Colour palette

Contents

  1. 1. Step 1: Research your market and target audience
  2. 2. Step 2: Define your brand vision
  3. 3. Step 3: Find your unique value proposition
  4. 4. Step 4: Design your brand identity
  5. 5. Step 5: Launch your brand
  6. 6. Start your branding strategy on the right foot

Branding your startup

October 6, 2021
Your business brand represents who you are, what you do, and the audience that you serve. The brand identity that you create is what makes your business unique, memorable, and eventually, familiar.This is key, as brand awareness can influence buying behaviour, loyalty and advocacy—all important criteria for growth and business success.  To get it right, you need an effective branding strategy. In this blog post, we’ll dive into the steps it takes to build a brand, from researching your target customers to setting yourself up for success on launch day. 

Step 1: Research your market and target audience

Successful branding starts with identifying the right prospects to target. That way, as you prepare to launch your business, you’ll have a deep understanding of the audience you’re aiming to reach. Researching the market involves uncovering your target audience’s demographics, which include:
    Age Gender Location Income and education levelProfessionChallenges and goals
Don’t forget to also identify who your competitors are, too. You should be able to answer the following questions during your competitor analysis:
    Who are the top companies in your industry? What makes their solution so successful?What are the gaps in the product or service that your solution can fill?Where does their target audience hang out (both online and offline)?How do they communicate and reach out to customers?
Studying your competition and their branding strategies will provide you with clues about what’s working for them, along with ways that you can stand out from the crowd.

Step 2: Define your brand vision

Your brand vision is the values that your company stands for, along with how it strives to improve your customers' lives. Defining it will help lead your branding strategy in the right direction and provide your team with purpose. Here are examples of powerful brand visions from some of the world’s top companies:
    Nike: “Bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.”Tesla: “To accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.”LinkedIn: “To connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.”
Don’t know what your brand vision is yet? Here are questions you can ask yourself to identify the “why” behind your startup, according to Simon Sinek’s “The Golden Circle”:
    What are we doing? What actions does your organisation take day by day? What are the products or solutions you plan to offer for customers? How are we doing it? Think about the process that your organisation goes through to deliver value to your audience. What is your company roadmap and process? Why are we doing it? Answering this question allows you to identify your company’s values. Why did you choose to launch your business in the first place? What motivates your team to get up each day and do what they do? 

Step 3: Find your unique value proposition

Your unique value proposition (UVP) is what makes your startup stand out from the crowd and encourages customers to choose you instead of the competition. It’s an essential part of the messaging you’ll be putting out during your launch. Here are three strategies you can use to identify your UVP:
    Define the problems you’re solving for customers. Think about how you’re improving the lives of your customers. What pain points and challenges are you helping them overcome? How do you help them achieve their goals?Identify your unique features. What functionality does your product have that the competition doesn’t? You can highlight these features in your UVP to convince your target audience to choose your product over others. Collect recurrent positive feedback. What good things do your customers often have to say about your product? A useful tactic to uncover this information is sending user surveys via email or social media.

Step 4: Design your brand identity

It’s during this stage that everything starts to come together. Here are the critical design components you’ll need to work on when branding your startup:
    Logo. Your company is one of the first things that your audience will see. Make sure to create a logo that is memorable and catches the attention of your customer.Colour palette. Your brand’s colour palette should have three different colours: base, accent, and neutral. The base colour is for personality. The accent colour should complement the base visually. And the neutral colour should act as a background.Typography. Look for fonts you can use that align with the mission and messaging of your startup. You can leverage various open-source resources such as Google Fonts to find the perfect fit. Or, if you have the resources, create your own.Imagery. The imagery your startup uses has a significant impact on your brand identity. It needs to be consistent with other aspects of your branding, such as your logo and colour palette.
Unless you currently have someone specialised in design within your startup, the help of a freelance designer or agency will be necessary during this phase. 

Step 5: Launch your brand

This is where the magic happens. After doing all the hard work of researching your market, audience, and competitors, identifying your unique value proposition, and creating your branding design, you need a detailed launch plan. Here’s how you can ensure that your brand launch is a success in seven steps:
  1. Set a launch date. Give yourself a date on which you’ll be going live, and ample time to ensure everything is ready without rushing and risking making mistakes. 
  2. Create an event schedule. To make sure the launch data is as successful as possible, create a calendar with a set of important events you must achieve before the big day. This could include key dates where you’ll release press releases or a soft launch to test out any kinks before the full product rollout. 
  3. Create a need-to-know sequence. Make a list of the internal and external stakeholders you’ll need to inform about your brand launch. These include board members, partners, donors, sponsors, influencers, and more. 
  4. Build anticipation with social media. You can spread the word about your upcoming launch by announcing it on your social media channels. To take things up a notch, you can run paid social advertising campaigns to target your ideal customer and inform them about the launch. 
  5. Build an email list. Along with social media, you should also be focusing on building an email list of prospects. It’s one of the most effective channels to keep your audience engaged and up-to-date with company announcements. 
  6. Develop a communication and content marketing strategy. Think about the content you want to put out to educate your audience about your launch. This can include videos, webinars, white papers, case studies, eBooks, blog posts, and more. 

Start your branding strategy on the right foot

Successful branding is key to making your startup stand out from the crowd and optimising everybody’s first experience with your brand. By following these steps, you’ll have a roadmap to set up a branding strategy that will set the foundation for your future success. Even if you plan to eventually rebrand your startup down the road, you can apply the same tips to develop a fresh new start. 
Caroline Wire
Caroline WireFreelance Copywriter

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