Branding is all about communicating your brand – building a strong brand presence that creates desire and attracts customers. Successful branding = Business growth. Consistency and brand experience are two of four key qualities consumers value and that keeps them coming back for more. How effective is your brand communication? Are you attracting the right customers, and are they loyal?
Factors that impact your brand communication are your colleagues, available resources and manpower, the number of channels and platforms that require your brand presence, your competitors, and your audience to mention a few. As always, there are some dos and don’ts that affect your success rate.
Here’s a short list on how to successfully communicate your brand
1. Establish brand identity guidelines
A key goal for any brand should be to achieve consistency. Consumers expect your brand to be consistent and it is connected to the growth potentials of your company. This is not an impossible task, but it does require effort and dedication in addition to a real plan.
For brand consistency to happen, you need brand rules. Proper brand identity guidelines that concern everyone who is communicating your brand. These brand guidelines need to set the standard for all employees and external stakeholders on how to use and apply your brand across any and all channels.
Also read: Create branding guidelines with a brand management platform
2. Establish internal brand guidelines and align your branding processes
Employees are the central participants in your brand communication. It’s impossible to communicate a brand if you don’t have your employees on your side. Think of it as a football team playing a game. If the team isn’t aware of the purpose and goal of the game, and no one knows what position they play or how to do it, you will have a team scattered all over the football field, running in different directions. It’s safe to say that team won’t win the game.
The same applies to branding. Everyone in the company needs to know why branding is important and what role they play on the team. Therefore, make sure your brand guidelines include internal brand strategies and align your external and internal branding processes.
Also read: This is internal employee branding and how you get started
3. Establish proper brand asset management
Having brand identity guidelines in place is unfortunately not enough to achieve brand consistency. In fact, 95% of organizations have branding guidelines, but only 1/4th have formal guidelines that are consistently enforced. One step in the right direction is to establish brand asset management.
Brand asset management is the system that connects the dots between your brand guidelines and your brand assets. This is the system that enables seamless and intuitive user workflows, making it effective and easy to apply your brand regardless of who’s in need, or which channel or platform is utilized. By having this in place, growing and developing your brand becomes easier, and everyone who needs to use your brand can do so effortlessly and quickly from one single location.
Also read: What is brand asset management?
4. Create a brand communication strategy
To win the football game, or in this case, win against the competitors by achieving brand consistency and building a strong brand identity, your employees need to be included and informed about the strategy.
It’s not enough for them to know that they are a part of the plan and their role. They also need to know what is required from them. This part is essential in brand communication. Although a customer service representative and a receptionist represent the same company, their role and how they need to interact with the audience is different. To succeed, this needs to be accounted for in your brand communication strategy. By adapting the brand communication strategy to each role individually, you’ll have a better chance of realization.
5. Develop and grow your brand continuously and meet market expectations
There’s no resting when it comes to branding. How you communicate your brand today, might not fit or be sufficient tomorrow.
The market changes and so do consumers. On one hand we have a fast-growing Martech space that puts pressure on marketing teams and our ability to follow our own brand communication strategy. It’s not easy to deliver on demand when deadlines are behind us, and resources are short. On the other hand, we have consumers. How they search for information, what they value and how they engage with your brand varies between them. When communicating your brand, you need to adapt at the same speed and meet these expectations.
Communicate your brand with digital solutions
Just as you digitize your private life to simplify and increase your own efficiency, you need to do the same for your work life and your brand. By digitizing your branding processes, following the above steps will be easy. Everything about your brand can easily be maintained, developed, and communicated from one single solution.
No second guessing. Everyone will know everything they need to know to communicate your brand with ease.