My very first Branding Strategy project: a few tips from my learning experience to help you thrive in your business
It was around a year ago that I decided to switch from graphic and logo designer, into a full time branding strategist (I actually talk about my journey and the importance of branding strategy on Medium, you can read all about it here).
I started out by enrolling into an amazing course called Brand Master Secrets, which was created by a fellow strategist called Stephen Houraghan. Although I was pretty skeptical at first, this course ended up changing my mindset and opening a lot of doors for me.
When I finished the course, I felt so empowered… but scared as hell. I mean, I’ve been a graphic designer for almost 12 years, and suddenly, I decided to start building a new career. It was that feeling you get when you finish college: you know you have the tools, but you just don’t know what to do with them. Besides, how could I start selling my services as a branding strategist without prior experience? I knew I had to get started somewhere, but where?
Lucky for me, an old client of mine reached out at the time and asked for a logo for a business that she and her sister wanted to launch. So, I thought, this is it! This is where I get started.
When I talked to my client, I decided to offer them my branding strategy services for free, I just charged for the logo. They both agreed, and even though they wanted to launch their business as soon as possible, they understood the importance of building a solid and consistent brand, so, they decided to pospone the business’ launch for a couple of months, allowing me to develop my very first branding strategy. That’s how Annyanka® was born.
Like any type of complex project, working on this one had its ups and downs, but the overall experience helped me grow and thrive on my own line of business.
Here are a few takeaways that will help you understand what’s behind building a brand to help you thrive on your own.
Start with why
Most business owners start out thinking about the product they’re going to sell. Yes, profit is very important, we all need to pay our bills. But this doesn’t have to be the main focus. As Simon Sinek says, you don’t start with what (the product/service), or how (promotions, discounts, etc). You start with why (for further information, I recommend you watch his amazing TED talk here). Defining why you are doing this, before you do anything else, will allow you to you develop a strong foundation in your branding.
When you have a deeper purpose, other than sales and transactions, you’ll be on your way to make your brand stand out from your competitors in the market (this is the first stepping stone, there are a few other things you’ll need to consider, but I’ll get to that).
This might sound counterintuitive, but you have no idea how many startups have failed because they didn’t have a well established purpose.
I think this quote, from Sunny Bonnel, author of Rare Breed: A Guide to Success for the Defiant, Dangerous, and Different sums it all up:
Don’t have something to sell, have something to say — Sunny Bonnel
Once my clients understood this, they switched their mindset from: “we sell beautifully crafted crochet characters” to “it’s our purpose to create memories filled with love, and we’ll accomplish this by crafting unique characters.”
Build an audience
Defining your target audience is one of the most important things you need to consider for your business. Knowing your audience will help you recognize who you’re talking to. You need to understand their fears and desires, so you can develop a strategy that will actually solve their specific issues.
Yet, it’s important that I mention that building an audience for a new business is not the same as building it for an established one. Although the process is similar, when you’re a well established business, you already have an audience, so it’s easier to develop a buyer persona. For the record, a buyer persona is a fictional character that’s set-up specifically for branding and marketing purposes. He/she has specific demographic and psychographic characteristics that shape an overall type of audience, thus helping businesses understand behaviors and target them with their solutions.
When you’re just starting out, everything’s from scratch. You’re just like a baby taking its very first steps. Developing a buyer persona when you don’t have a clear audience becomes a bit of a challenge. You need to define, with the proper guidance, people you think you could help out and that could potentially become your advocates, so the research becomes much more thorough.
There’s no specific process, but I’ll share with you a couple of ideas you can implement to craft an adequate buyer persona when there aren’t any type of customers in sight just yet:
- Use the scientific method (or sort of): develop a first draft from your hypothetical buyer persona: who are they? where do they live? what do they have in common? Think of anyone you already know that might fit into that profile and interview them (offer them something in exchange, maybe an extract from a course you sell, a sample of your product, etc). Go over your persona’s draft, fix it and voilá, you have your persona. If you can’t find anyone like that around your close circles, then let’s move on to the next idea.
- Use social media profiles: as you know, the biggest social media networks, such as Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn contain all of our personal information. So, if you can’t think of anyone that’ll buy from you, check out the competition; they’ll probably have followers that have some or all of the characteristics you drafted initially. Being that the case, log into your competitors’ pages and gather a few social network profiles from these people. Extract as much information as you can get your hands on and mix it up. There, you have crafted your buyer persona without even leaving your house or having to give away anything.
In Annyanka’s® case, I had to use social media profiles for my research and I ended up mixing up several women’s demographic and behavioral characteristics. As a result, we defined an ideal target: women over 35 years old who don’t have time, but that still want to give their kids a special gift, so they shop online (a colleague of mine actually designed Annyanka’s® online store as soon as I was done with the strategy), and they use platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.
As you can see, information is power, and with that knowledge, it was easier to determine which sales strategy to develop afterwards and which social media platforms were ideal for my clients in order to create brand awareness, direct traffic, and eventually, convert into sales.
Understand your competitors and know your difference
There’s a lot of competition out there. It doesn’t matter what you do, sell or develop, nowadays, it looks like everybody does the same. As I mentioned before, understanding why you do what you do, already gives you a competitive advantage, but it’s still complicated to stand out.
You need to take your time to check out the competition. See what they’re doing right and take a closer look into where the gaps are. No one’s perfect, and certainly one brand’s flaw can become another brand’s opportunity to make a difference. Once you get a clear picture, think about what your brand has that none of the others have. You need to concentrate on finding that missing piece, so when you craft your positioning statement, it will really make your brand stand out of the crowd.
