3 Important Reminders About Your Brand Identity

Let’s do a quick exercise.  Think about your favorite business.

Picture the name.  Think about the logo.  Remember the last time you tried a product or service.  Maybe you visited the website recently or popped into a store location. Recall the customer service, the company culture, the feeling you had with each interaction.     

What comes to mind?  A happy thought?  A positive memory? Sense of comfort or familiarity?  

This is the effect of a strong brand identity. It creates a consistent emotion with any variety of interactions.  A strong brand identity will provide the same feelings for your customers whether they are on your website, talking to you on the phone, or stopping by your office.  When you clarify and commit to your core values across all channels, your customers will always know what to expect from you.  

While your brand identity needs careful time and attention to clearly define, here are three important tips as you evaluate your efforts.

1) Don’t be shy

Are you fun and frivolous?  Are you serious and deliberate?  Traditional and calm? Luxurious and austere?  Whatever combination it may be, is that what your website, your social media channels, your emails, your blog, and your company culture convey consistently?

When in doubt, your audience, or ideal customers, will also help you stay true to your brand identity.  Their preferences, lifestyles, personalities, and behaviors will give you insight into your common traits and what parts of your brand identity draws them in.  Use this information to further define your business.

2) You are not just selling products

You are also selling the experience of buying from you.  From the very first time that a customer learns about your brand, you are selling them a mix of feelings and emotions right along with your products.  

The buyer’s journey moves from awareness, to consideration, to a decision.  During each of these phases, you must attract, convert, close, and delight over and over again.  

Your brand needs to reflect how you value your clients through each of these stages by managing their experience as the move through this funnel by way of blogging, emails, landing pages, and nice surprises.  The end product sale is just the icing on the cake if your customer has had a wonderful experience on the way to the purchase.

Need a few more tips to help improve your customer’s experience?  Click here.  

3) Your brand identity is like a person

Each one of us has a unique personality with our own style and flair. We communicate in our own ways, we have our own ideas of fashion, and we have our favorite things to do and places to go.  It makes us who we are and the same goes with the characteristics of a brand.

Logos, fonts, social media channels, graphics, colors and copywriting all provide the foundation and core message of a brand identity.  If they aren’t consistent, customers begin to wonder who you really are and loyalty could potentially waiver.

This is the time to invest in the professionals.  Hire a graphic designer or marketing firm to give your brand identity an experienced makeover.  They will have the expertise to pull it all together.

Conclusion

Apifonica sums it up nicely, “the best companies are the ones which can strike the right emotional chord with its customers, as customers are more likely to stick with a brand whose vision and beliefs resonate with their own.”

How do your customers feel about your brand? How do YOU feel about your brand?  What emotions do you evoke? What’s your style? How accurately is your brand identity defined online?  What would you change today if you had the resources? Let us know by dropping a line in the comment section.