We’re constantly working with start-ups and entrepreneurs looking to get their brand up and running on limited funding. Wondering what they can do to guarantee value from the process and for ways to use the budget as efficiently as possible. So over my next two blogs, I’m going to give you the first few steps to ensure your new brand is targeted and differentiated. These are two of the cornerstones of any good brand strategy and they’re not complicated to do, we’ve lead plenty of clients through the process and now I’ll lead you. You can do this yourself.
Step One: Define your brand’s audience
Sounds simple, but many new clients have a hard time focusing on who their key audience should be. We ask and we get a list of audiences or the reply “We want it to appeal to everybody” and we know we’ve got work to do. So what’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with a brand that appeals to everyone? There isn’t one. Every successful brand has an extremely tight definition of who the primary audience is, who they aim the strategy at, knowing that if they do this audience’s response will influence other audiences. That’s the trick: You don’t try to catch secondary audiences you use your primary audience to do it.
So now rethink who your key audience is and create a persona around them that describes everything about them but most importantly draw out what defines them. And more specifically what defines them in relation to your brand. What is this persona’s particular need or want your brand will fill? The more discerning you are about this persona, the more powerful they will be. They are the first steps in ensuring your brand can be successful.
Tomorrow I’ll write about the second step: differentiation.
Derek Carroll
Derek is the Creative Partner at Truly Deeply, a brand agency with 25 years experience working with brands to position them for growth. His deep expertise is in creating beautiful, effective and unique brand identities that bring strategy to life and resonate with audiences. Derek has extensive experience developing consumer, business, community and government brands.
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