Developing Your Brand
Developing and maintaining your company brand is necessary from the start of the business. Your brand is how the world knows you. It is their most inward idea of who you are and what your product or service means to them. Your brand helps potential customers remember who you are. While this concept sounds simple, it takes work to develop and remain in the mind of the client.
How to Find Your Brand
Before presenting company branding to the public view, you need to know what your brand is. Regardless of what your product or service is, your brand is what you stand for. Go through the following steps, taking as much time as necessary, and you will be able to identify your brand.
Identify a core value that you have. Ask yourself what your company's most significant value is: honesty, compassion, quality, etc.
Make a list of your passions. Look as far back as you can in time because childhood passions are often fundamental to your nature. Children naturally know what makes them the happiest.
Now list your talents. These can be real skills like being a great photographer or a natural at math. They can also be things like having the ability to sense people’s needs, discern a situation, etc.
Now, look at your last two lists and pick three to five items that come closest to your core value.
Now comes something that may need a bit of thought. Take these five traits and weave them together with your core value into a statement that defines your specialty. Let’s look at an example. We’ll use a service for this one, saying you are a freelance writer. Say the core value you chose was education. From your talent and passion lists, you chose psychology, marketing, and writing. Weaving it all, you come up with “Writing to educate others in the area of neuromarketing.” That is your specialty. You may write about many things, but that is what you do best.
Now, expand that specialty into a paragraph, weaving in several skills, passions and core values. It doesn’t have to be long, and shorter is preferable. Depending on your list, you may end up with something like: I specialize in using my writing to help others combine psychology and marketing to reach their goals. I teach them how they can increase their efforts in an ethical way that speaks to the core of why and how people buy.
Finally, think of a short, snappy tagline that summarizes this paragraph. For example: Find success where psychology meets marketing. That is the tagline you will include everything you do—website, signature, marketing materials.
Developing Your Brand
Now you need to make sure the world learns to associate that tagline with who you are and what you do. Your company branding goal is to connect the two so that if someone hears your name, they think of your tagline and vice versa. Here are some of the top ways we have found to do this:
Give Speeches –
Many of us hate to speak in front of an audience. Those who can surpass that fear and become good at speaking earn large amounts. Having someone lead a discussion or give a talk is one of the best methods of teaching. It also helps people to place you and your tagline together.
Build an Online Presence –
This does not mean having a website solely. You need to join in social media, participate in forums related to your specialty and even make podcasts and host webinars. The more often your name is heard, and the more places, the greater your brand is recognized.
Become a Thought Leader –
Don’t be afraid to step outside the box and do things that others have not yet brought to the forefront. Become known as someone who is willing to see things from a different perspective, and someone who wants to share what they know.
Keep Learning –
Standing out involves staying ahead of the pack in regards to the amount of knowledge you have. Keep learning, and you will always have new insights to share, further cementing expertise in your area.
Don’t let another day go without going through the company branding process. The best way to cement it in the world is to know yourself, be true to yourself, and share what you have learned with others.
