Building your brand: How your brand is like building a home
Many businesses and entrepreneurs assume that building a brand is just about securing a logo and securing their domain name. The thing is a brand is everything about your business. What consumers say about it while you’re not in the room. The public perception of your business and even the search results populate in search engines.
All of this negatively or positively affects your business because your branding efforts should be consistent, clear and clean. During COVID-19, branding awareness and efforts have never been more important because of how and what consumers say about your brand now will carry into much further after COVID-19.
About 20 years ago, think of what personal branding or business efforts would have looked like. It would have been news crews, press releases and traditional advertising methods. It would not have been as simple as creating social media accounts and working on digital marketing strategies.
While press releases and online news articles now provide some of the best backlinking strategies out there for companies and personal brands, it is important for a business to start thinking of their brand as a home.
What is a branded house?
A branding house strategy is set in place to help larger companies and even smaller businesses continue to build off of their current branding strategies. This starts with the overall brand strategy for the entire company and segments off into branding for subsets of the business as well.
This type of branding strategy is great for franchises, smaller businesses, startups and niches because even the smaller businesses and franchises need to get their name out there to clients and customers!
Let’s build the branding house
What are the steps for building your own house? You start with the dream, start the research, contact experts and find the perfect expert, contact the bank for funds and start the process once you are approved.
You start with the dream, that is where the magic begins. This is the initial stage, much like the drafting of the house. What is driving you to build your dream house? A place to always feel welcomed and warm, a forever home to raise children or simply because you find your dream job. No matter the reason or story behind it, the same goes for your brand.
What is the story? The mission? The reasoning behind everything. No one simply starts a business or heads in the entrepreneurial rout of life without having a story or purpose behind the dive into business ownership. The story is the foundation of your home. It is what will keep you sturdy throughout your entire life.
From there the branding house starts to grow, this is where the walls start to be developed and the branded house continues to grow. This is how employees work with one another, workplace wellness and the clientele you will bring in with these walls.
The core values do not live in a deep, dark place of the branding strategy and branding house because they are the branding house. This is one of the most important elements and can be missed along the way or get lost somewhere in the midst of business getting busy.
From there, each employee and client will start to put the drywall and paint onto the walls that are there.
The design elements, paint and stories that are shared within the house and its walls are the non-negotiable parts of the business and your products and services. Each one is made up of the clients and employees behind it! Don’t let the competition or weather get in the way of building the house.
The roof is the continued value of the brand itself. How does your company continue to update and provide the best value out there while keeping everything else strong?
Branding is a never ending process that all companies and small businesses need to keep in mind throughout the duration of their business’ life. Always keep the foundation strong and the roof healthy for everything else to stay intact.