Have you ever wondered why some brands effortlessly grab our attention and evoke strong emotions, while others struggle to make any impression at all?
The secret lies in executing your brand properly. It’s so much more than just having an awesome logo or a catchy tagline – it’s about creating a consistent and compelling brand experience across everything you do.
There are several elements to creating and executing your brand identity the right way, so the next several weeks we’ll dive into each component and how to execute it.
Today, I’ll explore the foundation that contributes to successful brand execution, so you can work on doing the same for your business.
Establish your identity & voice
When you’re creating a brand that you want to be remembered, you’ve got to start with the foundation — your brand identity.
What is your brand identity? And how do you really figure that out?
Your brand identity encompasses who you are as a business — what are your values? Your mission? What do you stand for?
Ask yourself these questions, and then determine your brand voice. Do you want your business to be perceived as friendly? Professional? Quirky? Fun?
Your business should have a personality of its own — this may just be your own (unless you’re boring, then don’t do that ????), or it may be an altered persona that is more outgoing or humorous to contribute to the brand you want people to interact with.
Practicing writing in your brand voice by coming up with various marketing materials, such who you are for an About page on your website, a call to action in a newsletter, or a post on social media.
It’s important to understand that you should always be thinking of your audience — so often today we see big brands create real connections with social media followers because of their brand persona.
Take Wendy’s for instance:
The way Wendy’s has taken their Twitter account to execute a brand persona that’s fun, snarky, and entertaining has landed them in headlines multiple times (for good reasons).
Wendy’s executes a persona that resonates with a very large, specific audience and, funny enough, has helped them grow their following — not because of their food, but because of their tweets.
But with more followers comes more opportunity to promote their food to a larger audience they have curated and lured in with intention.
Pretty smart, eh? It’s good marketing, and they’ve done it well.
But the key here is they don’t stray from this brand voice that has brought them success.
So if there’s anything to take away from what Wendy’s is doing, is define the audience you want to reach, create your brand persona that will resonate with that audience, and execute it. Over and over again.
At the end of the day, always keep your brand values and mission in mind — you don’t want to make a fun Twitter account if it won’t help you market your brand and services.
Do it for the right reasons, properly, and you’ll be able to establish a brand identity that your audience will love and draw to.
Next week, we’ll dive into the next component of executing your brand — establishing brand guidelines.
See you next time,
