To generate revenue and become a successful business, you need an amazing brand that epitomizes your values and leads to more awareness, recognition, and trust among your customers.
Creating your ultimate brand involves many things, but finding and sticking to your signature style is the first step.
Why is it important to know your brand’s style?
There should be a clear brand style embraced by all employees in an organization.
The importance of understanding your brand's style and knowing how to utilize it extends across every department of your company, whether it is marketing, sales, or customer service.
Having each department recognize and utilize your brand's style is important for many reasons.
Here are some of the big ones:
Avoid misunderstandings
By keeping your core values and key messages clear, you will avoid any uncomfortable customer interactions or miscommunications. Customers may feel confused or even betrayed if your marketing and customer service teams express conflicting messages.
Creating a signature brand that is reflected throughout your business is the key to avoiding misunderstandings. Taking this approach will earn you the trust of your customers, and you'll be more memorable.
Stay consistent
Once your signature brand style is established, you must stick with it. From TV ads to billboards in city centres and your website to social media, your branding should be consistent across all platforms.
Knowing and understanding your brand will enable you to maintain consistency throughout all aspects of your business. Furthermore, it helps to build long-lasting relationships with customers.
Become recognizable
Creating a distinctive branding style takes time and effort, but all recognizable brands have one thing in common—they stay true to their messages. By knowing their audience, they can communicate with them in a way that is relevant.
You can differentiate yourself from your competition by knowing your branding style and becoming a company that people remember and come back to time after time.
Create brand ambassadors
Having your employees understand your company's branding style, values, and key messages can make them ambassadors without even trying.
It is inevitable that every member of your staff will share information about your company with friends, family, or even strangers online from time to time. So, equip them with the right messages, and you could end up with some free word-of-mouth advertising.
How do you find your signature brand style?
What's your signature branding style? Now that you know why it's important, how can you find yours?
To help you determine what kind of style would best reflect your business, we suggest following a few steps.
First things first:
Define your brand values
What makes your company different from the rest?
Regardless of what you do, your industry is likely to have some competition.
So, what makes yours stand out from the rest?
In order for a business to succeed, its values, mission, goals, and benefits should all be at the heart of its branding. Establishing these values from the start will enable you to develop a brand that accurately reflects them.
Establish your target market
A brand that doesn't resonate with your target audience will fail to generate awareness and recognition.
Therefore, before you decide what your signature style will look like, it's important to conduct research and identify your ideal target market.
Your product or service probably underwent market research when you developed it-now it's time to look at it again.
It will be much easier to decide how to present your branding when you know to whom it is speaking to.
Find your brand voice
Style in branding extends beyond looks, of course. Finding your brand voice is equally important for ensuring you stay consistent and on message at all times.
Style in branding extends beyond looks, of course. Finding your brand voice is equally important for ensuring you stay consistent and on message at all times.
In everything from social media captions and blog posts to advertising campaigns and even sales reps, establishing a familiar and recognizable brand voice is essential for growth.
It could be as simple as a list of words you use or don't use, or it could be as elaborate as a set of editorial guidelines. In either case, finding your voice is essential to finding your signature style.
Create your visual assets
Having identified your values, your target audience, and your style, it's time to start creating visuals!
Branding style includes everything from a logo, colour scheme, fonts, imagery, taglines, and editorial voice. Every step of your customer's journey will feature it, beginning with advertisement and marketing to the storefront and employees to the carrier bag and receipt they take home with them.
When you start creating the visual assets, you can play around with different ideas that look and feel right for your company.
After choosing your signature branding elements, you should create brand guidelines that will govern how you will use your branding. By doing this, you will help to ensure everyone knows what your signature style is and how to use it effectively.
Having read this blog post to the end, you probably now realize how important it is to uncover your business' signature branding style.
Need some help defining your signature branding style?
Reach out to us!
Branding concepts and strategies are at the heart of our work at Osler & Co.