It sounds easy, but you need to be extremely thorough with your competitors’ analysis. When I did it for Annyanka®, I ended up finding out that there are lots of women hand-crafting beautiful characters using crochet as a technique. Although we had a great starting point as a foundation and a clear niche, we knew that we were still missing the piece that would blend everything together.
As I mentioned before, these clients are sisters. The one that contacted me is the operational leader of the project, and the other one develops the crochet characters. In one of our workshops, she mentioned that, besides the amazing knitting talent she possesses, she also writes children’s stories. Bingo! That was the answer, right there; a very small detail, but it made all the difference: these characters would have to be delivered with their own short story… so, just like that, the character comes to life!
It was then when we took a step back and rephrased the original statement: “it’s our purpose to create memories filled with love. We accomplish this by crafting unique characters — and then we added—that tell you stories. Everybody loves stories, so we believe that having this approach will allow our customers to feel more connected with their families, and surely their kids will remember that funny story that came along with their beautifully crafted character. It’s like magic, and we create it for them.”
So, we found the missing piece. There are a lot of crochet crafting businesses. But so far, none of them come with their own story. And just like that, with that small twist, is how we positioned Annyanka®.
Know your voice
So, now that you have understood why you’re doing things, defined an audience and a positioning strategy, you need to develop a personality for your brand.
It’s important for you to understand that people nowadays are pretty tired of having to deal with enterprises and companies; they want to connect with other people. So, what you need to do is to imagine your brand as a person. How does he/she look like? What are his/her core fears? What traits define him/her? But most importantly, how does your brand engage with your audience? And on that subject, you need to think about your buyer persona’s traits again. Who is he/her? What does he/she need from your brand?
Let me give you an example. With Annyanka®, as previously mentioned, the buyer persona is a 35 year old woman. She’s a busy mom and she needs special gifts for her kids; something different, something that has to be created, something magical. So, Annyanka® is a magical witch that will create that special character for her child and share with them a magical story in which that character comes to life.
Knowing this, Annyanka’s® voice has to be playful, friendly and charismatic.
When you develop your branding personality, make sure it’s consistent with your target’s needs and desires. Consistency is key in order to succeed, remember that.
Putting the puzzle pieces together
Up to this point, a lot of work has been put into developing a branding strategy. But all of that is still internal. Here’s where you start crafting your consistent messages for your external communications.
- Develop your core messaging: you have a purpose, how are you going to communicate it with the world?
- Who are you helping? The world? What world? Remember you defined a specific niche. A target audience that needs or could potentially need the solution you provide to them. So, who are they? Speak as if you had them in front of you. You already defined a tone of voice, so use it!
- Communicate your difference: How are you helping them solve their problem where your competitors failed?
- Tell your story: No, not yours. People are more interested in knowing how you solved their peers’ problems. They want to see how you actually changed someone’s life through your brand. But, make it appealing; we all love stories, use your audience’s experiences as a foundation for multiple stories and share them by inspiring others.
- Develop your name, tagline and hooks: A simple name for your brand, not overly complicated, easy to pronounce and easy to find. The tagline; “Just do it” does it ring a bell? That’s because it’s one of the most successful taglines in branding history. Three simple words that inspire, motivate and encourage. Your tagline should reflect everything you stand for in the less amount of words possible. And finally, develop your hook, or in other words, the famous elevator pitch: In three sentences or less, define who you are, who are you helping, how are you helping and why are you different.
- Develop your brand identity design: Oh yeah, finally! Here’s where my colleagues and I come into picture. As I mentioned on my previous Medium article, as designers, we hate designing with a blindfold. We need structured direction, and a branding strategy facilitates a roadmap that’s easy for us to follow, so it’s easier for us to conceptualize and develop a brand identity design that’s consistent with the overall brand. We create a logo that symbolizes and defines what the business does, along with a color palette that is consistent and coherent, and a set of fonts font that actually go along with everything.
In Annyanka’s® case, thanks to the internal strategy, external communications just flowed… naturally. Everything was set-off to work perfectly, just like a clock’s gear.
BONUS TIP, AND THE MOST IMPORTANT ONE: None, I repeat, NONE of the statements we put together for Annyanka® would have worked if my clients haven’t been aligning their whole business processes, graphic design and social media development into their branding strategy. If you are going to invest time and money into building your brand, you need to align yourself and every decision you make to it! If you don’t do this, then it’s just a piece of paper, and a huge waste of time and money. Branding strategy has a purpose by itself: to help you thrive; so go ahead and use it!
One more thing
The final lesson I learned from my experience was this:
- The best way for me to validate my skills and truly gain some insight and real-life experience was by testing them with a real-life project.
- When my clients helped me, they received a full branding strategy that set the foundations for their brand. And my benefit in return wasn’t economic, but thanks to them, I gained experience and received valuable feedback that allowed me to analyze my mistakes, fix them and improve my process before I launched my own brand into the market.
- It’s important to clarify that the way I addressed this project worked for me because I needed the confidence to get started with my venture. It’s not the right or wrong approach; some people just launch and fix mistakes on the way, so do whatever works for you, as long as you grow and succeed.
So, as you can see, there’s a lot of work to put into a branding strategy. I could go deeper and give you much more details of the process, but that isn’t the purpose of this article. My intention is to give you an overall insight on the methodology I use and highlight the key points that I believe will help you thrive.
I’m still on this learning path, but it has been amazing because thanks to Annyanka®, I have landed many projects, and each time, I’ve gained more insights that have helped my own brand building business grow.
I really hope this article gives you a better understanding on how branding strategy works, and that my experience helps you master your own branding processes.
