In order to be successful and seen in the marketplace, businesses must cultivate a unique outward expression that connects your business to your audience, yet differentiates you from your competition. This outward expression is called a brand personality and is comprised of a defining set of emotional and associative characteristics based around your business’ sincerity, message, voice, and aesthetic appearance. When done correctly, a brand personality will convey your business’ essence but will remain flexible enough to evolve and grow as your business does. In this article, we are going to take a look at the importance of creating a brand personality and a few simple steps you can take to establish one for your business.
Why Is Having a Brand Personality Important?
Having a brand personality is critical for businesses who want to cultivate a unique image, voice, and perspective that individuals connect and associate with. When you have a brand that is recognizable or one that resonates with customers, not only do you have a platform that you can reach out with, but you help bring awareness to your business. Beyond this, a brand personality will familiarize individuals with your products, services, and as such, customers will place a higher value on what you have to offer them since they are familiar with you and your identity. When customers buy into the culture or lifestyle around your brand, they will associate more with your products, will see your business in a more positive light, and will feel more loyal to you.
6 Steps For Creating a Brand Personality
- Make Sure You Create The Right Look. A major part of your brand personality is the identity that you push through the design process. Your business’ identity will come from the culmination of your company logo, your website, your image choice, the colors you use, and the typography you present to your audience. Choosing the correct elements and matching them to the lifestyle, voice, and message of your brand brings your personality together with one unified look.
- A serious brand may choose a darker colour palette, serif typefaces as these are more formal and mature, as well as hard edges and open spaces.
- A casual brand may go for cooler colours as these are more relaxed and calming as well as choose sans serif typefaces as these are modern and agreeable. Landscape images are a popular choice for brands that leave certain messages open to interpretation, and round elements are more casual.
- Show Off Your Lifestyle. When you share the culture around your business, customers will feel more attached to your brand. If your brand’s lifestyle is adventurous, creative, and fun – customers are going to love watching a behind-the-scenes of your employees living that type of lifestyle. When you showcase this with pure transparency, your customers know that you are being authentic and will thereby emotionally connect to you better.
- Create Unique Lingo That Is Specific to Your Company. Once you are aware of what your brand personality is, you can craft your business’ voice and the lingo used, around it. For instance, your brand could be vibrant and energetic, traditional and stoic, affordable and friendly, luxurious and sophisticated, or casual and funny. Is your brand light, serious, old, young, and is it more feminine, masculine or non-binary? Identify where your brand falls into categories like these and then make a list of keywords that could be used strategically in communications that support the voice of your brand. These keywords should be used across social media profiles, throughout advertising, in your brand’s blog, and through external and internal communications.
- Engage on Social Media & Take Time to Respond. When you take time to respond to your customers, it increases your credibility as it makes you more trustworthy and puts your customers at ease. It also shows that you care about them and that you are willing to take the time to respond and build a meaningful relationship. In addition to this, it can take people who are being negative towards your business and turn them into loyal customers by giving them the attention needed to solve the problem they are having. Finally, customers expect you to respond and engage with them through social media and if you don’t, it’ll feel like you are ignoring them which is definitely not what you want.
- Grow Your Network on LinkedIn. Every single business wants to be seen and one great way of doing that is by using social media marketing. Although Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter all offer their own benefits when it comes to reaching your intended audience targets, it is LinkedIn that allows your brand to reach a higher amount of professional visibility. With over 500 million individuals signed up on the platform, business professionals can network with one another without traveling anywhere, the platform offers the ability to generate new leads, and you can network to specific businesses in your market. Beyond this, by optimizing LinkedIn profiles of your business’ employees, you can use your brand’s unique voice to invoke the emotional side of the brand across the professional sphere.
- Make In-Person Appearances by Speaking at Conferences. When it comes to business and public speaking, not enough actually engage in conferences, which is a shame since there are plenty of benefits to be had. When businesses speak at conferences, they generate more sales, showcase that they are thought leaders, obtain free publicity, and get access to increased visibility, all of which will increase your visibility and network.
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