A brand refers to how your customers perceive your products or services. In the current post-pandemic era, your success as a business depends heavily on how well-established your brand is. After all, hundreds of companies provide the same product or service as yours.
So, if your company or brand name is known and respected by its customers, you’ll never see a downward trend in your growth – and will always stay ahead of your competition.
The customer perception about your business is what we call your “brand”. Because as the market grows and more businesses open up with similar products/services, people will only choose the companies that have an established and authentic “brand”.
If your business is based on an app/software, branding is even more necessary for you. Since you are not selling any tangible product, you will have to establish your brand by providing high-quality service and showcasing a properly designed website and other assets.
Remember, these tweaks to your business will come at a cost – and that cost will be on top of your app development cost.
As we have stated, your brand is what your consumers think of you. Establishing a brand of your own takes a ton of effort, ranging from having an aesthetically pleasing identity design (logo, website design, use of colors, etc.) to an appealing tagline/slogan.
This guide will try to shed some light on how having a professionally designed brand can skyrocket your business.
What Is a Brand?
People have different perceptions about different businesses. As discussed earlier, a brand is what your customers think of your business.
For instance, Apple’s consumers around the globe assume it as a premium, high-quality, and bold brand that creates innovative products.
These types of companies create those perceptions mindfully. They are developed by careful identity design, marketing tonality, and other visual and non-visual marketing tactics.
Nowadays, your business is all about your brand. As your financial position and performance define your intrinsic monetary value, your branding represents the intangible value that your business has created over the years in consumers’ minds.
It is limited to consumer perception and is now widely known as the overall value of your business.
But, the actual question is, why should we bother to develop a brand for our business in the first place?
Why Should You Develop a Brand for Your Business?
We have a total of five answers to that question. Even though there are a thousand reasons why you should develop a brand for your business – below are the top five.
- Branding Can Help Build Trust
The first reason to develop a brand for your business is that it helps you build trust. For example, there are thousands of shoe brands on Amazon or any other store – but many prefer Nike or Adidas over others.
Consumers trust their quality, material, and durability. That is because of the brand equity they have established.
Brand equity is in itself a technical term. In simple words, it means the total value that a brand name brings to your business.
When you develop a strong brand, your brand equity is higher and vice versa. And the higher the brand equity, the higher the trust.
2. Branding Creates Loyal Customers
If you have established a strong brand and customers have the utmost trust in your business, your customer retention rate will ramp up faster.
Long-term, consistent, and sustainable growth is only possible with loyal customers. Having a set of loyal customers that return and buy frequently is the backbone of any business. It helps you stay in the game in the long run.
Branding helps you create loyal customers. It enables you to connect with your audience on a deeper level.
For instance, Redbull has a strong connection with its audience because of its brand image. Their thrill-loving customers are hard to break because of their loyalty to the brand.
3. Creates Trust in the Marketplace/Industry
Having a well-established brand also helps the industry/marketplace as a whole. If Apple has a well-established brand, it will help all the smartphone and technology companies establish trust among the audience about its features.
4. Branding Protects You from Competitors
On the contrary to the previous advantage, branding also helps you stand out from the crowd. It helps you differentiate your market offerings (products) from the competitors. After all, staying ahead of your competition is the most challenging task as a business.
Establishing a good brand not only helps you stay ahead of your competition, but it also helps you stay away from their copy-cat tactics. If they copy your product, your effective branding will enable you to take your sales back.
5. Branding Increases Sales and Profits
Good branding is highly correlated with increased sales and profits. Your well-established and effective branding strategies will lead you to better sales and profits – irrespective of your niche/category.
But, how do you do that ‘effective branding? Or how do you create a developed brand?
How Do You Create a Developed Brand?
Just like the previous question, we have five answers to it. But, they are not five different answers, but a one 5-part answer that outlines the simple 5-step process for you to create a brand for your business.
1. Research Your Target Audience and Your Competitors
The first step is to research your target audience and your competitors. For that, you must conduct proper research about the background and preferences of your potential customers.
Also, when you create a brand, you need to stay relevant. You cannot create a black-themed brand when selling baby care products.
You need to incorporate colors like pink and blue to stay relevant with the other brands. Therefore, you need to conduct proper research about your competitors and their strategies to remain relevant.
2. Conduct a Website Analysis
After you’ve done your customer and competitor research, you need to conduct a website analysis.
From analyzing the need to explore the themes/styles of competitor websites – you need to conduct comprehensive research to create a website that is likable and relatable to your competitors.
3. Choose the Look and Feel of Your Brand (Colors and Font)
Likability and relatability are the two significant aspects of good branding. This is only going to happen if you pay close attention to the visual elements of branding. Therefore, the third step in the process is optimizing your brand’s look and feel.
The look and feel of your logo, advertising and marketing collateral, packaging of your products, signature branding, and your website/mobile app design all play a crucial role in helping you achieve a relatable and likable look and feel for your business.
4. Make Your Website Communicative
What most amateur entrepreneurs do is that they spend most of their time creating aesthetically pleasing designs – but those designs do not communicate anything.
Your designs and look/feel should communicate your image. That’s why it is necessary to choose a look and feel for your business that is communicative and represents your business to its best.
In the 4th step, you need to make sure that your choice of brand visual elements is communicative of your values.
5. Apply Your Branding to Your Business
Lastly, it is now time to apply all of your decisions and implement the design changes, website rebrands, publishing new logos, etc.
3 Reasons That You Should Invest in Branding
We have already talked about why you should invest in branding – but they were more of the advantages of developing your brand. We believe you should know the real business needs and gaps that branding fulfills.
1. Reduce Marketing Costs
The first reason to invest in branding is the subsequent reduction in marketing and business costs.
Have you ever seen a Television Advertisement for Lamborghini? That is because they already have an established brand and don’t feel the need to advertise.
Effective branding will enable you to spend less on marketing and still have better sales numbers. That’s the beauty of good branding.
2. Increase Company Value
Effective branding does not only help you reduce your marketing costs – but it also enables you to increase your company in value.
After all, if it takes less money to market your business and close sales, your company will automatically be more valuable than others.
3. Close More Sales
Last but not least. The biggest reason you should invest in the effective branding of your business is that it will help you close more sales.
An established brand is known by more customers and gets more word-of-mouth marketing than other brands. Therefore, it closes more sales and is more profitable.
Conclusion
Running a business without spending dollars on branding is senseless in the digital era. If you want sustainable growth and to retain your customers, you need to have an established brand that sticks with the minds of your customers.
It will give you a distinct identity and enable you to stand out from the crowd and, above all, keep winning.
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