Branding is far more than just the logo and colour scheme you use for your business. It extends to the vision and goals for your business, your story and the way you interact with customers, employees and external stakeholders. Its who you are.
Brand management takes this information and deliveries a concise and consistent message to your customers, to engage them and create loyalty through your brand message. This is why its so important to get your branding right as you want your customers to buy into your brand.
Brand guidelines
As I’ve mentioned consistency is key with your brand, that is where brand guidelines come into play. These guidelines pull together all the information about your brand and how the brand should be portrayed from visuals, messaging, styles and the vision. These guidelines can be distributed out to employees to understand how to use materials and how to communicate with customers and to external providers such as marketing or web development companies.
Brand guidelines create a useful document that help you to keep consistency, spread the message of your brand internally and educate people on who you are. It helps to create brand ambassadors not just members of staff.
How to create brand guidelines
Some people look at brand management and think it sounds expensive! Yes, if you got to an external agency and they provide you the support to understand your brand, create assets and guidelines this will come at a cost. But it doesn’t need to cost you anything, you can do this internally and set the guidelines yourself. Or you can do the majority of the work yourself and then have a marketing agency check it over and pull this together for you, this reducing the cost.
I’ve put together a list of useful questions to help you think about your brand and develop the concept of what your brand is. Click here to read more on this.
Once your brand is established you want to be managing this and monitoring what is happening around your brand. If you link this to the customer journey the first aspect is brand awareness – this is when the customer becomes aware of who you are. When promoting your products / services people need to see the brand behind these so they can understand you and build trust. This is when people gain awareness.
Brand awareness
Brand awareness can be tricky as its generally not something that can be measured. It also needs to be done consistently and is not something you can do as a one-off campaign. This may seem a difficult concept for some stakeholders to get their heads round as if you can’t measure it how do you know its worth investing your time and money. But remember people buy from those they trust and building trust creates loyalty.
Once you have generated awareness of the brand people will then gain a perception of who you are, experience your brand and form an opinion of your business. This all has a direct impact on your sales and is called brand equity.
Monitoring your brand
Brand equity can be monitored more than awareness and looks at the customer journeys, what people are buying, shopping patterns, social listening and reviews. All of this information looks at what customers are saying, how they are interacting with you and what they convert on.
Once a person has made that first purchase and becomes a customer you want to look at how well they recognise your brand and recall who you are. We all know some of the famous taglines that people instantly recognise such as ‘Just Do It’ Nike, ‘Every Little Helps’ Tesco’s and ‘Because you’re worth it’ L’Oréal. Think about how someone would recognise your brand, how you stand out visually, through content and through experience.
Now you have development awareness of your brand and people are starting to recognise your brand you need to manage the reputation. This is what people think, reviews, feedback and looking at how you can learn and improve from this.
One quick a simple way to look at your brand reputation is to Google your brand. See what comes back, what people are saying and assess whether you would trust this brand. The results can be interesting and enables you to look at your business from the outside.
Brand management summary
Brand management is key to understanding what your business is about and keeping your goals on track. It helps audiences understand who you are and what you provide. Delivered on a consistent basis people will start to recognise your brand and associate your brand message with your company not just an individual product. All of this helps to grow sales and ultimately profit.
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