How to Determine Your Brand’s Identity – A 5 Step Guide

What is your brand’s equity?

Brand equity refers to the value of your brand. This value protects your company from competitive marketing and price changes by helping you stand out and demonstrate your business’s unique value. Without a strong brand identity, you won’t be able to gain equity. This can have devastating effects on your bottom line. So here are a few things to keep in mind when building your brand and defining your brand’s identity.

Your brand is more than your logo, it’s a story about who you are as a company. A strong brand lets people know what to expect from your company and also helps to create a lasting impression. Without a clear identity, you will lose recognition in the marketplace and fail to stand out.

Elements of your brand’s identity include:

How to Identify your Brand

Step 1. Research

It’s important to research who your target audience is since this will guide future decisions. You need to determine various demographics such as age and gender to help get an idea of who your ideal customer is and what they like. This will give you a better understanding of how to reach your targets.

Step 2. Create Buyer Personas

This process involves a deep investigation into what is motivating your ideal customer, what they need, what their struggles are, and how you help to solve their problems. It’s best to outline 2-3 target audience profiles personas to help guide your strategy.

Step 3. Introspection

Grab a mirror because it’s time to take a good look at your company and ask yourself a series of questions. This is the time to evaluate your mission, your values, and your goals and how your brand reflects that. Here are a few questions to consider when determining your brand’s identity:

You can also include a few out of the box questions like:

Step 4 – Competition

It’s always a good idea to look into the competitive landscape of your industry to see what is working and what isn’t. More importantly, this step helps you identify what truly makes your brand unique from others and what you need to emphasize in your marketing efforts going forward.

Step 5 – Develop a Brand Style Guide

A branding guide includes instructions on how your brand is to be portrayed to the world. This includes directions on how to use your logo, your brand colors, how to talk to your audience on social media, your overall tone, and more. For example, if your target audience included CEOs and business owners, then you would likely use a more formal tone in your writing focused on security and reliability If you are aiming towards millennials or Gen Z, then you might want to use a more casual tone focused on transparency and ease.

Similarly, different audiences require different channels of communication. You’ll find the majority of Boomers and Gen Xers in more text-based platforms such as Facebook and Twitter while Millennials and Gen Zers are more effectively communicated with on visual and video platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. A brand style guide ensures that everyone on your team knows how to represent your brand and that it remains consistent throughout your strategy.

Beyond a Logo

Your brand’s identity influences more than just your social media channels and business cards. It also informs how you go about designing your website and your overall marketing strategy. Think about your target audience. Are they primarily using cell phones or are they using a desktop? Are they on-the-go and have limited time and capacity to take in a lot of information? Your design and functionality should reflect the behaviors of your customers.

All of these questions, and more, go into your website’s design. You want to create a website that makes the user’s experience enjoyable and simple. This also influences your content strategy on your website. If your target audience doesn’t have a lot of time to read about your company, you need to deliver the information in a way that matches their needs. This could mean bullet points over paragraphs or dazzling call-to-action buttons instead of lengthy forms. Your customer’s experience with your website is a direct reflection on your company, so it’s crucial to consider all of these aspects when establishing your brand.

Want to learn more about branding?

Check out one of our recent conversations about all things branding and the recent rebrand of our own company from Firefly Digital to Firefly Marketing.

References:

Brand & Logo Questionnaire