By Adrien Maines and Bianca Vranceanu –
If you ask anyone with a recognizable business how they did it, chances are branding had a lot to do with becoming the business they are today. Your brand is your company’s personality, and with digital media at the forefront of all things, branding helps emphasize your company’s personality and allows consumers to differentiate your company from its competitors. The pandemic has certainly caused businesses to pivot even more into the digital space. There’s no better time than now to define your personality and unique branding proposition if you have not already. Here are some tips on how to build your brand.
Define Your Culture and Chart Your Path
The beating heart of every company is its employees. From your receptionist to your project manager to your accounting team – everyone touches clients somehow. One thing’s for sure, when diverse personalities of varied backgrounds come together, business soars! Therefore, it’s essential to capture your company’s personality, culture, and value proposition. Your branding should be versatile and grant employees the freedom to select designs that complement their identity and the business. While the design options varied, the integrity and consistency of the new look remained intact.
Recently, Promova worked with KMI International to build their new website. Before the redesign, Promova conducted a communications and branding audit and discovered that not all employees had up-to-date LinkedIn accounts, one of the key drivers for networking and driving new leads to KMI. To help, we created a LinkedIn Standard Guide to be used company-wide and designed six different LinkedIn headers that showcased the new KMI brand. This encouraged employees to update their accounts and choose the headers that spoke to them the most.
See some examples below:
This exercise helped employees get excited about their new brand, update their accounts, and tell the “Why KMI” story. The guide was also a helpful tool regarding headline, SEO, banner, summary, education, and how to share content. LinkedIn is the most popular social media platform for business, and the new headers help create a more identifiable brand.
Branding is much more than a look though. Here are several areas that branding addresses.
Recognition
Branding promotes business recognition. Strong branding makes your company stand out and grabs consumers’ attention more naturally. A business with a modern logo, consistent color palette, valuable content, and interesting visuals is more memorable to the public. This will encourage consumers to explore your company further and come back for more.
Trust
It’s important to build trust with your audience, but it takes work and time. Branding helps formulate trust because it creates familiarity and reliability. A business without branding is a huge red flag and leaves the consumer confused. For instance, we often see consumers choose a company based on their brand, content, media endorsements, and dedication to their business and industry. It is critical to have an updated website with distinct branding. We all have experienced visiting websites that look outdated; this screams sketchy and makes the consumer wonder if the business even exists! Branding makes your business look professional and feel credible. Branding is the visual investment that shows consumers your commitment and dedication to the company.
Branding is valuable for your employees as well. It helps make everyone feel like they are part of a team. Moreover, Promova designs a variety of branding, which gives employees a choice and encourages them to be included at every step of a brand audit or design.
The start of 2022 allows for new beginnings! Distinct and unique branding ensures your business will stand out and generate more interest and consumers. Are you ready to grow?