Your brand is the most important thing to your business. It’s not only how you present your business, but how customers, prospects, and even competitors see you. So you should protect it like a lioness protecting her cub. Rawr!
So what is a brand?
To start, your logo is a big part of it, but it doesn’t stop there. Your brand is more than just the visual representation of your business name. Your brand is in everything you do as a business—or at least it should be. Advertising, literature, messaging, presentations, how you answer the phone, website, emails, product and service quality, the tone of your copy writing…literally the desired perception of your business in the marketplace should all reflect your brand.
Why brand?
Because all of these components can either help or hurt your business. What does good branding do?
- Communicates the purpose of your business
- Solidifies the credibility of your business
- Allows your prospects to have an emotional connection to your business
- Motivates the customer or prospect to purchase from you
- Delivers the message clearly and visually
- increases customer loyalty
- Differentiates you from the competition
- Makes it easy for customers and prospect to quickly recognize your business
Of course brand does so much more, but those are some of the biggies. Suffice to say, your brand is important to your business and you should not leave it undefined, unclear, or incomplete. Then when you have a strong brand, protect it with everything you have, because if your company’s brand is unrecognizable, damaged, or just unclear, then so is your business.
“It’s not that big of a deal, it’s just the font on my logo.”
I’ve heard this one before. Here’s a little scenario:
You need new business cards, a new sign, or new brochure. You call on a different printer or graphic designer than you did last time. You don’t have the logo file to give them. Sometimes they just want to give you something a little different. There are lots of reasons why “these things happen”, but just think about how differently the you perceive the EVH Marketing brand just by seeing these examples.
All very different from the brand you see reflected visually on my website, in my copy writing, my tag line, and here in my actual logo:
Remember this: Your logo is important, the font and colors are important, even the level of formality is important. Don’t let anyone change it unless your aim is to change your brand.
If you need help defining your brand and then protecting it, contact EVH Marketing today.
There are lots of reasons why your business may not have marketing staff: you may not have 40 hours of marketing work to be done each week, you may not be able to afford salary and benefits for additional employees, or maybe you just don’t want those goofy marketing people dancing around the office everyday.
Neither is marketing. Alright, I wouldn’t begin to presume marketing is anything close to brain surgery, but the point is why would you do the marketing work yourself when you can work with a marketing expert?
Marketing isn’t about the latest, greatest, coolest, fanciest, funkiest, most award-winning…”campaign”. Yep, all those things are pretty good, but what’s most important is your business. Well, that and getting more of it.