So you’ve decided to start your own business – fantastic! Working for yourself can come with some great rewards including the ability to define your business your way, but, with everything, there are challenges.
From a marketing standpoint, the first thing that you need to think about when starting your own business is developing and defining your brand.
Brand is a big word. It means so many different things including physical, cultural and emotional aspects. One of the most important things about a “brand” is knowing what you stand for.
All too often you see and hear of people developing their own brands that jump from one thing to another, a bit like running a vegan restaurant that sells bacon. Not an ideal mix.
The role of a brand is to aid you in defining your business and what you do in the eyes of your customers, market, competitors and employees (the last part is extremely important so don’t forget them).
Whether you are a sole trader working on your laptop at home, or running a shop front in a busy main street, your brand can easily make or break your business and becomes the foundation to your future success. It needs to also become the essence by which you operate by. This is why it’s so important to define this first before you start to execute anything.
How to define your brand?
A great place to start with your brand is really to understand why you started your business in the first place. This will help to define what is the key driver. Ask yourself a few simple questions:
“Why did I start my business?”
“What is the purpose for my business?”
“What are the services/products that I will be offering?”
“What is the industry/s that I want to be a part of?”
“Who are my competitors”?
“Who are my customers”?
“What are my customers interested in?”
“What are my business values”?
“What does my business stand for”?
I will cover a few of these off in some future planned blogs, but, as you can see with the questions, your brand really needs to focus on the core of your business and be the foundation of everything that you do and stand for.
I’ve got a logo, isn’t that enough?
I hear a lot from people who focus on their logo being their brand. Your logo is the external representation of your brand – it’s not actually your true brand. Your brand is deeper than that. It’s the core of your business which is then covered in many different layers and then represented externally with a logo.
You could think of your brand as if it were a chocolate cake.
At the beginning of your cake you have all of these raw ingredients that get mixed together. For your brand, you have your internals such as experience / products and services / competitors / employees / qualifications. Mix them together and you have the basic foundations that you need to build your business (or cake). Once you put all of those ingredients together, you mix them up until you get the perfect mixture. You then bake it or set it up until you are happy with the perfect cake. Once you have the foundations, then you can start to add the external elements such as your logo and business name which then becomes the icing of your business. It’s basically the external components that can make your business and give it the look / vision you need or want to portray to the market (this elf isn’t the best cake decorator so I won’t give advice on the best way to ice your cake). The logo – it is essentially the icing on the cake! You need to also make sure that, whatever cake your bake or brand you build, it needs to appeal to your customers. Without this, no matter how strong or creative your brand is, it won’t succeed. Customers are the foundation of any successful business large or small and need to be the driving force behind everything that you do.
So, your brand is what you want to stand for, be known for and work towards. It needs to drive everything that you do and you need to be confident that you can live to your brand expectations.
Good luck!
The Marketing Elf
6 August 2017
The Marketing Elf 