A strong brand provides the foundational identity for your company — and it also should drive measurable results for your business. Branding should contribute to everything from getting the attention of prospects to closing deals faster, creating a strong culture, recruiting the best talent for your team, and more.
A strategically developed and implemented brand can positively impact every function in your company.
The typical challenge with branding comes in the application of it. Sure it’s impressive if a branding agency gives you flowery language and aspirational design. But those pieces alone will not help your business if they don’t include clearly applicable positioning, messaging, voice, and visual design that can be directly integrated into everything from your website to your sales outreach.
Branding only makes a difference when it’s activated across all your communications — and even influences your operational decisions.
To get you started on the journey of building a brand that grows your business, let’s explore the fundamental ingredients of the process.
The Foundational Elements Required to Build Your Brand
POV
Whether you’re new to your industry or a seasoned veteran, you need to have a strong point of view that sets your company apart. The way you see the industry, your particular approach to problem solving, what you believe customers truly need from your company’s products or services — these are all things that make up your point of view. While most business owners and leaders have these in their heads, clearly defining them is an important step in establishing your company’s identity.
The Why
“Discovering your why” has been much buzzed about for a while now. Despite the hype, it truly is essential that companies uncover that purpose that drives them beyond strictly profit or business function.
Prospect pain points
While this one is somewhat obvious, too often companies don’t start by fully considering the challenges and needs of their target audience. Knowledge of these customer pain points along with research and customer interviews hopefully were the genesis of the offerings you developed in the first place. And addressing these challenges is a key element of creating brand positioning in messaging that shows you deeply understand your target audience.
Your solution
This is the easy one: the what and how of your company. What are the products or services you provide and how do you deliver those to clients or customers? The key here is not only succinctly explaining these, but also explaining the unique elements in how you provide those offerings in a way that makes your company the best at them.
Features and functionality
These are the tangible aspects of your product or service. Whether you sell a widget or or offer complex B2B consulting, you need to be able to clearly articulate all the features of your offering and how they work to provide a great customer experience.
Customer benefits
”What does my offering do for the customer?” This is the question you need to answer here – but it must be answered from their perspective, which goes back to knowing the pain points, challenges, and even desires of your customer. Benefits must be positioned in a way that communicates that you know and understand what your customers are looking for and what you deliver to satisfy those.
Proof points
How does someone know your company is good at what it does? Those are your proof points. These indicators of your success can be your stellar team with deep experience, outcomes you’ve delivered for clients in facts and figures, business rankings, awards, and more. Think less in terms of testimonials and more in showing the proven outcomes your product or service helps customers achieve.
Voice
Creating a distinctive voice for your brand is one of the most effective ways to express the personality of your business. Specifically, brand voice is made up of the characteristics that define your brand and your values. Are you playful or serious? Friendly or formal? Assertive or conversational? A brand isn’t a person, but an authentic and consistent voice gives it that human element that allows people to connect with it on a deeper level.
Visual Identity
The overall visual identity is the primary way customers recognize and connect with your brand on sight. At its core, a visual identity contains a logo (or logo system–as described below), a defined color palette, and brand fonts/typography. All of these interconnected visual elements create an immediate impression and communicate your brand’s personality and positioning.
Depending on the manner in which a company needs to apply the brand (e.g. – large format outdoor advertising, a data dashboard within a mobile app, etc.) and the sophistication of the product/service offerings, a brand may need additional assets, too. Things like patterns (think Louis Vuitton), mascots (they’re GRRRRREAT!), and photography standards can play an important role in the public’s perception of a brand. However, for the sake of simplifying the brand framework, this article will focus on the core visual elements every brand needs: logo, colors, fonts.
Logo
Your logo is the nucleus of your brand’s visual identity. It helps you stand out from your competitors and serves as a memorable image that resonates with prospects and customers alike. Becoming an iconic business doesn’t happen without an icon, and that’s exactly what your logo is. While your logo doesn’t need to achieve the standing of the Nike swoosh or the Starbucks mermaid, it does need to create a visual hook that helps people remember your company.
Logo System
Typically, there is a version of your logo you use the most and is the most recognized by your audience. It may be either a complete logo lockup – which is a combination of your brand icon and company name – or simply your brand icon (think of Apple). That version is your brand’s primary logo, and the one you’ll use the majority of the time to help create brand recall from your audience.
However, this single primary logo often doesn’t work in all applications. A stacked logo, with the icon on top of the wordmark (company name), looks awesome on hats, business cards, and other marketing collateral. However, it may not look as good in the navigation bar of a website. In this case, a horizontal version of a logo, with the icon to the left or right of the wordmark, may fit the space a bit better.
Enter the responsive logo system.
Having multiple versions of your logo that are familiar and recognizable help you incorporate your brand in a way that positively accents the material in which it’s being applied. There’s nothing worse than a logo that’s stretched or squeezed into a space it doesn’t belong *cringe*. Not only does it look amateur, even worse – it may not even look like your brand! Leaving prospects scrolling on to the next piece of content in their feed, forgetting you exist.
Not having the right logo in the right place is a great way to lose business. But, having the right logo for every place, is a great way to win it!
Color Palette
The colors of your brand are strategic and important decisions as they evoke certain emotions and create a general mood that people respond to almost subconsciously. For instance, a dark palette might be mysterious or luxurious. A light or colorful palette may be more inviting and fun. The color palette also helps distinguish between business to business (B2B) companies from business to consumer (B2C) companies and defines where your company sits within an industry.
Typography
As the color palette is the mood, typography is the personality of your brand. It’s like when a person walks in a room and you already have an impression of what they’re like. The right font selection and pairings provide an inflection to whatever you’re communicating. In other words, they convey how you’re saying something. Typography also contributes directly to consistency and brand recognition.
The Takeaway
A powerful brand integrates all these moving parts in a cohesive strategy that can make a massive impact on the success of your business. After identifying and defining these various elements, your next step comes in applying them across marketing, sales, recruiting, and more.
