Branding – Velocity Media

17 April 2017

Four questions to ask before you rebrand

Whether you are considering making a small logo tweak or a complete personality change, here are four questions you should ask before you go down the road of rebranding.

What does rebranding mean to you?

A rebrand can mean many things to many people, so it is important you are clear on what you want and what it means to you. For some, it is a simple update to their logo and messaging, but for others, it is a complete brand change, that may include a new logo, brand personality and even business name.

As you can imagine there are significant differences in cost – and not all are financial. If you want to make a big brand change, and you have been operating for a while, there are a few more things you need to consider like:

What is the goodwill associated with your brand (your reputation and implied credibility)?
How recognisable is your brand to your customers and potential customers?
Have you done a lot of work on SEO that you could lose should you change name and domain name?

Why do you want to rebrand?

This is the most important question to answer when thinking about rebranding, and you need to answer it honestly. Is the rebrand because you want or need a change or is it because the customer you want to target is disconnected from your brand?

Doing a complete rebrand can be a big marketing task, and in many ways, you will be starting again so make sure it is for the right reasons. If the reason behind your rebrand is that you want or need a change to feel more energised in your business again, then look at a slight logo update or a change of messaging as opposed to a full rebrand.

Who are your customers and what do they want from your brand?

Your customers should always be at the forefront of any brand decision you make. After all, if they don’t feel connected with your brand they won’t buy from you, and that is a BIG problem!

Look at who your customers are and what they are likely to respond to. Say for instance you want your favourite colour pink reflected in your logo, but your clients are mostly male, it may not be the wisest choice. While this is a basic example, the same applies to the rest of your brand.

Don’t make the mistake of making your brand entirely about you. While you do need to have a connection to it for authenticity, and you may have even founded your company out of a personal need or frustration you are not your customer.

Where are you going?

Peek into the future, what do you want to achieve with your brand? What are the values, vision and mission of your business? What difference do you want to make in the lives of others? What do you want to be known for? What growth and innovation plans do you have? What goals do you want to achieve? Where do you want to be in three, five and ten years?

Now ask yourself, what kind of brand will get you there? What story do you need to tell and sell to capture the minds and hearts of customers and potential customers?

That is the brand you need to create or keep.

Amanda

16 June 2016

How to build your personal brand

We live in a world that is becoming increasingly connected; yet disconnected at the same time. While it has never been easier to communicate with anyone, anywhere in the world, we lose something when we stay behind the veil of technology – deeper relationships.

We forget that relationships underpin every business transaction. The deeper the relationship, the more profound and profitable it becomes.

Your customers crave connection – real connection – from the businesses they buy from. They don’t want to interact with a faceless business, hear from general autoresponders or enquire only through a web form. They want a real relationship, a real person – they want you.

Whether you are B2B or B2C, online or offline, product or service based, personal branding has never been more important. But where do you start, particularly if you’ve been hiding behind your brand for some time?

Start by being authentic

So often in business, we play a role. While this can help us to keep boundaries between our personal and professional lives, these same boundaries can also stop us from being who we are and building deeper relationships with our clients and contacts.

While you should keep a level of mystery about you, make sure you aren’t hiding the real you. It is alright to show vulnerability and humanity at times; it will often make you more relatable and accessible to your customers and followers.

Brand yourself

Day in and day out we market our products and services but what about ourselves? You are unique. No one else has the same knowledge, opinions and experience as you do. No one will see the world through your same perspective.

Own it and use it to your advantage. Talk about what makes you different and what value you personally bring to the table. Share your opinion and experience. Answer media callouts where you (not just your brand) could give input.

If you struggle to talk about yourself, or you are humble to a fault, have an opinion-based blog or a tip segment in your newsletter that is credited to you, not just your brand. Also, use your biography, LinkedIn profile and testimonials to do the selling for you.

Give yourself a voice inside and outside your brand to showcase your personal experience and expertise.

Be seen and heard

To build your personal brand, you need to be seen and heard (sorry introverts there is no way around this one!).

While this does involve building your online presence and demonstrating thought leadership through blogs, articles, media interviews and social media, all of which you can do from your office, you also need to get out into the world. Spread your message through networking, speaking and building relationships with others.

Start seeing yourself as a product you need to market. Pinpoint your unique selling points and the problems you solve and launch yourself out into the marketplace. You’ll find it helps your business marketing too.

Amanda

16 June 2014

Six questions to position your brand effectively in the mind of your customers

How your customers and potential customers perceive your brand directly impacts your bottom line. So how do you make sure you position your brand effectively in the mind of your customers?

Here are six questions to help you ensure your brand is more engaging and appealing to your customers, now and in the future.

1. What do you want your brand to stand for?

Work out what your brand stands for, what the purpose of your business is – beyond making profit and what you’re passionate about. What is your vision? What difference do you want to make in the world? What do you believe in? What problems are you solving? Do you have a cause?

When you know who you are as a brand, you not only communicate better with your customers and potential customers, you appear to be more authentic. The decisions and actions you take as a business owner can also be considered more carefully to ensure you stay true to what you stand for.

2. Where do you want to be in the market place?

Determine where you want your brand to sit within your market. Do you want to be the luxury, expensive brand of your industry, the cheaper alternative or somewhere in the middle? Do you want to be seen to be more exclusive to a certain group or available to the masses? Are you the optional extra or the essential?

3. What do you want to be known for?

When your customers and potential customers talk about your business or give you a testimonial, what do you want them to say? When someone sees or hears your business name what do you want their first thoughts to be?

Is it your results, professionalism, creativity or innovation? Is it your consistency, quality, simplicity or availability? Choose what you want to be known for and determine what products and services you need to offer, what actions you need to take and customer interactions you need to have in order to achieve it.

4. What personality do you want your brand to have?

Your brand’s personality describes the way your brand thinks, speaks, acts and reacts, which then gets reflected in your social media, blogs, marketing messages and your day-to-day communication with your customers, suppliers and business associates.

Do you want your brand to be humorous or more serious? Relaxed or professional? Enthusiastic or refined? Elegant or cheap? Young or old? Inspiring or more factual and realistic? Innovative or predictable? Choose what human characteristics you want your brand to have in order to make it more relatable and engaging to your customers and potential customers.

5. What emotions do you want to spark?

A brand, by definition is a collection of thoughts and feelings about your experiences with it. When you create the right emotional affiliation with your brand, you increase awareness, sales and retention.

For this reason, it is important to work out what emotions you want your customers and potential customers to associate with your brand. Is it safety and security? Love and passion? Awe and wonder? Confidence and trust? Hope, excitement or happiness?

Keep in mind that this is different to how you will appeal to your customers through your marketing, as you will normally use more negative emotions like frustration, fear or guilt in order to motivate them to act.

6. What do your customers want from you?

Once you have answered all of these questions from your perspective, answer them from your customers’ perspective. What do they need and want? What are they looking for from you and from your industry? What do they prioritise as most important?

While you may own your business, your customers are the ones who keep you in business, so always make sure your brand is aligned with what they want.

How did you go about positioning your brand in the market place? Are you happy with where you are or is it time to make some adjustments?