Turning Your Startup into a Powerful Brand

A lot of people believe that in order to become a powerful brand, a company must be at least half a century old. This is because when someone mentions a brand, people tend to fixate too much on the greatest conglomerates like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola. In this, they fail to see that some of the greatest brands in the world were not present only few years ago. Facebook, PayPal and Amazon are much younger than some of their counterparts, yet today it is hard to imagine a world without them. Even though you may not aspire to reach such heights, here are few ways in which you can turn your startup into a powerful brand.

Identifying Your Target Market

Those who try to appeal to the majority usually reach no one (or barely anyone) in the end, which is why it might be more efficient to narrow down your focus a bit. First of all, you need to identify your target market. Imagine your average customer. What does he or she look like? Think about the age, gender, education, background and geographical location? What does your average customer need your service/product for? These are just some questions you need to answer in order to be on the right path.

Choosing a Channel

Next, you need to try and find a way to approach them. Keep in mind that the choice of a medium is as important as the actual message you want to convey. For example, it isn’t a mystery that apart from Facebook, millennials are also obsessed with Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat. On the other hand, if you were to appease to baby boomers, you might have better luck with a bit more traditional means of marketing such as billboards, television and radio ads, or even telemarketing.

No matter what, chances are that sooner or later you will have to dedicate a fair amount of time and effort to digital marketing. Here, you will be faced with different issues such as making a decision to go with the app or simply optimize your website for mobile or an adequate company name search. Overall, these subtle choices will greatly affect the future direction of your branding efforts.

Research Your Competition

After you have dealt with this, it is time to resort to a bit of good old industrial espionage. In other words, there is nothing wrong in doing your fair share of research. Start by examining websites of your main competitors. Whenever you see something done right, you can always decide to incorporate it into your own platform. If you notice an error, you will learn how to avoid it. Of course, we are not advising you to do anything illegal, all you need to do is go to their website and impersonate a customer. If it will make you feel better about ‘borrowing’ their ideas, you can even buy something from them.

Be Unique

This last piece of advice sounds a bit pretentious; however, you need to find a way to stand out. Of course, no one is expecting you to revolutionize the industry you just started working in, but you could try to find a fresh approach to at least some of its problems. Finally, don’t forget to play on your strengths in your marketing strategy. If your prices are lower, make sure to emphasize that. Same goes for anything new you introduce in your industry.

Conclusion

Turning your startup into a powerful brand is far from simple, but it isn’t a rocket science either. For those afraid of starting a campaign on a global scale, you can always start local and go from there. A great branding strategy can be done even on a tight budget.