A brand could be a business, but not every business is a brand. That’s the philosophy of good branding: it’s intentional and strategic. You have to define what your brand is, the values it holds, and the experience it offers.

Branding is more than just your product. But how exactly do you define it? Let’s figure it out in this article.

What is a Brand?

A brand is any business that creates all of its visual elements, styles, name, voice and tone, experiences, and content. These brand elements come together to shape public perception and create a brand identity.

As Meta defined it: “People have personalities. Businesses have brands.” Your brand is the public image representation of your brand and its products.

Essential Goals for Building a Brand

The way customers perceive you creates your brand image. It influences customer behavior, customer loyalty, and purchasing habits. This eventually impacts growth factors like customer lifetime value and retention rate.

For every business, building a brand often means different goals. Here are some of the common reasons why you may want to build a strong brand:

Set and meet expectations.

A brand is essentially a set of perceptions, expectations, and emotions that your audience associates with your company. Developing a strong brand is also about setting expectations for your customer.

As you set and meet those expectations, your brand establishes trust with the customer. This creates a strong sense of loyalty and customer retention.

Create consistent experiences.

Customers expect predictability and consistency with every move. Over time, this builds your brand identity — showing how customers perceive you. Consistent branding also reinforces your brand experience and promises.

Have a competitive edge.

At its core, branding is what sets you apart from your competitors. Competitive edge isn’t just about the product, but what the product stands for. It is about the user and the story behind it.

If a business can establish itself as a brand, it can be the sole decision point for customers to purchase from it. Customer decisions are mostly about the brand than the product.

Build an audience.

Good branding can even help you build a supportive community. Most loyal audiences come together to support a startup because:

They support the brand’s vision, mission, or values.
The community is built with like-minded people.
They feel inspired, valued, or entertained by the brand.

Whether your brand is built on a mission (purpose-driven brands), an idea, or a vision (visionary brands), a good brand maintains itself on its foundation. The goal is to build a community, even when they aren’t your active customers.

Grow by word-of-mouth

Word-of-mouth referrals are still the best way for brands to grow. Globally, 88% of people trust brand recommendations from people more than any other channel. When you strengthen your brand value, customers tend to speak about your brand more!

How to Start a Brand: A Step-by-Step Guide

A brand may be intangible, but it holds immense value as a business asset. Here’s a build a successful brand that aligns with your goals in five phases (or steps):

Step 1: Define your brand’s vision

Every brand has a vision unique to its values, goals, and audience. The first step is to: define what you want your brand to be like. Start with this:

Say your vision out loud. What is your ‘why’ behind building your brand? Why does your audience need your product, solution, or offer? These questions set the tone for your brand’s mission and vision.

You can use your mission and vision to start designing the brand’s core components. Whether tangible or indirect, these brand elements will help you communicate the ideas to your target audience.

Decide your brand goals. At this point, you can decide what your initial goals and objectives will be. Answer these: Do you want to start building in public? Do you want to focus on getting sign-ups and feedback first? Whatever it is, decide.

Step 2: Do brand research

You need to ensure that your brand goals align with your ideal customer’s expectations too. That’s when market research begins. Start in two phases:

Competitor research. At this stage, you compare different businesses in your industry. Competitive analysis allows you to understand what other brands with similar products or audiences are doing, what’s working, and what’s not.

For instance, you can analyze:

What kind of logo do other brands use? Is there any color palette that’s common?
Do other brands have a slogan?
What tone of voice do other brands use when interacting with customers, writing online, or explaining their product?

Once you’ve done competitive analysis, you can find your biggest opportunities for differentiation. Successful branding is when you meet industry standard customer expectations and break set expectations with better customer experiences.

Audience research. Knowing who your audience is, what they like and value is critical to decide how you want to connect with them in ways competitors aren’t. Basically: What are competitors doing, and what are they missing?
Start by thinking of your target audience and answering:

Who is your target audience, and what do they want?
How does your product change their life?

