Brand building is tough work - it requires a lot of understanding of what your business is about, what it stands for, and the vision of the future.
Most businesses are too focused on staying in the "now", which may seem like a great thing at first, but affects your brands ability to grow your business. Businesses should start to think of their brand as the future of what your business is going to be, and not just what it is from day one.
One of the methods I have learned in building powerful brands starts with looking at some of the top companies in the world and seeing the process in which they build their brand, and then using those specific techniques in building a startup brand.
Here are 5 steps to building a powerful brand.
1. Invest in consumer facing elements
One of the most powerful brands in the entire car industry is Ferrari, an expensive high performance vehicle. One of the reasons that you may know about Ferrari, because Ferrari spends millions of dollars a year on consumer facing endorsements, promotions, and exposure for their brand.
When building my first company, I thought long and hard about doing something very similar, but realized very soon enough, that I didn't have the cash flow to invest in large advertisement campaigns, or billboard banners. For most businesses, this may be a hard sell, however, It may be one thing your small business can do is invest in a website that speaks to your brand.
If you look at Ferrari's, they have warm colors that make up their well-known red brand, and try to highlight some of the events that Ferrari has been apart of. The benefit of this is it connects a prospective customer to the brand, almost immediately, which gives them a higher conversion rate in becoming a customer of Ferrari.
Think of it like Ferrari is doing all it can to storytell its way to getting the sale through the customer.
2.Tell your story
Do you remember when your mom or dad would read you a story, and you would day dream on a consistent basis? The difference was that those stories were so seamless, and you didn't have to think much, but sit back, relax, and dream.
That's exactly what powerful brands do as well.
Take for example, Abarth, a prominent car company based in the Italy. The website does a fantastic job taking someone down the memory lane of how Abarth got started, talking about the vision by Carlo Abarth in 1949.
Even though Abarth is a multi-billion dollar company today, the consumer can relate to the entrepreneurial spirit that Carlo had from the very beginning, similar to what many consumers of Abarth may also feel.
Relating the brand back to the consumer, from a purely non-salesman standpoint, is a powerful trait of a powerful brand.
3.Show the people behind the vision
People want to buy products from people, not websites. I learned this the hard way with a business I was involved in that didn't even have an "About" page. I ended up spending many months trying to convince that business to display some character as to what the business is all about.
Not only is the "About" page one of the most visited websites on a company's website, but it shows the hard working people that build the vision of a company.
For example, Affirm, a financial technology services company, offers installment loans to consumers at the point of sale, but more importantly, has a "company" page that informs people about what the business is building. This takes a technology product such as Affirm and puts a humanistic element to the business, which makes it that much more likeable for the end consumer.
4.Be present where your customers are
How does a consumer even know that a business exists if the business isn't consumer facing?
This means being engaged and available where the customer conversion rate, and brand identity would be the highest.
Take for example, KISSmetrics. When Neil Patel and Hiten Shah started the company, they built it entirely on Twitter. Being a web analytics product, they knew that twitter was an appropriate way to convert followers and engaged fans on social into customers of KISSmetrics, or even higher from their twitter accounts!
To date, the KISSmetrics account has north of 225k followers, and is one of the most engaged business brands in the web analytics space.
The key to discovering where your customers are is by observing where they are coming in from. The best way to tackle this problem is to try various marketing channels, observe what the conversion rate is for what metric you are tracking, and then investing in those areas. For example, if you notice that social media has the highest engagement and conversion rate, than investing in that space would be the best bang for your buck.
5.Strong Business development deals
How do you grow and acquire thousands of customers in just a few years? For most companies, that involves partnering with bigger organizations in the space.
For example, Tablelist, a company that provides instant access to VIP bottle service, private tables and exclusive events started growing their userbase quickly through an early partnership with ridesharing application, Uber.
"The nature of the nightclubs involves networking. The hope is to make smart connections, and give larger companies an add on or something that they might not have, which in this case is Tablelist." says Julian Jung, Founder of TableList.
Tablelist would bundle a boring Uber ride to a nightclub, with a fantastic add on bottle service which not only increased customers for Uber, but more than likely gave consumers a feeling that a mature brand like Uber was on par with Tablelist.
Conclusion
Brand building is a full time job, and is the job of the founders and company to execute accordingly. Whether you are a more traditional business like Abarth or Ferrari, or a software product like KISSmetrics, or Insightfully, investing in your brand will result in more business, and more success for you.
What are some traits in building powerful brands?