Five top tips for bringing your brand to life
Many organisations think that their brand is the preserve of their marketing team. They may consider brand identity to be synonymous with your logo, corporate identity and the visuals created to go alongside that. But those companies couldn’t be more wrong - brand is about an emotional connection, and it identifies the very crucial elements of who you are as a company and why people choose to engage with you.
Here’s our top tips for making sure that your organisation has a brand that is really brought to life, and exemplified at every level of your business.
Audit and consider who you are as an organisation
You have to fully understand your company before you can develop a clear brand. Why do you exist as an organisation? What are your beliefs as a company? What are you trying to achieve? Why was your company set up?
Understanding this is key to being able to get this across in all other aspects of your marketing.
You should also consider your selling points - what makes you unique? What are your competitors doing? What does your customer look like? What do you want to achieve moving forward?
Once you’ve looked at this, you will have a much clearer idea of exactly who you are as a company. Many organisations, including ones we have worked with, will choose to work with an external agency who can facilitate workshops to help unpick all of this.
Consult with colleagues at every level of your company
If you’re looking at branding as the company owner, or a senior manager within your organisation, do not assume that employees across the company will see it in the same way as you. Your brand will not be authentic if it doesn’t articulate things in a truthful way. Your employees are at the core of everything you do - their performance impacts on how people see your brand, and their perceptions of the place that they work are key to showing who you are as a company.
You cannot just tell people - including your own employees - what your brand is. You need to talk through their feelings about the company. How do they view it? Why do they choose to continue to work with you? What words would they use to describe it? Are they happy? Why are they happy? What would they change about the way you work?
This is important for two reasons. Your brand will never ring true if it isn’t lived and exemplified by those who work with you - and you cannot find out what your brand is without including your employees in the discussion. And secondly, it will highlight any issues that might be preventing you from living by the brand values you want to demonstrate and allow you to adapt and change for the better.
Undertake research with your audiences
For similar reasons, you need to understand your audiences fully when you are thinking about your brand. Who are your customers? It often helps at this stage to create a customer profile - persona marketing is incredibly useful in this. Creating a persona that summarises who your three or four core groups of customers are offers a useful touchstone when you are making business decisions moving forward.
For example, here at Roscoe Communications, two core groups we would typically target would be:
CEOs and Marketing Directors at Cornish tourism businesses
Agency owners and directors in Cornwall who might want to outsource work to a freelancer
In this instance, we would create two portraits of individuals who exemplify these people - creating names and demographics, and exploring their media consumption, internet preferences, brand affiliations and how they communicate. We would then use these throughout our decision making processes - how are we going to reach these people, and how do they prefer to be communicated with?
What information do you have about your customers? And can you reach out to them for further information, asking them about their perceptions and experiences of your company? What do they know about you? How do they feel about you? Why did they choose to give you their business?
Articulate this clearly
You can then use your findings to create your brand identity and guidelines. These should include the following areas:
Your audience overview
Your mission statement
Your brand values
Your tone of voice
You should go into detail in this document as it will be the bible by which your organisation lives - it will clearly show and tell who you are as an organisation. It should make sense to everyone and be a point of reference for all. It should help your leadership team make strategic decisions, and it should help new employees understand what kind of place they are working at.
You can create a visual identity and corporate style guide to go alongside this. It will have more information about the design treatment you have applied to visually show who you are, and why you have chosen this route. It will include fonts, logos, photography, design elements and straplines and will help any member of your design and marketing teams to speak to your audiences in the right way.
See this as part of your overall business strategy
It is essential that you use your brand, and the documents and research that go with it, in the most effective way once you have put all of this work into. This means - do not put it to one side to be used only by your marketing team! Do not see it as an exercise that is only relevant to your marketing campaigns.
The process you have gone through to clearly set out your brand gives you incredible insights - into employee engagement, audience and customer overview, into your background and your goals for the future.
Include it in your team appraisals, use it to come up with ways to engage with your customers and employees and use it as a point of reference when making every decision within your business - is it on brand and does it represent your values?
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This whistlestop tour of branding and identity gives you some key pointers for making sure that your organisation knows who it is and communicates that effectively. A company that can make an emotional connection to its audiences, and who emulates values that resonate with their own, is one that will succeed and grow.
If you’d like to continue this conversation, and talk to Roscoe Communications about how we can help with your brand identity and how you can clearly show who you are as an organisation, we’d love to hear from you.