What’s Your Branding Story? (Part 1)

Developing Your Branding Story

When we think about the important aspects of building our brand, most people focus on Name, Logo, Identity, Colors, Marketing and Strategy. While those along with your product and services are important components to your business success it’s amazing how important the story is too. People want to buy from those that they know, like and trust, and your story is how they first feel something.

A lot of businesses under estimate how important their “about us” page is, or how important the story of their why is.

To develop your story answer the questions, “How did you get started, why do you do what you do and where are you going?”

Many people think about branding in terms of logos, pictures and other graphics that are on our letterhead, business cards and websites. But today, it’s so much more than a picture. Branding is about an attitude. It’s feeling that is conveyed by the story you tell consumers about your business, eliciting enough feelings of trust from the buyer that they happily open their wallet and spend money on your product or service.

To properly brand your business you need to answer the following questions:

• How did you get started?

• Why did you get started?

• Who is your target audience?

• What is your product or service?

• What makes your offerings unique?

• Where do you see your business going?

Sure, you do need to choose your logo, general colors of your marketing collateral, website graphics and so forth. But, it’s more important to answer the above questions ensuring that you accurately represent your answers with the themes you choose.  Any marketing that you do should further the ideas that the answers provided. By being consistent through all your marketing efforts you will expand your brand.

What’s Your Mission?

Once you answer the questions, you can then use your answers to assist you in creating a mission statement and an appropriate tag line. Your mission statement and tag line can help you define yourself even further in terms of expressing to your future customers or clients who you are, what you stand for, and what you do. Not only will the answers, and the resulting mission statement and tag line help your clients understand you, they will help you stick to your goals.

Knowing your mission, your reason for being, will help spread awareness about your brand to your target audience. A mission statement provides focus for every area of your business from A to Z. You have to remember that branding is a process that evolves and develops over time and consistency and persistence is an imperative component to that process. Knowing your why enough to create an effective mission statement will take your business to the next level.

Branding is about getting clear concerning your business so that you and your entire staff can be laser focused on every aspect of your company from ensuring you are marketing to your ideal client, creating products and services for your ideal client, and expressing what your business stands for to clients, contractors and employees. The mission statement is an expression of your brand, written in a clear and concise way that helps not only your customers understand your business focus but you and your business partners too.

You should be living your mission statement every single day, which will in effect promote your brand. Live your mission on social media. Live your mission on your website. Live your mission in all your marketing collateral, products and services. Yes, part of that is knowing which graphics to include that expresses your brand, but as you see branding is so much more than a picture.

The next part in Your Branding Story is TELLING it.