Building a successful, recognizable, and appreciated brand is the ultimate goal of any company. To create your successful brand, you need to know what your brand should look like and how it should make people feel, to resonate with your target audience.

Creating a brand that stands out is no small task. Facing big competitors with loyal customers and unlimited marketing budgets, you need to stand out by creating a very unique brand that will bring you huge growth and loyal fans.

In this article, we will go through a 15-step brand development process to create a successful and recognizable brand for your online business.

What is a Brand?

Simply put, your brand is defined by a customer’s overall perception of your business. A brand is not only a recognizable name and logo that sets you apart in a crowded marketplace, but also how people perceive you when they interact with your business.

People perceive your brand through a set of elements such as name, products, logos, colors, fonts, voices, and reputation that make your company what it is and influence how it is perceived. But it all starts with defining that consistency and the feeling you want it to evoke.

How to Create a Brand?

Branding is about creating awareness of your company through marketing strategies and campaigns to create a unique and lasting image in the marketplace. It involves identifying your business strategy, your target customers and their needs, your competitors, your brand positioning, and your message.

Once you know your basic brand identity, you can create a logo and tagline and develop a brand and marketing strategy at the same time. Then, let the world know about your brand through your website.

Brand building can be broken down into three main phases:

• Brand strategy
• Brand identity
• Brand Marketing

What is Brand Strategy?

Brand strategy is an essential part of creating a successful brand that will convey your purpose, your promise, and how you solve people’s problems. Your brand strategy will influence how you present your identity and align it with your purpose for maximum impact.

What is Brand Identity?

Brand identity is how you convey your brand to the public through visuals, messages, and experiences. It includes everything from your logo to your colors to your text to your website experiences. The elements of your brand identity must be applied consistently across all channels to make your company recognizable.

What is Brand Marketing?

Brand marketing is the way companies showcase and promote their products or services by associating values and voices with the right audience through strategic communication. Brand marketing primarily revolves around creating brand awareness, recognition, trust, and visibility.

The objective of brand marketing is to develop loyal customers by continuously and consistently communicating the brand’s identity and values.

The main objectives of brand marketing are:

•  Develop a brand image
•  Increase brand awareness
• Develop loyal customers
• Increase the number of customers who recommend your product or service
• Engage users with your brand

The process of marketing your brand can be done effectively through various digital marketing activities:

• User experience through your website
• SEO and content marketing
•  Social media marketing
• Email marketing
• Paid advertising (PPC)

Read more:

SEO for Beginners How to Optimize Your Blog Posts for SEO

Email Marketing Beginner’s Ultimate Guide

15 steps to building a successful brand for your online business

Let’s start with creating the foundation that will help you build your brand.

1. Build a Website

Your website is the most important marketing tool you have to grow your business and build your brand because it’s where your consumers will go to learn more about your business and take action when they are ready.

Building a website is essential because implementing all the elements needed to launch your brand, as well as the majority of your brand marketing activities, can be done from your website, from registering the domain name to managing the right content to gain traffic.

Just make sure you choose the best web host possible. With your site, you can easily leverage the power of social media to build brand awareness in your industry and establish an online presence.

Build your website with Wealthy Affiliate and get web hosting, access to keyword research tools, and a helpful community now.

2.   Choose Your Business Name

As a small business owner, your company name is probably one of the first major commitments you need to make. Depending on the type of business you want to create, you can choose a brand name that reflects your brand’s personality, actions, and reputation in the marketplace.

Choosing your brand name is crucial because it will impact your domain, your logo, your marketing, as well as the domain/URL of your website. For a brand name to be effective, it must be easy for consumers to recognize and remember.

If you plan to expand the product lines you offer in the future, consider keeping your company name broad rather than choosing a brand name based on your product category so you can pivot more easily.

3.   Define Your Brand’s Purpose

Every successful brand has a powerful purpose behind it. Your brand purpose is essentially to clearly express what your company stands for most and what value it brings to your target audience.

Your company’s statement of purpose provides a roadmap for achieving your goal and will guide the execution of your brand development strategies.

Everything from your logo to your tagline, voice, message, and personality should reflect your purpose. This is one of the most important steps in the brand-building process.

To define your brand purpose you need to answer a few questions Why does your brand exist?

• What makes your brand different?
•  What problem do you solve?
•  Why should people care?

4.   Create a Brand Logo

Your logo, an essential part of your brand identification, is an image that will be used on all your marketing materials. This logo will appear on everything related to your business, from your website to your social media profile to the little “favicons” in your current browser tab.

 It will become your identity, your business card, and the visual recognition of your brand promise. At this point, you may need help creating something unique, identifiable, and scalable to work at any size to reinforce your company’s visual identity.

When creating your logo, you need to think about color choices and typography. Colors not only define the look of your brand, but they also convey the feeling you want to communicate and help you make it consistent in everything you do.

 You’ll want to choose colors that differentiate you from your direct competitors to avoid confusing consumers. Color psychology is not an exact science, but it helps inform the choices you make, especially when it comes to the color of your logo. It is also important to consider the choice of font for better readability of your logo.

5. Write a Brand Tagline

Having a catchy, short, descriptive tagline is a great asset to making a strong impression that, like your logo, you should use consistently across all of your marketing materials – your social media bios, your website header, your custom business cards, and anywhere else you need few words to make a big impact. You can always change your tagline as you find new marketing angles.

