You’ve come up with your idea, you’ve made a plan, you have a product or service, you’re on social media and your website is launched. Technically, you’ve built your business, and now it’s time to build brand presence to attract your target audience. Whether your business is an online business or a brick and mortar model, you will need to build a brand that represents what you do so that prospects can clearly understand and be attracted to your products or services. The following 4 steps are a basic outline to building your own brand.
Connect with Your Audience
First of all, it’s imperative that you find your customer. Be specific. One common mistake entrepreneurs make is trying to appeal to everyone. Focusing on one target persona and narrowing down your marketing efforts to your target market with a “quality over quantity” method will win every time. While attempting to appeal to everyone, you end up being too general and speaking to no one. Even with the smallest number of potential clients, when you have a fully engaged audience, they will be there cheering you on and sharing your business and message with their friends and family.
Who is your target audience? Give this question some serious thought. This may have changed from who you wanted your audience to be when you first launched your business, and may not be the same audience you want 1-3 years from now. Stay flexible–as you grow and change, so will your audience.
Ask yourself, “How do I want my brand to make people feel?” Allowing your personality to shine through while remaining relatable to your audience is crucial when creating your brand. People trust people they know and tend to do business with brands they know and trust. There is no faster way to lose someone’s trust, business, and relationship than by not being authentic and true to yourself. We all have intuition to guide us and we tend to know when something just doesn’t feel right. The last thing you want is for someone to feel that way about your brand and what it represents. It is also important in being transparent and offering the best customer service to make it easy for your target audience or potential clients to connect with or contact you. Here is an easy way to make sure you are connecting.
Kristiek on Fiverr says:
When performing account audits and reviews, nine times out of ten I see the same mistakes. When I like a profile on Facebook, I’ll go to their personal profile or their page to check them out and learn a little bit more about them, and the number one thing that I notice is that they don’t have the “about” section filled out. So there’s no information about who they are, what they do, who they work with, or how to connect with them. The second thing I notice is links that aren’t active, or if they are active, they lead to some random place that’s not attached to your business page. It’s not attached to your group or any other social profiles, so there’s no way to find out more about you. All I see is what I found. I want to see more. I want to know more. And there’s nothing there for me to take a look at.
First, when building your social profiles, make sure that the fields are completely filled out, and you should have an about section on your personal pages as well. Some audience members will follow pages, others will join groups, others are friends and family who just connect to your personal profile. Everyone is a prospect. However you do it, make sure that you have a little information filled out about you so that when they’re checking out your brand and want to know more information, it’s easy for them to find. Make it a no brainer and put it all out there so that people have access to it. Even if it’s just a paragraph, focus on your business; who you work with, how you help them, and where they can find out more information about you.
Second, make sure that your various online sites are connected to each other and the links work and direct the visitor to the right place. A common mistake is that if you’re with another company in addition to your business or in network marketing, the links direct to those company websites rather than your site or contact, providing no way for people to get in contact with you directly because you’re not giving them that link. Make sure your links are set up, and make sure they’re correctly directed to the right places so that people know exactly how to find you and can always find more information about you. Both of these mistakes can be easily fixed almost immediately, and will make a lasting positive impression on your prospects.
Become Recognizable
You need to make your brand unique and recognizable. This is created through cohesion and consistency. The most popular question people ask me about is, “How do I create cohesion and consistency on a social platform when I’m building my brand?” The common mistake that I see is that people have all kinds of different things and all kinds of different fashions. They’re trying to offer something for everyone. It’s too broad. There’s no rhyme or reason to anything. They’re trying to gain recognition, but really not giving people any way to identify that it’s uniquely them. Is this you?
You want to position yourself in a way that people begin to recognize your signature style over time. Even if you’re at a point where you’re just starting out, and you don’t quite have the money to invest in somebody creating designs for you, you can get started with some simple choices. You will need to choose the two core pieces that will create your brand’s framework of cohesion and consistency, and stick with them until you’re at a point where your business grows and you have the money to invest in hiring somebody to create visuals for you. These core components are your color palette and your font combination.
Color Palette –
Just pick some simple colors that you always use, use them consistently, and use them cohesively. Choose the right color shades for your brand.
For example, if you’re using brown, make sure you’re using the same exact shade of brown or a complimentary color brown every single time. Pick a simple color palette. There are many, many resources out there to help you fine tune and pick a color palette.
One of the most popular ones right now is Canva. Canva has a blog where you can find resource articles on many of their tools. Do a quick search for color palettes, and they actually have suggested color palettes that you can pick and choose from and use instantly. They make it simple. Just pick a color palette, use your chosen shades consistently, and this will help you create brand cohesiveness as a whole.
Pinterest also has color palettes that you can use. It can be trickier to find the color codes that you need there, but there are some extra tools that you can plug in. If you’re a Chrome user, there’s an eyedropper tool and color picker tool that you can use to digitally extract the color and it will tell you the code that you need in order to duplicate that shade in your graphics program.
Font Combination –
The second component of basic branding is your font combination. Choose one or two fonts that you use consistently, and stick with those at all times. When deciding on initial font combinations that are great for your brand, Canva is a great choice once again. There are some pre-paired font combinations and suggestions that work really well together, so you can just pick an option and run with it.
Pinterest also has a variety of resources for font combinations. There are so many talented people out there who have already created downloads, including freebies, guides, and images. It’s okay to experiment at first to find out what you like best, and it’s completely normal to change it once or twice when you’re just starting out. But once you find one that you like, stick with it until you hire somebody to do visual branding for your next level.
In short, it’s important to have a cohesive tone to your branding from the beginning, which is visually accomplished with colors and font schemes, and it’s important to make sure people can find all the pertinent information about you so they begin to know and trust you and what you stand for. Building a brand is a process, and your online presence will evolve as you and your business grow and mature.
This post was written with the help of Kristiek, a branding and marketing professional available for projects on Fiverr. I occasionally hire Fiverr freelancers to write articles on topics they are proficient in, as this enables us all to learn more. Subscribe for more business, sales, and investing posts. Have a lovely day!
