Building a brand is about eliciting an emotional response with customers every time they hear your name, read your tagline, or see the colors of your logo. Considering that many purchases are emotionally-driven rather than financially-driven, building a strong brand is of the utmost importance.

When it comes to building a brand, both new and established businesses tend to struggle. Here are some reasons why overcoming the challenges when brand-building is essential, and a few tricks to making it work.

Your Brand Drives Your Business

Your brand encapsulates what your business stands for and what it strives to be. The design elements and how it conveys itself directly impacts the overall success of the business. In a nutshell, it’s your identity, upon which brand recognition is built. Your customer base will be more comfortable giving their money– a limited resource– to someone they know they can trust rather than a nameless, faceless entity. Your brand is what makes your business seem like a trusted friend or helpful neighbor, rather than a company set on becoming rich.

If you are a business owner who is struggling to build a cohesive brand, outsource to agencies and designers who can handle that work for you. Afterall, you want your customers to come to your business rather than taking a DIY approach, so why wouldn’t you do the same with business tasks that aren’t your forte. For more on this topic, take a look at why paid search in-house is a bad idea by Fang Digital Marketing.

It Sets You Apart in a Saturated Market

Unless you are a highly skilled inventor who owns all the patents on your invention, chances are you have some competition in the marketplace. More likely, you have a ton of competition. Think of it this way: when you go to the store to buy soda, there are a ton of different flavors and brands. There is the same flavor or style offered by different brands. Finally, there are a ton of different drinks other than soda you could choose from. With seemingly endless choices, how do you choose?

You will likely choose your favorite flavor of soda. Unless you are extremely frugal, you’ll likely choose a brand name over the store brand. From there? You’ll choose whichever brand is your favorite, because you have an emotional response to that brand. Thus, strong branding has made you choose a specific type of drink out of hundreds of options available.

Your Ticket to Free Advertising

Consider for a moment, the Nike brand. Nike is a world-renowned brand, with one of the most recognizable logos ever. In wearing a visible Nike logo, consumers are advertising the brand to other potential buyers, who then make a point to spend their money on Nike products. Furthermore, they’re paying Nike a substantial amount of money to be able to do it.

With brand recognition comes the opportunity for free advertising. Word-of-mouth referrals increase and people walking around with images of your logo on their clothing, books or lunch packaging attracts more customers. Strong branding means that even when someone forgets your name, your colors and imagery provide a visual reminder so they can find you later.

Building a rapport with customers, directing the design of your advertisements and websites, and navigating the course of your business all come back to the success of your core brand. If there’s any aspect of your business you should invest in, it’s this.

About onlinedrea

Andréa Jones is a social media strategist who works with lifestyle brands to build their online presence through targeted social media and content marketing solutions. She's also the founder of SavvySocialSchool.com - a membership community with everything you need to achieve visibility, growth, and engagement on social media.