Behind every successful business is a great story. Your branding is the instrument you use to tell your story.
Developing your brand means becoming familiar with your business’s goals, values, characteristics, and personas. This amalgamation of traits will lead you to your ideal client. By identifying your audience and its wants, you can deliver a thoughtful strategy that targets them exactly.
The marketing initiatives and PR efforts that you employ are the action-oriented offspring of branding strategy dedicated to furthering the brand’s legacy through continual planning and execution.
Differentiation is what sets you apart from your competition. The first and foremost way to stand out is through branding and messaging. The people that make up your enterprise; the mission they serve; the people they service—all of these are considered when determining what sets you apart. If you offer the same product at the same price as your competitors, you must differentiate your business. In the wealth management landscape, this consideration is more important than ever. Advisors, their clients, and those who serve advisors, are craving a solution to their individual needs – and want to know who can help them. Make yourself easily identifiable through strong branding and customized messaging.
To match your brand identity, design and visual elements are explored, tested and finalized to create a conceptual guide that will inspire your copy and media relations across all channels. Your business becomes unified, as clients are easily able to distinguish you from the crowd in a theme that is unique to your brand.
After you’ve differentiated and have your creative communication set up building your reputation is next. How are you building and communicating who you are? What you say about what you do needs to be in line with what you do. While it’s true that branding helps to set expectations, you need to follow that up with actions that are in line with that. Content, thought leadership, community involvement, and social media tactics are ways you can reinforce your brand. This builds your reputation. Over time, prospects recognize your business by its reputation, and thanks to branding and messaging, they know what you stand for. As your reputation builds, so does your level of consumer trust.
Monitoring your brand includes feedback, response, data science, testing execution, and user research. It’s important to monitor brand feedback and mentions to respond and act to jump on good publicity or spot a crisis before it becomes a crisis. Regular review leads to regular, responsive brand engagement—from internal stakeholders to end-users.
“There isn’t any significant difference between the various brands… They are all about the same. And so are the cake mixes and the detergents, and the margarines… The manufacturer who dedicates his advertising to building the most sharply defined personality for his brand will get the largest share of the market at the highest profit.”
– David Ogilvy
A strong brand infrastructure and messaging framework built off of your business goals will become the blueprint to the success of your communications. Start a new phase of growth by creating a memorable brand.