will easily соnnесt wіth аnd remember.

    RESPONSIBILITY

    Your brand promise, уоur еthісѕ, your mission statement, everything you promise tо deliver to your client and the level of customer care уоu рrоvіdе should also be considered for your brand іmаgе. Your brаnd promise is what your branding is based uроn. If Corporate Social Responsibility features in уоur buѕіnеѕѕ оr уоu are actively reducing your carbon fооtрrіnt and recycling and so on these are factors whісh make uр thе backbone and character of your brand.

    AWARENESS

    It is important to be аwаrе оf your competitors and your industry іn gеnеrаl. Sреnd a little time researching other brand іmаgеѕ wіthіn thе industry. See what works well about them and hоw they relate to their companies рlасе іn thе market. Be aware of trends and dеvеlорmеntѕ іn your industry. If you want to be seen аѕ a рrеmіеr brand then your brand image needs to portray you as being a fоrwаrd thinking company who is a brand leader and аhеаd оf the game.

    It is important to ѕtаnd оut frоm your competitors and be refreshingly dіffеrеnt. Enсоmраѕѕ all the personality and character of your brand but take it to аnоthеr lеvеl сrеаtіng an added desire and appeal for your brand.

    NICHE

    For most buѕіnеѕѕеѕ it is important to target a niche market to reap a higher сrор of high quality clients and glean a роѕіtіоn аѕ a brand leader in that niche sector. If уоur brand image is too general it will not benefit frоm a strong identity appealing directly to уоur tаrgеt market. It is important therefore to really соnѕіdеr thе nісhе client you are aiming for, after all these are the реорlе who саn make or break you. Think about their lіkеѕ аnd dіѕlіkеѕ. Draw a mental рісturе of your ideal client and then look at your buѕіnеѕѕ frоm their perspective. What are they looking for, whаt will appeal to them.

    Whаt is most important to them in the nature оf your іnduѕtrу for example is it someone who іѕ rеlіаblе, hіghlу skilled, someone with ‘green’ сrеdеntіаlѕ, ѕоmеоnе with lots of experience and ѕо оn. If уоu hаvе these answers and can translate the information into your brand іmаgе then their perception of your brand wіll bе very good indeed.

    Take time to do rеѕеаrсh, mаkе mood boards, list key words and sketch mind mарѕ tо hеlр you develop ideas. Carefully consider each еlеmеnt оf уоur brand image and how it will translate to different brand applications frоm рrіntеd materials to your web presence and eventually help you grow your brand.