How to develop a brand strategy for a local business?

How to develop a brand strategy for a local business? Answers from i4 Web Services!

How to develop a brand strategy for a local business? That is what we are going to be talking about today! Thanks for taking a moment to read this blog article and we hope you find it useful to help grow your business online, in-person, around social media, in print or anywhere your heart can desire.

Let us begin discussing ways to develop your brand strategy now. Did you know that developing a brand strategy is a vital step in creating your company’s identity? It is true, most successful business owners have written a business plan that details every aspect of a brand strategy.

A focused and results oriented business owner make the brand strategy act as a blueprint when it comes to developing the on-going marketing strategies and tactics. Therefore, by creating your branding – it should represent the core ethos of your business. The brand strategy should keep your business functional and consistent to delivering any product or service. An effective branding process will create a unique identity that differentiates you from your competition. Here is a list of things to think about when writing up a brand strategy with us i4 Web Services or with your business partners or maybe just by yourself:

Consider your overall business strategy.
Identify your target clients.
Research your target client group.
Define your ideal customer.
Define your what is not your ideal customer.
Define any Niche Groups in your targeted population.
Develop your brand positioning.
Create your brand storyline.
Develop your messaging strategy.
Develop your name, logo, mascot, and tagline.
Develop your content marketing implementation plan.
Develop your website.
Choose a memorable domain name.
Create messaging that will evoke emotion in your targeted audience.
Develop a visual identity and think about color theory.
Align your website and print media with your brand identity.
Build your social media presence.
Create A Brand Voice and Get Opinions on it.
Align your promotions with your brand’s voice.
Be unique and memorable with promotional media.
Create the opportunities for your customers become your brand ambassadors.
Do everything with quality – slow is fast and fast is slow.
Be consistent but also be bold and daring.
Use social media regularly – stay involved and engaged.

What is the purpose of your brand?

So many times, new entrepreneurs are so excited to make any sale possible they fail to think about this. Do not get me wrong, it is good to be hungry. But when you lose yourself in the process of making sales that your organization lacks an ethos – it is not good at all.

Your brand should be created based on your company’s personality, image, values, and core characteristics. The impressions you make, and how others perceive your company will lay the basic framework of your branding. Also, how you and your employee act and react to customer service issues can affect your brand identity as well.

So, what do you want your brand to do for your company? More importantly, what do you want others to say about your products or services? With a strong brand, your business will be able to leverage marketing to increase its influence your preferred target market. Then, your business will be able to build your credibility as a ‘good’ business to work with. A strong brand can, will and should motivate targeted prospective customers and returning clients to want to purchase your products or services.

A big part of your branding is the look of your marketing. Your business or charity for matter is creating a idea for people to wrap their heads around. This idea should be easy to understand and it should communicate your business model to someone very quickly. Everything from your logo to your color theory and even your font choices do play a big part in creating your brand strategy in reference to your on-going marketing efforts. Remember, all these things will actually create a feeling of emotion in your prospective customer mind.

With that being said, the success of your branding strategy and correctly linking it to your marketing strategy so you can begin running online and offline advertising is vitally important. It is not uncommon to have a brand image / marketing & advertising consultant working with you, so things go right.

If you want or need to turn to a professional, allow i4 Web Services to look at your branding efforts. You will speak with our owner, Ed Pisani Jr to get help with many aspects of your company’s brand needs. He will advise you on building the perfect logo for your business’s brand, implementing it into your web media, print media and discussing how to create custom layout that can be used throughout your marketing campaign.

We will ask about having a strategy session with to talk about you, your business, so we can develop an excellent brand and plan with you a strong brand strategy to ensure your business gets noticed! Yes, that is a sales pitch – so if you want our help give a call at 407-416-1515.

Now let’s take a moment to talk about ‘Logo Design’ and Successful Branding uses a Logo…

What are some of the most successful and popular logos that come to mind when you think about successful brands? Maybe, Nike, Reebok, Coca-Cola, CNN, Disney, or ESPN?

Creating a familiar script can create a wordmark similar to what Disney and Coca-Cola wordmarks. Having a font in mind is important. Why? Font theory plays a lot into targeted market audience. A font choice may play better with a younger vs. older population. While other maybe more eye catching to young families. These are all things you need to consider when creating a logo. Plenty of studies have been done to identify fonts that attract certain populations. So if your business or charity is interested in attracting ‘everyone’ you need a font style that can speak to everyone.

Next you want to think about your color selections. What colors say is equally as important as what your logo looks like. You need to again think about your potential audience and consider how you want to be perceived by them. Remember your color choices matter.

So now let’s take a moment a think about symbols. Throughout human symbols have played an important role to us. From church to the national flag, all these things matter in identifying ourselves as being part of something thus accepting something meaning buying into something. Hence, buying is the keyword here. People buy into things and creating a buying mentality is what you want to do. Think about it for a second, people ‘buy-in’ to standing when we say the pledge of allegiance or listening to the national anthem.

