Creating branding goals will help you and your team establish measurable metrics and performance expectations to create leverage and promote the successful growth of your brand. Brand objectives encourage a team to critically examine a brand by evaluating current practices for opportunities to improve and grow. Seeing where your branding strategy is succeeding as well as where it can improve will help you honestly compare your company to your competition in a way that can help leverage your competitive advantages. It is important to set down some goals to reach regarding creating your brand image, and timeframes by which to implement the following categories of brand building blocks.
Brand Identity & Audience Alignment
Determining brand objectives begins with a clear understanding of what engages your target audience. Your identity as a brand is determined by the relationship that you have with the people who are interested in your products or services. Being extremely clear about what you offer will draw the correct audience.
One of the ways business leaders can gauge the health of their firm’s brand is to assess its brand alignment. Brand alignment is a measure of how well your firm fulfills its brand promise. Are your people on the same page when it comes to describing your brand and service offerings? Once your firm has been hired, does the team deliver on promises? Brand alignment gets you to yes on both counts. One of the most important responsibilities that professional services executives and marketing directors face is sustaining the health of their firm’s brand by making sure the deliverables match what is being presented.
Brand Messaging, Tone & Personality
One way to ensure that your company is more than just a logo is by clearly defining and creating the voice of your brand via messaging. Adding flair and personality to your brand makes it stand out from the crowd. Oftentimes brands forget to create a clear voice and tone for their market. Customers want to support brands they feel can relate to them. Ask the question, “If my company was a person or creature, what would it be like? How would it talk? What emotional tone does it convey?” Spending time carefully crafting your tone and voice can take your company from being just another faceless organization to a brand with personality your loyal followers will want to get behind.
Brand Audience Engagement
For modern brands with an online presence, strong social media engagement is a sign that you’re building consumer trust and making an impact in the market. Creating meaningful connections via personal interaction with current and future customers will serve to boost your brand both on and offline. Social media engagement is measured through the number of comments, likes, and shares. Activity and engagement is crucial for every social platform to build a positive brand experience, and therefore develop meaningful relationships with new and potential future customers. However, the numbers aren’t everything. As a business, quality rather than quantity is what you should be striving for.
Brand Design + Creative Direction (Visual Identity, Logo, Colors, Fonts, and Photography)
Branding design describes how a brand chooses to visually represent their brand identity to the public. Branding design refers to key brand elements including logo, color scheme, typography (fonts), and other design components that make a brand stand out as a unique entity from its competitors, and therefore be more individually recognizable to consumers. Besides these main elements of brand identity design, branding design also more broadly refers to how a brand chooses to express themselves in both the physical and digital world; whether that’s on social media, in physical stores, or even in its interior design of the company’s office spaces.
Brand Refinement & Feedback
Refining your brand creates a stronger key message by letting your customers know why you are the best and why they should invest in your product or service. Realigning your brand enables you to target PR and Marketing campaigns directly to your ideal customers, communicating to them in a way that provokes a positive response. In our society, branding is important because it distills the essence of the company and structures the information in such a way that makes it easy for people to understand the core ideas or principles in a matter of seconds. Just a few sentences and a picture, and they should be able to grasp your concept and identity. That is the goal. Everything else should be just reinforcing your core identity and brand position. Nowadays, this is especially important because people have little time or attention for things, and they will not remember much unless it is different and unique, meaningful, focused, crystal-clear, and relatable or applicable to them personally.
In short, getting clear on your branding by narrowing the focus to appeal to the right people, creating a personality for your brand, understanding how to best visually represent yourself as a company and getting your key messaging across succinctly will truly help your brand development and success. Realize that an identity takes time to develop, and take steps to get started, refining it as you go. It will be more than worth the time and effort you spend on this crucial piece of your business identity, and the relationships you build with your audience will benefit tremendously from capturing your brand in a personal way. Subscribe for more posts on business, sales, and investing. Have a lovely day!
