In today's digital age, it's more important than ever to have established a reputable and professional brand. Effectively building your brand can lead to more referrals, more customers, and ultimately, more revenue. It's important to remember that building a brand doesn't happen overnight. It can take months and even years to establish a strong brand presence to the point where it becomes solidified within your particular region or industry.
Guaranteed Removals, an online content removal service with years of experience in the industry, knows the difference a strong brand can make for a business. Below, they offer five tips to help you build your professional brand.
1. Know Your Competition
Before you set off to create your unique brand, look at what others in your industry are doing. How are they marketing themselves? What products and services do they offer? What makes them unique? By carefully studying your competitors, you're also able to identify their brand's strengths and weaknesses. If you can clearly see where a competitor has gone wrong, it's much easier to avoid the same pitfalls when building your own brand.
2. Know What Makes Your Brand Different
How is your brand different from what's already out there? Setting yourself apart from the competition and developing a unique brand is essential to any brand-building campaign. Be clear about what products and services your business offers and know how and why they're different from your competitors. If the quality of your product or service isn't necessarily higher than that of the competition, then position customer service or prices as your unique selling point.
3. Establish an Online Presence
No business can survive in today's digital age without an online presence. Content Marketing should be at the forefront of your strategy. Your business should have a functional, optimized, and informative website. On top of that, social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube will create a new forum for discussion and interaction with your customers where you can answer questions, address complaints, and make announcements.
Going the extra mile and creating a company blog is also a great way to build an online reputation. With a blog, your business can share information on the latest trends in your industry, provide facts and figures related to your services, and generally create valuable content that educates, informs, and engages . Not only that, but a blog can be useful in directing traffic back to your website and increasing your conversion rates.
4. Be Consistent with Image, Voice, and Tone
Once you've established how you want to communicate and differentiate your brand in terms of logo design, slogans, mission statements, and customer interaction, keep it congruent over all business channels and mediums. The way your company is presented in all sales and marketing material, press coverage, employee dress code / uniforms, and office layout should be consistent with your mission and values.
Tone is important to keep in mind as well. How do you want to interact and communicate with your customers? Depending on your industry, you may want to take a lighter approach to customer service and marketing or you may want to keep things serious. A cosmetics store will have a drastically different tone from a law firm, for example. The key is to maintain the same tone throughout all areas of your business regardless of whether you're creating a TV commercial, social media ads, or answering a customer's email.
5. Get Your Brand Out There
A well-established brand isn't going to do any good if nobody ever hears about it. Once you've determined your ideal brand image and demographic, start creating marketing material that promotes it. Generate traffic to your website and gain some brand recognition by airing radio and television ads, creating brochures and infographics, and getting involved in your community. Outside of traditional marketing techniques, community involvement is a tried and true method of generating business and getting some brand recognition. Who knows, you may even draw the attention of a local news agency.
