How to Build a Brand for your Entrepreneurial Business

Hello EntrepreNERDs! Hope you’re ready and hungry to learn all about building your own brand. Whether it’s your online blog, your self brand, or the startup you’re investing everything you’ve got into, we promise these tips will be relevant!

The questions you need to be asking is:

1. How do I want my brand to make people feel?

2. Will it resonate with my target audience?

Why are these questions so important? Because these are the questions that will connect the dots between what you’re selling and who you’re trying to reach.

Let’s start off with the basics! What is a brand?

A brand isn’t just a recognisable name and logo that distinguishes you in a crowded market.

“Your brand is how people perceive you wherever they interact with your business—both the impressions you can control and the ones you can't.” – Shopify Blog

Once you understand what the brand you’re creating is, we can delve into the specific step-by-step process of building one!

1. Figure out your place in the market

First things first! Understand the current market. Try googling your product/service category and taking time to analyse direct and indirect competitors. Another good tip is looking at relevant social media accounts and compare shopping online and offline to get a feel for our customers would interact with the brand.

2. Define your brand’s focus and personality

We can do this by establishing 3 easy things!

- What’s your positioning statement

Try this framework to stake your claim in the market. Remember: this isn’t something you’re necessarily putting on your website or marketing material – it’s more of a guidance to what your brand is trying to achieve.

- What words would you associate with your brand?

Here’s a fun and useful branding exercise that would help you look into the personality your customers would be attracted to. Don’t worry, it’s not all fun, this will help inform your voice on social media and the tone of all your creatives.

- What metaphors or concepts describe your brand?

Personifying your brand will also help with identifying the individual qualities you want it to have. This can be a vehicle or an animal or a celebrity! Anything, really! This could even give inspiration to your brand logo.

3. Choose a business name

As an EntrepreNERD, your company's name is probably one of the first big commitments you have to make. It’ll impact your logo, your domain, your marketing, and trademark registration if you decide to go down that route (it's harder to trademark generic brand names that literally describe what you sell).

Ideally, you want a store name that’s hard to imitate and even harder to confuse with existing players in the market. If you have any plans to expand the product lines you offer down the road, consider keeping your business name broad so that it's easier to pivot than if you chose a brand name based on your product category.

4. Pick your brand’s colours and fonts

Colours and fonts don’t just define the look of your brand, but they communicate the emotions you want your target audience to feel. A nice thing to consider is colour psychology!

When choosing your fonts, it's good to look at fonts you might want to use on your website for starters, since Facebook and other social media sites are limiting in that regard, albeit still very possible.

Pick two fonts at most to avoid unnecessarily confusing visitors: one for headings and one for body text (this doesn't include the font you might use in your logo).

5. Write a Slogan

A catchy slogan is a nice-to-have asset—something brief and descriptive that you can put in your Twitter bio, website headline, business card, and anywhere else where you've got very few words to make a big impact.

Keep in mind that you can always change your slogan as you find new angles for marketing—Pepsi has gone through over 30 slogans in the past few decades.

A good slogan is short, catchy, and makes a strong impression. Here are some ways to approach writing a slogan of your own:

· Stake your claim: Death Wish Coffee—"The World's Strongest Coffee"

· Make it a Metaphor: Redbull—"Redbull gives you wings."

· Adopt your customers’ attitude: Nike—"Just do it."

6. Design your logo

A company logo design is probably one of the first things that come to mind when you think about building a brand. And for good reason. It's the face of your company after all, and could potentially be everywhere that your brand exists.

Ideally, you'll want a logo that's unique, identifiable, and that's scalable to work at all sizes (which is often overlooked).

Consider all the places where your brand's logo needs to exist, from your website to your Facebook Page's profile picture to even the little "favicons" you see in your current browser tab.

If you have a text logo as your Instagram avatar, for example, it'll be almost impossible to read. To make your life easier, get a square version of your logo that has an icon element that remains recognizable even at smaller sizes.

7. Apply, extend, and evolve your brand as you grow!

Last but not least, Building a brand doesn't stop with creating a logo or slogan, or even with your brand launch. Your brand needs to exist and remain consistent wherever your customers interact with you, from the theme you choose for your website to the marketing you do to customer service to the way you package and ship your products.

All you can do is put your best foot forward at every turn and try to resonate with your core audience. But hopefully, at this point, you have the tools, knowledge, and resources to start.

Good luck EntrepreNERDs! Let us know if this was useful or what stage you’re at :) We’re rooting for you!

Tell us all about your journey, or even about the beginning of your plans in our Discussion Forum where you can learn about other entrepreneurs' experiences too! We love to hear all about you EntrepreNERDS!! It's also a great way to build awareness about your brand! Hungry for more how-to's on digital marketing tools... read our Digital Marketing Made Easy posts!