Why Building Your Brand Matters

What is a brand, and, importantly, why should you care?

A brand is the emotional response a person has when they encounter anything related to a specific company, person, website, or other entity. It is the feeling you get when you see a favorite company's logo, or when you get a notification that one of your favorite personalities on social media has a new post.

A brand is a combination of concrete things—like your logo and your company slogan—mixed with the less tangible things like how people feel when they see that logo, memories from childhood, and the emotions that come up when interacting with you. That is a lot of stuff going into that brand. Let's look at what makes a good brand and why building your brand matters.

Why Does Branding Matter?

Building your brand creates recognition, trust, and emotional connection with your audience. Consider these statistics:

Branding and customer-centric Marketing is about putting customers first and providing them with the best possible experience.

Attention Spans, SEO, and Your Brand Focus

Humans have short attention spans. That means if you do not make your branding memorable, nobody will remember your brand! Keep your branding simple, classy, and catchy.

The Rule of 7

From the marketing world, we get a rule that says a person must see your brand seven times before internalizing it. This means some people may recognize your brand even if they do not know what your company does.

You can use this fact to embed your branding in people's brains, to make your company stand out in your field, and to make your brand the one folks remember when it comes time to engage.

Start by making your logo memorable and relevant to what you do. Think about your favorite companies and their logos. How many are directly relevant to the company's industry or product? We would wager the majority of them are.

If your company has a slogan, use it in your logo. Now there are words associated with the visual form of your logo, making it more likely that people will remember what your brand looks like and what it does.

For Strong SEO, Brand Matters

Google's algorithms now take into account something called "brand gravity." This is the combined pull of people searching for your name, your brand's name, AND the keywords you have optimized your content for.

That means the stronger you embed your brand in your audience's minds, the more likely they will remember your brand when they go to Google for solutions. And every time they search your company name or slogan together with the keywords, they get your site and your content. The more that happens, the more likely it is to continue happening until you are at the top of the results page.

Try Changing Your Brand Marketing Focus

If your marketing is all about the numbers—to the detriment of your brand—think about shifting your focus. You can harness extra marketing mojo by focusing your marketing content on your brand's unique voice (more details on voice in 3 paragraphs), pulling in the folks who know and identify with your brand.

Speaking of Content

Your content should be created in the voice of your brand. That means website content, social media posts, and blog posts should be easily identifiable to the public as having been created by your company. This content must be informative while considering your target audience and how they are likely to react. Make it too formal or stuffy, and you will lose the millennials, for example.

The Three V's: Voice, Values, Vision

• Voice: Your content should have a unified sound. Your blog posts should flow like your Facebook updates and Tweets. If your content is not consistent with how people see your brand elsewhere, they will lose trust in what you are presenting because it will seem inauthentic.
• Values: Your brand should also encompass your company's values. This authenticity breeds trust in your audience. Your product has a finite lifespan; your brand and the values it represents are timeless.
• Vision: Employees who believe their company's vision matches theirs are happy. And happy employees are better positioned to be brand ambassadors when not at work.

An old maxim, "Know Thyself," applies to this discussion. If your company does not have a strong sense of its brand (voice, values, and vision), there is work to be done. How do you find out if that is the case? Easy. Ask your employees. If they cannot identify it, the public will not be able to either.

Learn From Other Areas of Marketing

Specifically, one called Recruitment Marketing. This sub-field focuses on attracting passive job seekers to a company before they are ready to look for a new job.

Recruitment marketers do this by focusing on their Employer Brand. We have been discussing this here, but focused on working for the company rather than buying its products.

The marketer focuses on the emotion evoked when the job seeker thinks about the employer. These marketers use a consistent voice across platforms to convey the values and vision of their company. Then, when the audience realizes that it is time to look for a new place to work, they remember the unique content created by the recruitment marketers, and they go straight to that employer's careers page to start searching.

Let this idea translate to your company brand. Use your unique voice—across platforms like your blog and social media—to convey your brand to the world of potential customers out there. Provide them with interesting, useful content that helps solve a problem they are having in your brand voice. Then, when they realize they need more help with that problem, who do you think they will come to? That is right. The first brand that comes to mind will be yours.