10 Ways To Master Better Branding
In the modern age, branding is an absolutely vital element for most companies.
However, it is also an increasingly difficult one, with an enormous, global pool of competition, spurred on by the real-time speeds of modern internet and technology.
Seventy years ago, you might have been thinking about how to market to your city, or maybe even your state.
Nowadays, with a few clicks, your branding can be viewed by people quite literally all across the world.
This opens up opportunities, but also creates a whole host of potential pitfalls.
What's more, branding is a field in which significant investment has occurred in this increasingly globalised world, meaning you are already fighting to compete with people for whom creative branding is a career.
However, with some careful forethought, outside of the box thinking and determination, you can take advantage of the precious resource that is branding.
So, without further ado, here are ten tips for going about improving your better branding techniques.
1 – Universality
As mentioned above, branding is now a global game.
With that as the case, it is essential that there is a degree of universality inherent in your work.
This is not to say that you have to adjust individually to the language and cultural elements of all different nations, but if you do identify the potential for your brand in a specific far-flung region, it might be worth thinking about these elements.
It is more of a sense in which you must capture with your branding humanistic elements.
Promoting people and human emotions and behaviours to the front of your marketing will make your potential to explore distant regions much greater.
The relatability factor is a considerable part of globalised marketing.
2 – Identify Your Targets
Within that overarching sense of universality, it can be too good to achieve; you have to look more specifically at who you will be directly pitching to.
You never want your desire for universality to lead to vagueness in your branding.
So, focusing on a demographic that you are convinced will be most susceptible to your product and using laser-pointer precision to zero in on what affects them most is an incredibly useful starting point.
Getting started in better branding, in a world full of endless possibilities, can be a real struggle.
However, with a tight focus, you are already fed a vast number of cues on how to begin the branding attack.
3 – Know Your Competition
If you're getting into branding in almost any field you can think of; you're going to run into competition.
It is vital that you can track and maintain your understanding of what is going on around you.
It can sometimes seem like a taxing task, and in many ways, it can feel threatening, since you might encounter some quite good work as you research.
However, not only will it help you develop your ideas and inspire your branding, but it also will show you what to avoid, allowing your work to be unique.
Find other branding, react to it, examine its effect on you and learn from it, on how to do better branding than it.
4 – Be Unique
As mentioned above, uniqueness is going to be your ally in the branding world.
Being as crowded as it is, branding can cause significant brand confusion at times.
All it takes is a quick Google Search for ‘Brands with similar logos', and you will be presented with a whole host of copycat-esque branding profiles.
Even the ones who don't look that much alike will still share some prevalent themes and colours.
In that kind of marketplace, getting your branding to stand out is very hard but, similarly, very valuable.
If you can get your head above water in this regard, the potential rewards are great.
Take a look at some of the most iconic and unusual branding giants of the past 30 years and use them as a starting point for exploring how to develop a genuinely unique branding strategy.
5 – Workshop
It doesn't matter what you are doing within the world of branding, workshopping is going to be of enormous use to you.
By this, I mean running your work past a focus group of outsiders, laymen, who give you a raw response to your work that then helps to guide your revisions and future work.
In branding, this might mean taking a whole list of branding imagery and company names, including your own and getting the strangers to rank them by how much they stand out to them or appeal to them.
Remember, workshopping can be on all sorts of scales: you could get in a massive selection of strangers and run extensive tests of your work, after having taken personal information for each volunteer to establish their demographic.
Alternatively, you could run an idea past your family.
Both count, it just depends on what you are testing for and to what extent you have resources to manage these kinds of tests.
Whatever you do, feedback like this can go a long way to helping you in getting better branding.
6 – Choose A Register
It doesn't matter who you are or what your company does, consistency is one of the keys to a successful branding campaign.
A typical campaign will have a whole host of elements; from advertising, to brand name to the logo design.
However, throughout all of your branding, you want to cultivate a register, tone or voice.
By this, you will want to give off a sense that your company has a consistent message in its public dealings.
It can be humorous, ironic, professional, serious, charitable, really whatever you like.
However, if you have disparate tones within all the different elements of your marketing, you will run into problems of confusion and customer distrust.
It gives off an impression of incompetence and can breed doubt amongst potential clients who are very important to avoid in any branding campaign.
7 – Take Risks
It would help if you didn't take risks solely for the sake of it.
However, if you find yourself on the precipice of taking the risk on an idea, never shy away merely because of having identified that what you have come up with is risky.
Riskiness often correlates strongly with originality: you are much more likely to feel like an idea is dangerous if it hasn't been done before.
However, if there are no role models already existing in branding, then you're on to an idea that is unique which is enormous. (See point 4.)
Furthermore, knowing that you are taking a risk can be a great motivator for you to have been thorough in all other areas of your research.
Once you find no apparent problems, go for it.
8 – Diversify Your Media
In this day and age, the options available for the presentation of your brand are enormous in their number and their differences.
A branding campaign that involves a logo and a name and nothing else is a branding campaign that will find itself getting lost in the vast world of modern media.
As a current brand, you want to be able to turn your branding into a YouTube video, a television ad, a Snapchat story, a novelty ice cream cone…
Whatever it is, the original product needs to have real, built-in flexibility to allow for the inevitably diverse requirements of your product.
9 – Use Social Media
To that last point, social media is 100% necessary when branding your work.
Social media is an incredible world for better branding, a platform with a built-in attraction for users, accessible, highly flexible advertising options as well as influencers who are built-in brand reps.
It is a fertile ground for any brand to publicise themselves, so use it and use it well.
Have your page, buy advertising on the sites themselves like Facebook and Instagram.
Most of all look for influencers who, for actually relatively low costs, will advertise your product to their, potentially, millions of viewers.
If you have a product, sending them a sample can be a way to get away with it for free even.
10 – Get It Out There
Cooking up some perfect scheme is all very well.
It may sound excellent to you and your team, maybe even to the people who have been used to workshop it.
However, you won't know until you have put it out for the world to see.
It can be a bit nerve-wracking, but the value of the data you then collect on its performance cannot be overstated in the slightest.
So, go on, get on with it!
Concluding better Branding
Branding can be extremely powerful.
Alternatively, it can be entirely forgotten about.
The power is in your hands to create a form of better branding which will grip its target audience and refuse to be forgotten.
Creativity, risk and research are the key elements to developing a memorable and compelling campaign.