This will allow you to understand what your customers care about, and what you need your branding to be like. Perhaps they care about your brand’s values more or their connection with your brand.

There are many other values that can build your brand strategy, such as:

Price
Convenience
Social status
Quality
Community

Connect with your audience to understand what motivates and interests them. Find out their pain points, biggest needs, and values. These could resonate with your brand.

Step 3: Create brand assets

At this stage, you have a mission, vision, and a strong brand identity in mind. You can now create the actual elements of your brand. There are so many brand elements that you could create, but it’s best to start with the essentials.

Create visual brand assets. A brand’s visual identity is the first thing anyone notices and remembers. These include visual elements such as:

A brand logo
Brand colors
Typefaces
UX/UI standards for digital products
Product and product packaging for physical products

In all these visual elements, consistency is key. Stay consistent with the brand colors you choose because they will help customers remember your brand. You can also use color theory here — darker colors for a professional, sophisticated brand and brighter colors for playful, edgy ones.

Next, create linguistic brand elements. These include all the written brand elements, such as your brand name, a slogan, mission and vision, and brand voice. They help your brand stand out and establish recognition.

Other than your brand name, a slogan further sets the tone for your brand’s values, mission, and vision. It shapes why customers should choose you.

Step 4: Launch your brand

When you launch your brand, focus on one thing: consistency.

Apply your branding comprehensively and consistently. Identify touchpoints where someone could interact with your brand. It could be social media, a billboard, on-shelf at a store, on a website — the options are endless.

Make sure that the customer experience remains consistent across all the touchpoints and marketing channels. It should reflect exactly what your branding is about. Here are some points to take care of:

Make sure that the brand logo is consistently used in all instances.
Use the correct color shades and fonts.
Keep your brand voice intact across all channels.

A brand guide can be helpful for this. Document all your brand guidelines in this guide so that your team can refer to it anytime. This way, everything stays on-brand.

Then, develop marketing content. Content is the core touchpoint for all businesses. The more touchpoints you create, the more people will find your brand, and therefore your potential audience gets bigger over time.

Branded, marketing content can be in multiple forms, including:

Social media content
Blog on your website
Webinars on virtual events
In-person events for your target audience
Newsletter
Customer stories
Reposting user-generated content (UGC)

When you’re developing content, you want to ensure two important things:

Create high-quality, customer-facing content. Make sure your content serves the customer in some way: it could be inspiring, entertaining, motivational, or educating.
Optimize your content for search engines with search engine optimization (SEO) and keywords. This helps your content reach the right audience.

Step 5: Review and adjust

Branding isn’t a one-time process. A relevant brand evolves as the business grows, its product line expands, and the customer base changes. Therefore, it’s branding should evolve too.
Here’s how to keep your brand relevant:

Monitor your brand activities. You need to ensure consistency with every aspect of your branding. In short, you want to roll out content with the same quality since the launch. Before any launch, ask:

Does the content align with our brand style guidelines?
Does the experience and element align with your brand personality and style?
Does the content address your audience’s pain points through your brand’s core values?

Look after your audience’s responses. The work isn’t done at creating on-brand content itself. You also need to monitor how your audience responds to it.

If people aren’t resonating with your content, why so?
What does your audience seem to like about your brand?
Has your target audience shifted with your product growth? Have their pain points and needs changed over time?

Review the changes, understand them, and adjust your branding strategy based on what’s not working.

Build your Brand’s App with Natively

Mobile apps are an essential for brands. Every time your customer unlock their device, they see your app on their screen. It keeps your brand on the top of their mind. In addition, on-brand apps keep customers engaged.

Natively’s no-code AI app builder lets you build your brand’s mobile app and launch it at a fraction of the traditional development cost. You don’t even need to code with it. Just prompt the AI about what you want to build and…it exists.

Launching an app has never been easier before. Now, it is — extend your brand with Natively.