Massimo Acquaviva, 2R Capital Investment Management Limited director, is an experienced businessman with many years of experience. This article will look at entrepreneurship, exploring the most important elements in terms of building and boosting brand.
Savvy marketers and entrepreneurs sometimes go to extreme lengths to differentiate their brand from the competition. An enterprise’s brand identity exists whether it is actively managed or not, and it is therefore essential for business owners to take a proactive approach to building and maintaining a strong and reliable market presence.
Building brand goes far beyond coming up with a catchy business name, logo and slogan. To stand out, companies need to identify the essential elements that define their business. Irrespective of size or industry, businesses need to build brand in order to remain relevant. Branding helps businesses to stand out from the competition, which is particularly important in highly competitive niches where many different companies offer similar products or services. Branding helps a company to convey its unique story and values, as well as providing an opportunity to showcase its products and differentiate itself from market rivals.
Implementing a consistent branding effort makes a business more memorable. When consumers can identify a company based on visual, auditory or physical elements, this breeds familiarity and in turn promotes trust, which 81% of consumers rely on when making purchasing decisions according to a 2019 Edelman report.
In order to succeed, every business needs a customer base. Building a loyal following is not a matter of chance or luck but rather stems from shrewd messaging, presenting customers with unique experiences, and building connections and rapport. Brands need to create and maintain an emotional connection with the customers they serve, building a following to support the business by sharing their positive experiences with the outside world – promoting not only repeat business but more referrals through word of mouth.
Brand is a manifestation of a company’s heart and soul, shaping how existing and potential customers perceive it. Take for example Apple, a brand that is all about innovation and modernity but also simplicity. With its minimalist approach to aesthetics, Apple has set itself apart, from its simple logo to the ultra-sleek Apple website. Apple also builds brand by highlighting its creativity, using phrases like ‘Think Different’, constantly innovating new products to make people’s lives easier and collaborating with market-leading influencers.
To build brand, businesses first need to identify their target audience, homing in on the proportion of the population its products are most likely to appeal to. Many business owners fall into the trap of trying to appeal to as wide a bracket of the population as possible, but it is impossible to be all things to all people. Rather, astute marketers identify and target their ideal customer. This can be achieved by examining existing customers and looking at the competition. Great marketers create buyer personas, imagining what their ideal customer might look like and creating a profile outlining their gender, age, behaviours and likes and dislikes. As an ecommerce brand grows, so will its opportunities to learn more about its audience from customer surveys and analytics tools, enabling it to add to and tweak customer personas to keep them accurate.
Establishing a business’s long-term goals is a critical step in building brand. Once these goals have been established, the business can formulate a business strategy, breaking down objectives into actionable steps to achieve these overarching objectives. Popular business goal examples include achieving higher conversion rates, improving customer retention and building a reputation as a premium brand. Returning to the example of Apple, the company has differentiated itself as premium brand, enabling it to charge much more for its smartphones compared with rival manufacturers. Establishing overarching goals is also critical to measuring performance and success.
Businesses need to highlight the main benefits and qualities their brand offers. For businesses operating in competitive industries where they are pitted against much larger market rivals, presenting products or services that no competitor offers can go a long way in terms of creating a memorable brand. Perhaps the company is known for its stellar customer service or offers a more affordable product than most of its rivals. It is important for business leaders to figure out how their company provides customers with value and what makes it unique.
In terms of building brand, it is also crucial for companies to look at their digital footprint, for example their presence on social media and their website’s visibility in search results. In a digital age where the consumer’s first port of call when researching a product or company is the internet, building a strong and positive online presence is vital.
