Your brand is possibly the most important factor in bringing customers to your business. This makes developing your brand a top priority, probably second only to delivering a quality product. But you can’t develop your brand by just telling anyone who will listen that you are good (or great :). You need to put in place a well-defined brand development strategy. It should have the expressed purpose of influencing your customers to view your business through a lens of your own making. Your strategy should consist of tactics for engaging your brand viewership in multiple media, including print, broadcast, and online.
Print media is a brand development tactic capable of capturing that most intimate of inputs, the sense of touch. Feeling your brand in their very hands gives your customers a level of engagement with who you are that can’t be duplicated with other tactics. The business card is at the forefront of this type of outreach. Printing a logo and your company name on that tiny card can foster a connection that is personal, making the holder feel a personal stake in your endeavor.
The same can be said for the ubiquitous flyer. It can only reach a limited number of perspective patrons, but those it does reach can experience a deeper psychological need for what you have to offer. Don’t pass up on an opportunity to incorporate print media in your brand development strategy if you can help it.
More wide-reaching but in many ways equally as intimate as print media is broadcast media. That jingle you just can’t get out of your head, that every-man actor who seems to resemble countless people you pass on the street, these provide powerful links to your brand. Broadcast media acts on the senses by coming back into your consciousness seemingly randomly.
But when those random recurrences coincide with a moment that your product or service is needed, they serve a powerful purpose. They cause your brand to stand out in a positive light in comparison to your competition’s efforts if you have properly developed them. Make sure you put serious thought into any investment in broadcast media as a part of your brand development strategy.
The brand development tactic with the potential to reach the most people in the most compelling way, however, is online presence. The internet offers a multitude of avenues to reach out to your customer base. With each line of contact, your brand can be grown to your exact specifications. An email campaign is a great starter to let them know you’re looking for them. It can include a link to your website, your primary online brand development tactic for disseminating the ideas you wish to convey.
A social media footprint in addition to providing a literal count of whose receiving your brand also allows for personal interaction with your followers. When incorporating an online presence as part of an overall brand development strategy, extra care must be given to maintaining continuity of brand image across the many available platforms.
It is possible and relatively affordable to incorporate all of the above-mentioned brand development tactics into a comprehensive brand development strategy. Each can play an invaluable role in crafting the image that your public will use to judge you by.
The customer’s idea of who they think they’re dealing with when interacting with your business will be the determinant in how much and how often they invest in you. Therefore you must make sure you develop the activities needed to make the carefully crafted impression of how you wish to be perceived.
Questions about building your brand? Contemplating different channels to help communicate your unique offering? Take a look at our Branding and Design section and give us a holler – we would love to help out!