6. Research Competing Brands in Your Industry

You need to study your main competitors or reference brands, not to mimic them exactly, but to find out what they do well and what they don’t do in order to differentiate yourself from the competition and convince customers to buy from you instead of them.

Examining your competitors is therefore an essential part of developing your own brand. Because by assessing your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, you will understand what your brand needs to focus on to give your business an edge and position your brand well against them.

There are many ways to do this. The simplest is to Google your product or service category and analyze the direct and indirect competitors that appear.

7. Be Unique

To attract more customers and investors, instead of imitating the big brands, you need to offer something that the market is not yet familiar with. This is not an easy task, but you need to do it by making your product or service authentic enough to create wonder, curiosity so that your brand identity leaves no one indifferent.

Your customers aren’t looking for a company that offers the same thing as everyone else, but an experience tailored to their needs, supported by genuine personal interaction. To create a unique brand for your business, nothing beats bringing out your personality in every aspect of your branding process while remaining consistent with your brand personality across all touchpoints.

8. Define Your Brand’s Ideal Customer

Once you’ve defined your brand’s purpose, it’s time to define the foundation of your brand building – the target audience you’re trying to reach to tailor your mission and message to their exact needs. The key to gaining a competitive advantage in branding your company lies in a true understanding of the buyer persona, or more precisely, your target audience.

Solidify your consumers’ image by determining their detailed behaviors and lifestyles to create a brand identity they can understand and relate to. This ensures that your brand message is crystal clear to the recipient. To better define your brand’s buyer persona, dive into factors such as age, gender, location, income, education level, motivations, goals, pain points, fears, and desires.

Determining the ideal audience for your services or products with these elements in mind will affect and benefit all areas of your brand-building process, especially your marketing efforts. It’s what makes the right person consume your content, click on your ads, subscribe to your email list, and so on.

9. Describe the Qualities and Advantages of Your Brand

The key to creating a great brand is quality. Focus on the qualities and benefits that make your brand unique. Assuming you know exactly who your target audience is, give them a reason to choose your brand over another.

For example, show that the quality of your product or service is worth the price. If you wow people with your exceptional offering, amidst a multitude of low-quality products, yours can attract them and they will remember it more easily.

Instead of just listing the features your product or service offers the customer, think about how you add value that improves the lives of your consumers. For example, demonstrate that your product or service offers more authenticity, better productivity, cost or time savings, etc. to your customer.

10. Create Your Brand’s Unique Voice

Your brand voice depends on your company’s mission, your audience, and your industry. It is how you communicate with your customers and how they respond to you. Maintaining a consistent voice is especially vital when publishing blog posts or social media messages and will help your brand image be recognized the same way across multiple channels.

You can opt for a professional, friendly, service-oriented, technical, promotional, conversational, informative, etc. brand voice. If you find and use the right brand voice that makes sense and resonates with your target customers, you have the best chance of connecting with your consumers.

11. Show Your Customers the Face Behind Your Products and Services

In this stage of brand development, beyond your logo and tagline, you need to present yourself as the founder of your brand and say who you are, why you offer your product or service and communicate in a simple and clear way, to establish a direct emotional connection with your consumers.

In general, people are more attracted to a brand when they can see who is behind it. Add a photo of yourself and your team if you have them on your website or social media profiles to create a more personal connection with your audience.

Your message should be closely associated and consistent with your brand. If your company has a brand story that customers need to know share it, as it can help the buyer be reassured about the legitimacy of your company. It sets the stage for every customer interaction with your brand.

12. Apply Your Brand Image to Your Entire Business

Building your brand isn’t just about creating a logo or slogan, or even launching your website. You need to apply your branding strategy to your entire business to give it a consistent brand image. It is essential to integrate your voice, message and personality into your website, which is the most important tool for marketing your brand.

But your brand must exist and remain consistent in everything your customers see, read and hear and in the places they interact with you. Make sure your brand looks the same across all digital platforms. Your social media network profile pages should be visually branded with your chosen image for engagement.

13. Use Social Media

Social media is one of the most powerful online branding tools you can use to consistently promote and market your brand. Social media, also allows you to interact with your potential and current customer base as well as connect with your peers in your industry.

14. Use Testimonials to Build Credibility

Testimonials are one of the most powerful marketing messages and brand boosters you can have in your arsenal.  If you’ve received testimonials from your customers who have made purchases, add them to your website, post them on your social media channels like Twitter and Facebook to maximize them. You can even add them to your email signature.

15. Build Brand Awareness

You can build brand awareness through marketing, engagement, and community building. With continuous effort, you will manage to build long-term relationships with your customers. This leads to a steady increase in leads and sales, word-of-mouth referrals, and promotion of your products or services. Instead of considering your customers as mere buyers, consider them as ambassadors or representatives of your brand.

Conclusion

I hope you found these steps to building a successful brand helpful. Building a brand does not happen overnight, or even in a few months. In fact, the process of building a brand never stops. Once you start applying these steps, you may find that creating a brand for your online business is a more complicated process. You must continue to shape and evolve your brand as you grow so that your brand loyalty increases enough to expand your reach.