Simona Cellar – Brand Designer – 7 ways to improve your Branding as an established Entrepreneur
7 ways to improve your Branding as an established Entrepreneur
If you’ve been in business for a while, at some point there comes a time when you feel that you’ve outgrown your visual brand. Sure, when you started out, you were okay with your semi-professional look. But you realize now that your branding could be way better and that you just need more in order to grow your business. Keep reading to learn about 7 ways to improve your branding.
1. Review your Brand Strategy
It’s best to start with your brand strategy, first. Your brand strategy is the foundation of your branding efforts and guides you where you need to go next. Brand strategy is one of these fuzzy terms that people interpret differently. Here are the main things, I think you should cover:
This is just an overview, without getting into any details:
- – Brand Foundation: Profile, Purpose, Mission, Vision, Values
- – Ideal client personas: Traits, Problems, Aspirations, How you help them
- – Brand Story: The transformative journey your target audience goes through.
- – Customer Journey: The path of interactions your target audience has with your brand.
- – Competitive analysis: Evaluate your competitors and find gaps in the market.
- – Brand positioning: Position your brand based on the gaps in the market.
- – Brand messaging: Tone of voice, Tag line, Key messages
- – Brand personality: Define your visual brand through 5 adjectives that describe your brand.
- – Brand imagery: Visually define how your target audience should perceive your brand.
2. Improve your Messaging
Sometimes it’s not always necessary to re-do everything. Perhaps some areas just need some adjustments. Your wording across all your materials is very impactful, when done right. So, in some cases you might just need to boost your messaging to stand out and differentiate yourself better from the competition.
3. Focus on Brand Management
If your visual materials are disorganized and lack a consistent look, bringing in order can help your overall branding. This is called brand management and can be done on a small scale via a simple brand style sheet, on a larger scale via more in-depth brand guidelines or a platform where all your finished pieces are stored and organized. These online platforms help all your employees, partners, and collaborators to keep your brand consistent.
4. Breathe new life into your Brand with a Brand Refresh
A brand refresh is a lower form of change. It’s a minimal modernization of all design elements. The main point here is to refresh the brand to make it more contemporary and appealing without significantly altering its core elements. The brand’s values and positioning remain intact.
5. Transform your Brand with a Redesign
A redesign is a more comprehensive revision of all design elements to make the appearance more modern, appealing, or functional. The brand’s values and positioning remain intact. Your design elements will be improved, updated, and even reinterpreted.
6. Revise your Brand with a full Rebrand
A rebrand involves revising the brand strategy and redesigning the entire brand identity. The goal of the rebranding is to communicate a new message, modernize the brand image, adapt to new market conditions, or target a different audience.
7. Monitor how competitors, the industry, and general trends in business are evolving
By understanding how your competitors operate, how your industry is evolving or what trends are current, you can measure your own performance and identify areas where you can enhance your own products, services, or processes. Also looking at trends within different industries opens doors for innovations. You’ll uncover unexplored solutions, untapped customer needs, or potential gaps in the market. This continuous monitoring and identification of opportunities enables your business to stay ahead of the game.
Conclusion
There are many ways to boost your branding. But before you do anything, analysing and finding out what’s not working, is your best bet to help improve your branding. Remember to regularly check-in and review your business and branding. Because your brand is a living and moving thing, that needs to consider latest trends, changing customer preferences and industry developments.