How to Start and Build Your Own Brand: The Complete Guide

If you want your business to reach the maximum amount of customers possible, you’ll need to start and build your own brand. 

A strong brand will allow you to reach a broader customer base. But how do you go about starting a brand that people will eventually recognize and trust?

In this article, we’ll discuss how to start your own brand. 

Establish Your Market 

Before you can start a brand, you’ll need to first know who you are going to target. 

To do this, you will need to answer several questions. 

• What are the demographics of your ideal customer?
• What do your customers want and need?
• How does your target demographic communicate, and how do they speak?
• What does your target demographic care about?
• What else interests your audience?

When creating a brand, it is not enough to know the age, gender, location, lifestyle, and earnings of your target demographic; you need to understand how they think. 

Find communities online around your specific product niche and tap into their concerns, needs, and desires. Look for themes that particularly resonate and look for the areas of your niche that people engage in discussing the most. 

Research the Competition

Before you create and launch your brand, have a look at who your competition is. Carry out a full SWOT analysis on all of your competitors, focusing on their branding. Try and understand precisely what elements of their branding are the strongest. 

You won’t want to copy your competitors; however, understanding them will allow you to create a more robust brand strategy for yourself. 

Look for any areas that they are missing out on and then explore whether there is scope to use this angle in your branding. There may be a good reason that your competitors have steered clear of certain aspects. Make sure you’re not heading into a dead-end.

Describe Your Own Brand 

Start by jotting down a few adjectives that describe how you see your business. These words can be used as a jumping-off point for creating your brand’s editorial guidelines. 

The type of words you use and the way that you express yourself can be used to form your brand’s core values. It will help you set the tone for your website, as well as all other communications.  

More importantly, these words will help you to form brand slogans and your company name. 

Creating Your Brand Name

Your business may already have a name, and your brand name can be something completely different. 

Your name should be easy to remember. It should be unique. If it is referencing something else, make sure you fully explore all of the connotations associated with the name before settling on it. 

Think About Your Visuals 

Your brand’s visuals are potential of more considerable significance than your words. Visuals can have a more significant lasting impact on a potential customer. 

Visuals generate emotions. We’re emotional creatures, and our brains are drawn to things that make use feel specific ways. 

Determine a color scheme for your brand early on and then stick to it. Different colors will bring on different emotions, so consider what you want to get across. 

Some examples of the emotions liked with different colors are: 

• Yellow- optimistic, happy, and warning 
• Red- passion, and attention
• Navy Blue- secure, professional, formal
• Light Blue- calming, open, and honest
• Pink- feminine, innocent, and young
• Black- edgy and sophisticated

Find a font that matches your brand identity and use it on your website and other communications. Make sure that it is clear and easy to read.

Finally, have a logo designed that you will use as the face of your brand. Remember that it needs to be simple to understand, memorable, and distinct. 

While you can get a logo designed for just a few dollars, if you want to create something identifiable and recognizable, it’s worth investing in a more developed design that has undergone several stages. 

If possible, carry out testing on the effectiveness of your logo. Use a focus group to carry out research into how people react to your logo and don’t settle on a design until you are completely confident. 

Apply Your Branding Across Every Corner of Your Business

Once you’ve got the words and the visuals, you should apply this throughout every aspect of your brand. 

Use the color scheme, logo, typefaces, and language across your companies website, social media platforms, and all offline media. 

It needs to be used in your company advertising, printed media, and any outbound communication such as emails and letters. 

If you fail to use consistent branding across all of your channels of communication, then your brand will get diluted. 

As your business grows, you will need to evolve your brand toolkit.

Test and make changes to your brand as your business evolves, but always remember to test these alterations before committing to them. Branding changes can affect your existing customers. 

Get Support in Building Your Brand

Brand identity is something that you will have to work hard to create. Getting your brand right will take a lot of research and development. 

If you don’t feel that your creative efforts would do your brand justice, it is worthwhile investing in the right creative support to help build your brand. 

From naming your brand, through to coming up with the visual aesthetic, you can find specialists who can do this for you. 

Take a look at these case studies to see how a branding specialist can help to create a full brand package. 

Get Your Brand Out There

Once you have decided on your brand’s name, visuals, color schemes, and logo, it will be time to get it out there. 

Creating your own brand does have an element of trial and error, and once you have launched, you should monitor the effectiveness of all of the elements of your branding. 

For more great articles on how to improve your business, be sure, and explore the rest of the site.