Brand development is the process of creating and strengthening your professional services brand. This gives you a competitive advantage over your competitors, offering you a point of differentiation, helping you build relationships with your customers and more. However, the key to success in today’s busy market is to remember that your corporate brand does not have to be the same combination of competitive analysis, battered personality and traditional communications.

The world as we probably know has limited the corporate brand to the fact that it turned out to be not so much corporate as human. Thus, you no longer just choose a name and logo, you tell a story, create a symbol and create an impression.

As we help firms develop their brands, we divide the process into three phases.

1. The first phase is getting your strategy right and aligned with your business objectives.
2. Second is developing all the tools you will need to introduce the brand, such as your logo, website & intro video for your brand or product.
3. Finally, there is the phase of strengthening your newly developed or updated brand.

Your brand development strategy is how you go about accomplishing these tasks. To make the task a bit easier, we’ve broken the brand development strategy into 6 simple steps.

Examine Business Strategy of Your Brand

How to bring your brand to the market? A strong, well differentiated brand will grow your firm much easier. Your overall business strategy is the context for your brand development strategy, who are your target audience? If you say “everybody” you are making a very big mistake. Our research clearly shows that high growth, high profit firms are focused on having clearly defined target clients. The narrower the focus, the faster the growth. The more diverse the target audience, the more diluted your marketing efforts will be. So how do you know if you have chosen the right target client group? That’s where the next step comes in.

Focus on Key Qualities & Benefits your Brand Offers

Think about why your customers choose you over the competition. Are your products more dependable? Do they have a longer life? Or are they less expensive than others in the market? In many sectors such as fashion, furnishings or manufactured goods, unique styling can be a key differentiator.

Conduct Effective Market Research

Before making significant efforts, you will have to answer a few key questions first.

• Are customers aware of your brand?
• How are you perceived in the market?
• How do customers view your brand compared with others?
• What characteristics do customers associate with your brand?

Market research will help you answer these questions and gather feedback on positioning for your future branding exercise. Brand research is usually conducted by interviewing target audience and organizing focus groups

Create your logo and tagline

The most exciting (and arguably the most important piece) of the brand building process, is to create a brand logo and tagline for your company. This logo will appear on everything that relates to your business. It will become your identity, business card, and the visual recognition of your promise. Remember, your name, logo and tagline are not your brand. They are ways to communicate or symbolize your brand. You must live it to make it real.

Need help branding your business? Hire a professional logo design agency with brand development experience, to help make your brand stand out. Our graphic designers’ expertise will ensure that you get a unique and timeless mark for your business. 

A designer can also develop brand guidelines, to ensure consistency for any future application of the logo and associated brand color palette or fonts. Strong brand style guide will include the following things:

• Logo size and placement
• Color palette
• Typography and fonts
• Iconography
• Photography/image style
• Web elements

Develop Brand Website

Your website is the most important marketing tool you have for business growth and brand building. This is the place that your consumers will visit to learn more about your business, and take action when they are ready. Not only does the user experience have to be exceptional in order to convert, but your messaging needs to tell your brand story. It’s important to have all the right pieces in place. As customers have become online-savvy, it is essential to have a professionally website design with high-end usability and functionalities.

Focus on Digital Marketing

When it comes to digital marketing, it seems we are all familiar with the term and probably also feel we should be doing more of it, what with over 4 billion Internet users worldwide. There’s no question that, in the modern landscape, a big part of your marketing strategy is digital. Consumers and businesses alike are almost always online — and you want to be able to reach them and observe their behavior where they spend the most time. When it comes to digital marketing, it seems we are all familiar with the term.

Types of online digital marketing include:

• Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Social Media Marketing
• Content Marketing
• Influencer Marketing
• Email Marketing