Why is that? Well, simply put it shows that they care about the meaning behind the symbol. They care about what happens to the meaning behind the symbol. So therefore, think about what symbol will really speak volumes to your potential audience and why. Take a moment to consider the major brands that have got it right over the years. Here is a short list to get some inspiration from:

The smiling arrow of Amazon
The Nike “swoosh”
The bent staple in the ‘L’ of Staples
The Target circle for Target
The sideways ‘E’ in Dell

Even if you do not use some of these products or services, you still know these brands and exactly what they sell. That is a successful logo design. Before you spend money on developing new website that will feature responsive design and other SEO friendly features, first take some time to look at your logo.

Your company is unique. Your logo branding should be, too.

A big problem is sometimes – business owners try to copy an iconic image such as the Superman ‘S’ on the chest. Loving a character is fine but you do not want a prospect customer to mistake your logo for anyone else’s company.

i4 Web Services really does not recommend that you ride the coattails of a more successful competitor. Not only will it possibly backfire on you but your competitor most likely will take legal action to protect their brand costing you a lot of money. Plus, you are not distinguishing your business as being better or more affordable than or even being in some way unique from your competitors.

Why would any customer choose a business with a brand stolen from another business he or she already knows? So, don’t steal a logo design because it will destroy your business credibility and lastly it will give a competitive advantage to your competition.

So here is the point you want someone or anyone for that matter that visits your website to have something that can quickly symbolize your company and its product or services. By either a wordmark, a trademark, or a combination of both, you need to instantly make a connection.

If you still not clear, ask yourself these two questions – what does the font influence the first impression someone has about my business? And does this symbol cultivate the message without words?

Your Logo Needs To Be All About You

Your logo is a valuable piece of your brand whether you own a small business or are partner in a much larger business looking to rebuild a brand from the ground up. Sometimes, businesses startup because they have the customers and grow so quickly that they are already somewhat established as a company with a healthy following of customers. This is where things get tricky because your customers need to understand the transition and can be part of the growth of the company.

We recommend include the current customers and employees for that matter in the logo design process. Granted they will not have the final say but it includes them for a brief instant in your evolution as a growing company.

By sharing a few different versions with your stakeholders, it will give them a chance to offer feedback and that matters when you have an existing group of loyal customers. Your ability to include their insights will help you settle on the right logo for your company. Perhaps these insights will make you consider different colors, various backgrounds, and different sizes before settling on the perfect logo for your business or charity.

There is a value to work with a professional graphic designer and this type of person is creative. This creativity can help you find the visual ethos want to express to the world. This investment cannot be underestimated, you know it is easy to tell apart websites where someone used a copy of some random artwork with words on top versus hiring a professional to design a logo. When you compare the logos and its use in our overall brand the differences in quality can be quite startling. Take some time to compare your competitor’s logos against other competitor’s logos on websites where a sleek and professional logo was designed by a graphic designer. What camp do you want to be in?

Don’t worry i4 Web Services does make logos and we are happy to happy – just give us a call now, 407-416-1515. When you call us, we discuss your goals and plans for your business why you need a new logo or maybe a redesigned logo. We will share some of the best practices for designing a valuable graphic that you will use across your entire business enterprise. We will help you create an amazing logo that speaks to your customers and is an asset to your brand. From your digital home including your website and social media pages, as well as on boxes, bags, buildings, flyers, postcards, business cards, and advertisements in the community.

Writing out your brand strategy is a wise thing to do.

Writing a brand strategy sounds like a challenging task for many start up business entrepreneurs and charity founders. However, this task is much simpler than it seems. If you want to get your brand noticed in a crowded market, you should write a detailed marketing strategy and follow it diligently. No matter whether you have a background in business branding or not, you can build an outstanding strategy in a few simple steps.

Step 1: Define your target audience.

By being able to define your perfect target audience creating a brand with a solid logo design becomes much easier. Why? Because you have taken time to really think about who you want to get in front of and why. So, the better you know and identify your target audience, the more effective branding strategy can be designed. So, you should define the demographics of your target audience – here is a short list to consider using:

Age
Gender
Ethnicity
Family size
Religion
Education
Income level
Location
Consumption habits
Lifestyle Buying Habits
Hobbies
Spending Habits
Values, attitudes, and beliefs
Lifestyle

Step 2: Set long-term and short-term goals.

Now that you know your target audience – you can now setup goals to grow your business. The effectiveness of a good branding strategy is that it can be easily plugged into your marketing and advertising strategy. It should be easier to expect to achieve an increase in overall sales, to raise brand awareness, or to improve brand loyalty year over year.

Further, by setting a set of goals you can make gains versus doing nothing and hoping for the best. I4 Web Services recommends making your goals: SMART – specific, measurable, attainable, rational, and time-bound. Depending on your long-term and short-term goals, you will choose different marketing methods and create various types of content for them to be successful.

