Branding Areas to Focus on For Startups

While earning a profit is the greatest sign of business success, strong branding presents the identity of a company to the niche market. When it comes to startups, making their brand presence felt by the target customers is the most challenging task with plenty of big and established players already present in the marketing. Read on for Branding Areas to Focus on For Startups.

Startups usually do not have a face or identity in public. They struggle to build a brand and survive in the fiercely competitive market. Startups that fail to turn a profit and compete against established businesses will fall by the wayside in due course.

You, being a startup, must identify a way to reach the break-even point as quickly as possible. You should also try to make a profit while reducing expenses because you may not have enough capital to survive for a longer period. According to a Startup Genome report, over 90 percent of startups fail, despite the fact that most of them dream of building the next big thing.

Why?

The reasons are many but the poor branding strategy is one of the most important reasons why most startups fail. And I know that you don’t want to be one; right? Pay heed to these branding hacks for creating a magnetic brand identity.

Table of Contents

Branding Areas to Focus on For Startups

Pay heed to your niche customers

Building a great persona and brand awareness in the initial days of inception is the biggest challenge every startup faces. But some renowned entrepreneurial tinkers have experimented with various options in the recent past and have come out with some solutions — learning about branding from reliable sources being the first step.

Some inexperienced marketers may suggest you consider creating a stunning logo first, but it’s not the right first step since creating a logo is involves some intricate design features like color palettes, fonts, contrast, textual features, sizes, scalability, and so on. All of these are vital elements that affect the emotions of the target audience. Also, you need to think about other aspects like psychology and marketing.

Kevin Barber has rightly pointed this out in his blog “Why Most Startups Get Branding Wrong” on HubSpot. He says, “Your brand is the experience you deliver customers. The entire essence of branding is the connection between company and customer, learning to understand the customer and why they love your product. Once you understand the customer and what drives them to your product, you can create your brand’s visual identity.”

The most crucial aspect of business success is to learn more and more about the customers, their behavior, along with other things. Conduct surveys, take customers’ insights rather than assuming how they feel and think. When it comes to naming your business, your target audience will surely help you out. You can start a social media poll campaign after putting some names for sort listing the best. Your business name should not only resonate with the core business values, but it should also be creative, interesting and eye-grabbing.

Learn the basics of branding elements & practices

Establishing a strong connection with your audience through design and presentation is vital for the success of your business. Now that you have learned about your target audience, you can think in the right direction while making the right branding strategy. Learn as much as you can about the various innovative marketing tactics from reliable sources and case studies.

Those proven branding hacks learned from different reliable sources will help you create a strategy to connect with your customers strongly. Your brand can become a powerful name in the niche market if you carefully design other branding elements such as a logo, business cards, social media banners and so on. You can create them on your own using an online today like Designhill.

Fulfill your promises & build customer trust

You started your startups with too much hope, ambition, and vision; right? And you also want to be a long-run player. Therefore, you must fulfill promises that you made to customers to win their trust and to establish a lasting relationship with them. Once you successfully build a strong relationship with your target audience, half of your work is done, your brand is established.

According to Brian Honigman, entrepreneurs should weave stories that emotionally connect their customers. Science approves of the fact that human beings relate to the stories because brains imagine the narratives as if they were real. So if you narrate your brand stories with strong emotions and feelings, your audience will definitely feel it and a psychological bond will connect them with your company/ brand. Thereafter, a positive brand image will spread amongst the target customers thus fulfilling your business goal.

Align your brand with a social mission

Consumers, especially millennials, respect companies that work for social causes, charities. According to Nestlé’s Chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, millennials are the first generation who are willing seriously to spend more for better quality, for traceability, and for sustainability.

So be socially conscious because your customers will feel good for your brand and the chances of buying your products will be more.

Use social media for personal branding

Social media has transformed the world. Its ever-growing adoption is changing the way we interact with our friends, family and colleagues. Out of 7.7 bn people in the world, over 3.5 bn people are online and social media platforms are being used by almost 33% of the total population.

With 2.4 bn users, Facebook tops the list followed by YouTube and WhatsApp. Whereas LinkedIn claims to have 467 million users and LinkedIn Publishing is turning into a big destination for news from brands.

These platforms are ideal places for you to build your personal branding. Post original, informative content which will help you gradually build your personality. People will start following you for your pieces of advice, guidance thus building a strong relationship.

The final word

Pay heed to these branding hacks and check which of them turned out to be the best for your startup. You can achieve your long-term business only by developing a strong bonding with your customers. Let us share your success stories. We’d love to hear from you!

Top Tip: We highly recommend the eRESONAID online course by our good friend and renowned brand strategist Fabien Geyrhalter its amazing and you will learn so much that you can implement into your own brand strategy framework. Good luck! and our best wishes to you for your startup!

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Author Bio
Henny Kel a graphic, web designer and blogger with over 6 years of experience and working as a Digital marketing strategist & Brand Consultant at Designhill. He is passionate about anything related to design and spends his time hidden behind a book or a screen and reading about design.