A Comprehensive Guide for Small Businesses: How to Build A Brand From Scratch

You’ve zeroed in on a great product to sell and you’ve already laid the foundation of your small business. However, you’re still unsure of how to build a brand. If this is the situation you’re in right now, don’t worry - you’re in the right place. This guide will tell you everything you need to know about how to build a brand from scratch.

Be it an online or an offline business, you need to ensure that you build your brand well. Brand building is certainly one of the most important ways to grow your business. However, it is not an easy task to build a brand from scratch.

The reason for this is simple. Whenever you build anything from scratch, you need to put in a lot of effort and planning. The same applies to brand building too.

What exactly do we mean by building a brand? Your brand isn’t just your logo or a recognizable name; it is a lot more than that. Building a brand is about making sure that your target audience perceives your business as a valuable one. It involves factors that you can control as well as ones that you can’t.

Let’s take a look at this step-by-step guide to help you build your brand from scratch.

1. Identify Your Target Audience

Before you learn how to build a brand, you need to first have a target audience in mind. This is the audience you need to focus on when you decide on your brand-building strategies. If you target an audience that is not relevant, all of your efforts will go down the drain.

So you need to identify your target audience on the basis of their locations, demographics, and interests. You can start off by focusing on one or two of the most important audience segments. You can later work on perfecting your targeting for more accurate results.

Remember, having a broad audience means lower relevance to individuals and relevance is all that matters in marketing. If your target audience is small but highly-relevant, you’re all set to build your brand.

2. Research Your Competitors

Remember, you’ll never be the only business in the market. You will always have competitors. While we may perceive competition to be a roadblock, you can use it to your advantage too.

By looking at your competitors, you can learn a lot about how they market their brand. You should check out their logos and the ways they interact with their customers. You don’t necessarily need to follow exactly what they’re doing. However, they will definitely give you an idea of what to do.

You can use them as a base and try to come up with better ways. Competitor research has a lot of advantages. While you can pick up their good qualities and improve upon them, you can also spot the bad ones.

Such research will help you create a strategy to build your brand. Whether you’re looking for how to build a brand from scratch or have a brand already, competitor research always helps.

For online businesses, there are many competitor research tools available out there like SEMrush. While SEMrush can be used to analyze your own website’s performance, you can also use it to analyze that of others.

Image via SEMrush

You can see your competitors’ backlinks, keywords, traffic, ranking pages, etc. All of this data can provide you with valuable insights into how they manage to reach their target audiences. It will also give you information about their target audience as well.

However, if you are just starting out, and don't want to invest money into such software, then you can do your competitor research manually.

Here are some ways to find competitors in your niche and research them:

• Do a Google search for your product category or niche and see what names pop up. Check out their websites and social media pages to understand their brands and how they differentiate themselves from others.
• Eavesdrop on social media or Reddit conversations related to your niche and see what brands are being mentioned the most.
• Search for popular hashtags in your niche and do a hashtag search on social media. See what brands are using those hashtags.

This is nowhere as comprehensive as using a tool, but at least you’ll get a basic lay of the land.

To conclude, if you want to learn how to build a brand, then competitor research is an essential step in the process. Search for your competitors and then build a brand that is different and better than theirs.

3. Make Your Brand Unique

In a pool of a million other brands, it can be difficult to stand out. This is why you need to make your brand unique. Be it your business plan, your product, your marketing methods, or even your customer service.

If you can offer something different to your customers, they will remember you. Try to do things differently than what other brands in your niche are doing.

With competitor research, you will have an idea of what others are doing. You must innovate and come up with something unique to stand out from the rest.

4. Define Your Brand's Focus

When you’re thinking about how to build a brand, you should also keep your brand's focus in mind. Especially when you’re just starting out.

You can’t provide solutions to every problem for everyone out there. You need to focus on what you do best and offer just that. You need to include this in your positioning statement. Your positioning statement talks about how you can cater to the needs of your customers better than your competitors.

Your positioning statement should essentially include your product or service, your target market, and your uniqueness factor. It sends out a clear message about what your brand wants to achieve.

5. Define Your Brand's Personality

One of the most important steps while learning how to build a brand is to identify and define your brand’s personality.

Just because your brand is not a person, doesn’t mean it can’t have a personality. In fact, it is very important to develop a personality for your brand. It gives your brand a more human touch.

You should start by defining your brand as a person from the very beginning. It will help you connect better with your target audience as well.

You should take your time and think about your brand’s personality. Would your brand identify as male or female? As an old person or a young one? What would its mannerisms be like? What are your brand’s likes and dislikes? Based on this information, you can define a complete persona for your brand.

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