Step 3: Analyze your competitors’ marketing strategies.

A good business does not just build a website and overnight and hope for the best. A good business does not operate in a vacuum either. Let us be real, we all have competitors, and you should be aware of the marketing strategies your competitors are using. So, make it a point to choose from three to seven of your biggest competitors and analyze the following aspects of their marketing strategies:

Website design
Social media profile design
Content quality and quantity
Design of ad copies
Content of newsletters
Lead magnets
Pricing strategy – availability of coupons; seasonal sales, discounts, etc.
Range of product available

Once you get an idea of what tactics help your competitors win the target audience’s attention, you will be able to design an effective brand marketing strategy for your business branding campaign. If you follow their best practices and avoid their mistakes, you will significantly improve your marketing efforts.

Step 4: Know your products and/or services.

No matter what your industry is or what your niche you want to work in, you should understand that your product and/or service is not 100% unique. If you want to achieve success, you should explain to your target audience how your product differs from other products and why this difference matters.

Basically, you do not need to describe your product’s features or service’s benefits to the point of boring your customer base. Instead, you should try to explain how your product (or service) meets your customers’ wants and needs. This is very straight forward advice, write out your company brand strategy then use it. This simple advice works.

Yet you need to take this step very seriously. You must look at your product and/or service from a critical point of view. You need to really understand the ins and outs of your product or service to make an impact with your customer(s).

Yes, leave your ego at the door and ask yourself the following questions:

How can my product and/or service benefit my target audience?
What specific needs does it satisfy?
Which features of my product and/or service do matter to my customers the most?
How does my product and/or service differ from other items available in the market?
How is the pricing of your product or service compare to your competitor?

Answers to these questions will help you to choose the right banding direction you want to go and how to integrate the best possible marketing tactics to boost your sales.

So, by thinking about your direction, you can ask yourself or maybe your current employees this question – what buying motive does your brand potential have? As a business owner or busy professional – you may need to understand that branding can present your product or services in a more appealing way.

Try to introduce your brand in a way that makes people feel irresistible when using your product or service in print and online. So, what you want to try to do with your brand over time is to create emotional reactions by trying to focus customers’ attention on the value tied to your product or service features. Then secondary to address your potential customers’ needs and wants.

Why is Web Graphic Design So Important and how does it connect to your brand?

A successful brand campaign strategy can make people feel a certain way about your company. Your logo, your website, and maybe your social media posts will help your customers become familiar with your brand and they can learn to trust services or products labeled with that graphic media.

A website is your 24 hour – 7 day a week – always open for business storefront. It can serve as a sales center, informational connection, and so many things too. Imagine you are walking through a local store in search of something. Whether you are a fan of one product over the other – your goal is to see learn about it, and possibly buy it.

Why having a website is important is that is strengthens your brand because like everyone else in the world your eyes will drift to the cans that you recognize. We like to see things that are familiar. Therefore, a website and social media account can help your company feel like a friend you have welcomed into your home countless times.

So, when you consider working with a graphic / web designer for your logo and website can be an essential component of building a strong brand. Seeing success with your branding begins with a unique logo, well built website, and social media that compliments both for your business.

Remember to apply Branding in Search Engine Optimization

Okay so having a strong logo, an understanding your business and its customer base is so important. Now it is time to think about building a website in a responsible way. Using SEO when assessing page viability for being searchable online is critical. You can look amazing but if no one can find you then that is a big problem.

So, let us think about building a website with a good structure and layout. Plus implementing a branded strategic way to use images in an SEO-friendly manner with ALT tags of course that improves your search rank can matter. i4 Web Services has years of experience connecting the dots for your brand online.

Yes, it will not happen overnight to integrate the necessary brand messages on the search engines – but it can happen. Furthermore, by looking at how your page is built, and the content is introduced with keywords and key phrases counts as well. The combination of keyword-rich content and enticing messaging will satisfy both sides of the strategic equation. When you design a mobile-friendly, modern looking website will also help grow your successful brand.

If you notice your search engine marketing efforts are not working, ask us to do a FREE WEBSITE & SOCIAL MEDIA REVIEW, so we can check out how your site is structured and determine if it’s time to rework it. Call us at 407-416-1515 today!

Lastly, thank you for reading this blog article on “How to develop a brand strategy for a local business? ” – Answered by i4 Web Services based in Central Florida and we hope you enjoyed. Yes there is a bunch more to cover but it hopefully was an incredibly good start to really dive into the branding concept. We will be coming out with more articles – so check out our Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter Pages to stay up to date with new blog articles. Thanks!

Hopefully for those who have taken time to read this blog article have new ideas and thoughts for building / improving your brand. If you need or want to chat with us about branding – call 407-416-1515 or send us an email. We are happy to help your business or charity grow its online presence.

How to develop a brand strategy for a local business?