How to brand and promote your business? Every business needs a personalized marketing plan that also includes branding activities. Find out how to make yourself known by promoting your brand
So, how do you brand and promote your business?
The role of the brand in marketing strategies is well known even by those who do not work in the sector: the best-known brands are on everyone’s lips and above all in the mind and their celebrity is accompanied by a set of very specific values, sensations, and characteristics.
If you try to think about your favorite brand, whatever its product category, you can immediately realize that what it calls to your mind is not just a logo or a color, but an articulated set of emotions, atmospheres, peculiarities, and an identifiable philosophy.
How do companies create this strong association between a brand and a personality, which is the basis of any communication campaign they implement? They use branding marketing strategies, that is the set of tactics that allow a simple brand to become a real personal brand.
What does branding mean?
Personal branding strategies are real paths for building the character of a brand, with processes that involve both its conception, its structuring, and its promotion and dissemination to the desired target audience.
Branding means making a brand unique, unrepeatable, and easily recognizable by its potential customers, as well as effortlessly imprinted in the minds of loyal customers.
Creating a well-known brand is a complex but compelling experiment, which has as the ultimate goal to offer users a multiplicity of reasons for choosing the products or services offered by a specific company, a professional, or any type of business.
In fact, branding marketing is not only applicable to large multinationals but can and must also be taken into serious consideration by small businesses, local shops, freelancers, and anyone who wants to build the identity of their business in a studied and smart way.
In addition to connoting a brand with absolutely personal traits, it also serves to clearly distinguish it from the competition and convince customers to lean towards a particular brand with conviction and a wide range of reasons.
By studying your personal branding in detail, you can perfectly match your brand identity, i.e. the set of colors, tone of voice, fonts, graphics, or images that make up your identity, with the brand image, or the way in which the audience perceives your brand and generates content that can promote it through word of mouth and social media.
How to do branding?
Building a brand and managing personal branding is a complex topic, but let’s try to understand the main points to consider when you decide to dedicate yourself to this essential aspect of your business.
Find your Unique Selling Proposition
The first step to create a clear and well-positioned brand is to identify your UPS, i.e. the set of all those elements that uniquely identify your business and that are able to create a clear diversification between you and your competitors.
How to do it? Study in-depth both the vision, mission, and purposes of your business and the strategies of the competition.
You will be able to identify the peculiarities and values you want to convey as well as find the areas left behind, so to speak, by competitors, which you can use to integrate characteristics and market demands in your brand that no one else covers.
Study your target audience and decide how to brand and promote your business
The ultimate goal of a personal branding technique is basically to give life to a brand that, thanks to its distinctive features, attracts a very specific audience, identified as sufficiently large and profitable.
It is clear at this point how the targeted study of the audience you wish to intercept comes even before your personal branding strategy.
By defining your potential buyer personas in detail, you will be able to grasp the exact characters with which to enrich your brand.
Only in this way can you make your brand absolutely irresistible for the slice of the target audience that you would like to rely on your services or products, whatever your offer.
Be consistent
Most likely, in your communication strategy, there will be many channels to speak with your potential customers, as well as with the already conquered customers that you intend to retain.
In fact, you could have both a website, a Facebook profile, an Instagram account, or maybe even a Youtube channel or a profile on TikTok.
It goes without saying that maintaining consistency between the messages that come out on the various communication tools is the golden rule for achieving a unique, well-decipherable, and strong brand awareness.
This harmony must concern both the purely visual part of your communication, such as the layouts, fonts, logos, or icon sets you will use and the textual part of your story.
Do you want to focus on a serious and professional brand? Adopt that tone in all your communications, from the newsletter to the Twitter post.
Do you want to be perceived as a nice, casual, and fun brand? Do everything you can to ensure that each of your messages conveys exactly this character.
Find unique values and inspire
A winning idea to stand out in a world submerged by incessant flows of information is to aim at the heart of your audience, involving them and proposing values that can excite, move, inspire or motivate.
There is nothing better to create a strong brand than to be a promoter of important battles, an icon of a generation, a symbol of a particular group of people who in some way can recognize themselves in your brand and choose it.
Not only because it is useful or trendy. but also and above all because it makes them feel they belong to a specific community.
Be transparent
A valid marketing strategy nowadays can only be based on transparency and empathy and emotional marketing.
When you choose how to set up your personal branding plan, don’t be afraid to communicate your personal story or the path that led you to your audience.
The “About” section of your website or the bio of your social profiles should not be a list of trivialities or discounted data without personality.
lt should be a container of emotions, which reveal the aspects in which your customers can reflect or from which they can be intrigued, or surprised.
In short, to create a community of enthusiastic supporters of your brand. Authenticity and persuasive storytellings are two key indispensable concepts.
How to Brand and Promote your Business – Final Thoughts
There are many ways how you can brand and promote your business.
The important thing is to stay true to yourself, and always have your potential customers in mind.
If you are pretending to be someone you are not, or if your sole intent is to make money – in the long run – you will lose.
People are much more intuitive than we think.
Always offer more value to your audience than your competition, build a personal relationship with people, and create unique and compelling content.
Success is around the corner!
by: Paolo Galbiati
