Why Branding Matters and How to Do it Right

To propel your brand to success, you need to tell a unique story, establish a strong brand persona, and highlight your offerings effectively. All this relates to branding, and in this article, we tell you all you need to know.

Jump to Section

• Branding is Storytelling
• Build a brand persona that connects with the audience
• Communicate your Brand story through Content Strategy
• Content Strategy In the era of Social Media

Branding is the act of crafting your brand’s distinct identity so that it differentiates itself from the rest of the competition. It is the key to the success of your business and needs to be established before all else. If you do it with strategy, skill and creativity, you lead your brand to success.
Think about someone you like as a person. You don’t form your opinion about them based on just their name. A real connection with someone is made up of different aspects of their personality, their style choices, their attitudes, their way of talking, and their story and history. In the same way, these elements have to be incorporated into your brand identity and story to connect with the target audience successfully.

Branding is Storytelling

Your brand’s story is a combination of core values, unique selling propositions, and style choices that make your brand stand out.

 

The common belief is that the core elements of a good brand are the business model coupled with the products and services. However, in reality, every brand that has gone on to achieve success begins with a story. Pick any big name brand, and the first thing that will come to mind is that brand’s story instead of its products and services.
Your brand’s story is a combination of core values, unique selling propositions, and style choices that make your brand stand out.
The core values are your brand’s building blocks and drive the story you will be telling your audience. As your business grows over time, the market conditions and other things may change, but the core values will remain the same. When customers use your products and services, they will be seeing their own values reflected in your core values. Your brand’s core values can represent dependability and safety, innovation and technology, quick service and high standards, or a range of other things. It all depends on the type of business and the audience that you want to target as a brand. For example, customers will look to a fast food restaurant to provide quick service and a basic standard of hygiene and food quality, while the customers of a bank will look to it for keeping their money secure and always being dependable and accessible.
The unique selling proposition needs to be something that can be specifically identified with your brand. It is what makes your products or services stand out from your competitors. Ask yourself why customers would want to buy your products instead of from your rival businesses; the answer to this question is most likely your unique selling point. Don’t try to make your brand known for many different things. Instead, go with something specific and work to position your brand as a valuable provider of that distinguishing feature, product or service.
Your brand’s style has to be identified and brought into alignment with the brand story. The style choices you go with can be visual, as in a logo or colour schemes, or a concept, such as rapid service or flexible pricing. It could also be a signature theme song or jingle or anything related to the communication of your story. The brand style also includes the tone, vocabulary and syntax used in the language of your brand.

Build a brand persona that connects with the audience

In the age of information technology and the internet, getting your target audience to connect with your brand can be a challenge. You can differentiate your brand identity from your competitors, but to connect with your audience, you need to give your brand a personal appeal, and that comes with a brand persona.

To connect with your audience, you need to give your brand a personal appeal, and that comes with a brand persona

What is a brand persona?

The brand persona is defined as the human character with which your brand communicates. This brand persona incorporates a tone of voice, a unique outlook, a visual look, personality traits, and how language is used. Basically, a brand persona is a fictional character who represents the brand through their personality traits and actions.

Can a brand succeed without building a persona?

We are living in a time of human brands. A business cannot be just a faceless entity that puts out information, relying on its message to be heard and liked on its own. The monologue without a human personification of the brand is an obsolete marketing tool. The present and future of marketing revolve around engagement with the customer at a deeper level, and the brand persona is at the heart of it.
It is human nature for people to feel a positive connection with other people who evoke feelings of familiarity and relatability. Therefore, the brands that succeed in today’s market all try to engage consumers by expressing traits and ideas that feel safe and familiar. The persona then expresses these traits to link them with the products and services the brand is selling.

Personify the audience as the hero of the story

The persona you create for your brand will act as a stand-in for the audience in your stories. By acting as a representation of the average consumer in different scenarios and confronting problems common to most people in your target audience, the average audience of that story will identify with the persona character and relate to the issues that the persona is facing. After presenting the persona character as an everyday character with a specific problem, the story will show how your brand’s services and products will solve that problem. In this way, you can presume to know what your audience wants without making it obvious that that is what you are doing.
It should be noted here that the brand persona does not define what the brand says. Its primary purpose is to define the way that anything is communicated by your brand, and serves as a way to remain consistent across every brand interaction and communication with the audience, making the consumer feel familiarity and comfort towards the brand.

Communicate your Brand story through Content Strategy

If you employ effective storytelling to convey your brand message, you can cultivate a lasting connection with your brand

 

Nowadays, pretty much every person has connected to each other thanks to the prevalence of the Internet and smartphones. At the same time, however, all these technologies have not stopped people from feeling cut off and isolated from each other. Most people crave a genuine connection with others, and brand loyalty can tap into this phenomenon. If you employ effective storytelling to convey your brand message, you can cultivate a lasting connection with your brand. By developing useful, accessible, and understandable content for most people, you can humanise your brand and use the brand story to communicate your presence and value proposition to your target audience. With the help of the content, you can tell your audience who you are, what products and services you offer, and how you can provide these in a way that helps people and solves problems. The better you are at communicating your message, the more you will stand out from the rest of the competition and establish your place in the market.

There are many brands that have succumbed to the mindset of quantity over quality when it comes to making content and telling their story. Instead of focusing your story around your products, an effective story will incorporate your product as part of a broader narrative. As a result, it will connect with the customer in an organic way. Once you have learned how to tell a good brand story, the success of your brand is all but guaranteed.

Your brand story can act as a way to deliver information related to every aspect of your enterprise, share important details about your products and services and communicate the value they provide to customers. It’s not just the customer side of the business that is dependent upon your brand story; it will be helpful for you, too, especially when planning new product development and marketing campaigns.

In order to maintain an effective standard of storytelling over the course of time, both for the short and long term, you need to formulate a content strategy that will provide details on the type of content that you plan to deliver to your audience on a regular basis. This content strategy will also include a broad outline of the way you will explain the value to customers as a part of the story being told.

Before you can develop an effective content strategy that lays out a roadmap for your future content creation efforts, you need to have a well-defined brand identity and brand story in place. You can’t create an effective content strategy without knowing your brand story first. At the same time, you cannot consistently tell an effective brand story without having a well-planned content strategy to guide your brand storytelling. By having both content strategy and brand story in place, you will have a consistent and reliable way to communicate the value your brand can give to your target audience.

Content Strategy In the age of Social Media

Social media are essential for online businesses and enable them to directly communicate with their audience in a way not allowed by traditional media outlets. Different demographics prefer to use different social media platforms, and as a business, you need to be mindful of it. For example, the age of the average Facebook user is older than the age of the average Instagram user. You should have a clear idea of the demographics of your target audience, so you can build your social media presence on the right platform. When people reach out to your brand using social media, you should respond in a timely manner and listen to what they have to say. By genuinely remaining communicative and concerned with your customers, you can build a significant following on social media that is loyal to your brand and can propel it to new heights of success.

Social media are essential for online businesses and enable them to directly communicate with their audience in a way not allowed by traditional media outlets.