What to Look For in Branding Your Business
When someone says “branding”, our ears perk up. We find the concept of identifying, creating, and building your brand more exciting than almost anything! The reason we love it so much is because of how impactful it can be on a business. A mediocre, inconsistent, or undefined brand can have poor performance and reach, while a clearly defined, consistent, and well-targeted brand can help a business rapidly soar.
So how do you know if your branding is effective and appeals to your target audience? Or if people like your brand aesthetic?
We have learned over years and years in the industry just what it takes to find and identify your target audience and then create a brand that speaks to them directly. We understand all of the elements, down to the little details, of what a solid brand needs and what exact message it conveys. We include this breakdown for all of our clients during the brand strategy phase!
We look at the following elements of your business when coming up with your brand strategy:
What are your ideal clients? (Age, gender, personality, hobbies, and interests)
Words that appeal to your ideal clients because of their values
Ideal marketing channels for your brand’s growth
You audience’s pain points and how you solve them
Trends within your competition
Color theories within your niche
Font psychology for your ideal messaging
Taking it a step further, we want to help you understand how to know if your branding is appealing to your audience after it's fully designed and implemented.
3 Ways to Identify Success in Your Branding Efforts
1. Your Audience Engages with Your Content
It may sound obvious, but engagement means you’re doing something right. There are multiple types of engagement that support your branding, from likes, comments, shares, and saves to DM’s that lead to leads, responses to your newsletters, or sales in your shop. Engagement tells you that your audience is buying what you’re selling, so keep it up if it’s working!
Engagement can go through spurts, however, and keeping your engagement numbers high can take a lot of work.
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that all of your content has to have high engagement to demonstrate that your branding is effective. Some types of content may resonate deeper with your audience, but if your average engagement is positive and note-worthy, you’re likely on the right track with branding.
This is your reminder to have consistently branded content to help your audience be as familiar with you as possible. From color tones to logo placement, tone of voice in your captions to CTA’s, keep your branding consistent so that your audience never doubts who’s account they are engaging with.
2. Your Competition Adjusts Their Branding to Align with Yours
You’re likely familiar with your competition as they played a part in building your own brand. A healthy competition analysis is a good thing to do when you are building your business to ensure you understand what other businesses in your same niche are doing.
When it comes to knowing if your branding is effective at reaching your target audience, you can also assess if your competitors are adjusting their branding to model yours.
This may not look like exact copying of colors, fonts, and styles, but it could look like similar marketing efforts or promos, verbiage in captions or emails, and similar content types (reels, carousel posts, videos, etc.) because they are recognizing what you are doing that is drawing in engagement.
Your content strategy can be uniquely your own and include all of your branding elements to be effective. But your competition may be looking on and watching as they see themselves missing out on customers who are buying from you and not them.
3. Polls & Feedback Support Your Messaging
One of our favorite ways to assess if our branding is effective is to directly ask our audience. “How did you hear about us?” “What part of our message is your favorite?” “What do you think of our new service?” Feedback can help us identify if our messaging is successful and our audience is resonating with it.
We find that asking polls and questions on social media and in our marketing newsletters can give us the best results. Our audience is often open to answering quick, harmless questions that don’t take too much of their time. For longer, more in-depth surveys (which we occasionally send out over email), certain customers are happy to give us their time to provide more feedback.
If the feedback you are receiving tells you that your customers or target audience is not understanding your messaging or brand, it may be time to look at what they are confused by or not resonating with. A deeper dive into your analytics may be helpful here.
Your brand is a huge component to the success of your business, so making sure your audience connects specifically with your look, feel, and messaging is important.
By addressing these three elements, you can better understand if your audience is eating up your branding with hunger and enthusiasm for more or if your branding leaves something to be desired.
As branding experts, we’d love to help you understand if your branding is on point already. Reach out to us for a complimentary chat!
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