During the beginning stages of your business, a strong focus on a well thought out branding strategy is of utmost importance. Branding establishes the key elements that shape your organization and lead the way to growth in a uniformed, cohesive and relevant matter.

Target Audience

Whether you’re in the B2C, B2B market or both, establishing your audience and learning their needs is the first step to understanding what you need to deliver. A good way to establish your target audience is to take a look at your direct competitors and get to know who their clientele is. Many times, without proper research, companies mold their branding to their “preferred audience” while their products speak to a different set of consumers. This disconnect can severely damage a company’s reputation if the expectations of the “preferred audience” are not met.

Brand Perception

Understanding your brand perception is a great tool when measuring how attractive you are to your target audience. Does your brand come to mind when consumers are in search for your type of product?

Brand perception is highly dependent on three things: Experience, Brand Loyalty, and Marketing. While all brands aim to provide a positive brand experience, they often lose site of the “experience” once demand grows. It’s a lesson that most companies learn, and while “supply” is the answer to “demand,” keeping the customer experience positive, and providing the quality you advertise is the road to brand loyalty.

Luckily, brand perception is fluid. If you feel you’ve missed the mark, positive reinforcement is always appreciated. This builds trust between the customer and the company. Most customers understand that mistakes happen. Providing customers with acknowledgement and a positive experience after a mistake shows that your company appreciates them.

Brand Voice

While visuals, imagery, and brand campaigns familiarize your consumers with your look and feel. Your language can vary depending on the topics, but using consistent tones will help develop your brand personality. Having a good understanding of your audience is a great tool for connecting and “speaking their language.” Take into consideration how you might be perceived when selling yourself. Your brand voice is present in all aspects of your company from social media captions to customer service emails, all the way through to your packaging.

Develop a chart of 10 words that relate to your brand. Using them along with associative terms in your language style can be a huge help when you’re stuck.

Language Types

Simple Language uses common words that are easy to understand for anyone reading and avoids industry “lingo.”

Emotional Language creates a strong impact by evoking the emotions of your audience. Emotional language can be controversial, humorous or even stern. Be careful and avoid being biased if ever discussing sensitive topics.

Purposeful Language is created to drive results such as engagement and navigation to your website. Purposeful language can often be a question or survey.

Connectable Language addresses topics that the audience can specifically relate to. It often uses industry terms and slang. The use of empathy and relatability are helpful in creating a community of followers that feel safe and understood when interacting with your brand.

Amusing Language is often witty, short and takes the stage when your brand imagery doesn’t entice enough viewers. As an example, a Self Storage company would use amusement driven language to convey their message and services by creating lingual content that makes you go “ha, that’s funny!”

My favorite example is from a company in NYC called Manhattan Mini Storage. They’re slogans always include some sort of pun that memorable and humorous.

Example: “We’re not scientists, but we totally get space”