Tips for Strengthening a Growing Business Brand
When you give life to a new business, you're also giving life to a brand. When you interview job candidates, the way you make hiring decisions supports or negates your brand. Regardless of whether you've strategically crafted your brand, your customer service, content, employees and products all help define it. If they're all saying different things, then you have a brand problem.
Don't freak out just yet.
Creating and managing your brand can be very simple. It starts with the people in your organization. Usually that's the first thing organizations forget. The key is to keep it clear, keep it consistent and keep it alive. While you're building out your team, you must make sure that everyone understands the brand completely or nothing will be seamless.
Here's a simple list of steps to help solidify your brand, basics first:
1. Understand the value of a brand. Before you start honing a brand around your organization, you must first value its weight among your company. A brand isn't your logo, slogan or any other tactical piece of your business. Your brand is your value system, your culture and your tone. It's the way you approach marketing communication. Most of all, it's ingrained in each of your employees. It's within them that your brand will be carried out.
2. Define your audience. Your customers shouldn't solely define what your company stands for, but without them your company wouldn't survive. In order to tackle this in a strategic manner, you'll need to understand who your key target audience is. You can do this by conducting a customer survey, scheduling interviews, or posting something on your brand's social pages asking for feedback. Figure out why people like or dislike the products you sell. Get a better understanding of what keeps people coming back to your business; know what disengages them.
3. Analyze your organization. What kind of organization do you want to create? What types of values do you want to develop? How do these things apply to each person within your company? How do they reflect your product, your customers and everything else in between?
Your target customer is central to the success of your company, but if you don't have a strong sense of "who you are," you'll slowly crumble under the demands of external parties. You'll want to better define the values of your organization and how that will affect your marketing communications. Analyzing your organization's key value structure is doable without considering your customers, but you'll find that results are more holistic when they're included.
4. Choose your marketing communication tone and style. These can vary depending on the interaction. Although you can't control every single conversation your team has with customers, there can be a strong framework that supports your brand and provides guidance. Empower your team to make strong decisions when creating marketing materials that are brand specific.
5. Empower individuals through practice. Once you've gone through these steps and have a general idea of what your brand is, you must then find a way to encourage ownership. This can only be done by tying individual employee needs, goals and desires to your particular brand. Figure out how employees can carry out the brand through their individual role. Empower them by communicating how important it is they execute the brand. This will feel more like a culture discussion, but what your team needs to understand is that brand = culture. This is why it must be developed by, owned by and carried out by everyone on your team.
As a final note, encourage your team to support the company brand by leading by example. If you aren't carrying out the brand as the leader, it will be quite difficult for anyone else to trust that they can as well.
Brandon Levey is the CEO of Stitch Labs, an online software provider for multichannel retailers to help them manage their inventory, orders and sales data in one location.
