Tuesday 8 February 2022

Effective Brand Building Strategy for Startups | Brandwand

Branding is one of the most critical and most overlooked challenges a startup faces. The already established brands on the other hand don't bother with it much unless they see their competitor doing it.

Establishing and building a brand isn’t easy especially if you are a start-up with limited resources but it is one key step that is a must if you want your startup to be memorable and well-positioned.

Let us take a look at the most important steps to be taken to create a lasting brand identity while you are building your brand:

1. Choose an easy to remember and memorable name:

Your brand’s name will have just 10 seconds or less to make an impression. This is why, your brand's name should be easy to memorise and pronounce, relevant and preferably rooted in the category your brand belongs to. A branding agency will make sure that the name is timeless, relevant and conveys your brand’s message clearly.

2. Emotion and thought-provoking brand messaging and identity:

The best way to connect with your target group is to trigger an emotional response that is favourable for your brand. This could be achieved by your brand’s identity, tagline, brand’s voice and even a brand mascot. Many times, Digital marketing agencies achieve this by aligning the brand's message with moment marketing, in the process, connecting with the most trending or tangible emotions and situations.

3. Develop a strong visual identity:

The Colour red is chosen by a lot of food companies as it is known to increase appetite. Similarly, the colour blue is used by big corporates in their logo to instil the feeling of position as well as stability in their consumer's minds. The colours of the logo have been used forever to create appropriate brand imagery and associations.

Like colours, Typography is also an important aspect of visual identity.  For example, the font serif comes across as conventional yet practical whereas Sans serif is considered younger and more youthful.

All these visual aspects are considered by a brand design agency while creating the brand identity or while building your brand.

4. Have a website that aligns with your brand identity:

Billions of people buy online. This makes your website your brand's virtual identity and acts as an online storefront to your customers.

A website can be a powerful medium to convey your brand messaging and to establish and reinforce your brand’s identity. This means that your website should use colours, fonts and imagery that matches your brand's colours and persona.

Even the website content and copy should complement the tone of your brand’s core messaging and positioning. For example, a casual and playful copy can work well for a branding agency’s website or a gaming website, while a technical and serious copy will be required for a hospital or pharmaceutical companies website.

5. Build a strong social media presence:

Social media presence is no longer optional, it is mandatory for brands to succeed.

Social media can provide a powerful platform to educate, inform, engage and promote. The most critical decision is to choose the right platform based on your target audience.

Just being present may not be enough though. Continuous engagement with your TG is important to ensure maximum benefit from being on such platforms. Be careful of the copy, images and content that you post. Content development has to align with the brand's persona, tone of language as well as ongoing objectives such as a campaign or promotion.

6. Calibrate brand promotions with the brand’s voice and TG:

It’s imperative to choose the right platform, right creative and right messaging when promoting your brand online. Most of it can be decided by studying your TG, its behaviour and the preference of the targeted demographic.

Instagram works well for premium brands whereas LinkedIn works well for B2B brands. Social media influencers have proven to be effective for promoting beauty brands while youtube is known to have given a tremendous boost to the gaming industry. Choose wisely and give enough budget to your campaigns to see favourable results.

These strategies go a long way in establishing a brand in the minds of its TG. Brandwand, a startup specialist agency has mastered the art of developing and implementing effective brand building strategies for startups. They have over a decade of experience in brand development, brand management, brand building and digital marketing and have developed, launched and nurtured many startups successfully.