Are you convinced you need to create your own brand? Where do you start?

Branding Your Business HOW DO I CREATE MY OWN BRAND?

Are you convinced you need to create your own brand? Where do you start? It needs to do all these things at the same time as establishing your relevance to and building credibility with your prospective customers.

Write A Mission Statement So, let's start by creating a mission What is the mission of your business? Obviously, you're in business to make a profit. But making a profit is a byproduct of a successful business. 

Focus instead on how you choose to achieve that profit. What are your core values? A good place to begin thinking about your mission is to put yourself in the shoes of your customers. Put yourself in their target market. Let's say your business is web hosting. If you're in the market for a web host, what things are important to you? Different people will be looking for different benefits but you can bet that they want their website to be accessible to site visitors so reliability will be high on their list. Price is also likely to be high on the list as is 24/7 technical support. These things will be highly important to some and less important to others.

It is essential, if you are to build your own brand, that you yourself have a firm grasp of who you are, what you do and how you do it. So, focus on the benefits that are likely to be highly relevant to most your target market. Let's settle for our purposes on reliability, price, and technical support. Your mission statement might read something like this: I strive to earn a fair return on my investment of time and money by providing affordable web-hosting with guaranteed 99% up-time and 24/7 telephone technical support; That's a pretty general statement and if you decide to focus on a niche of the web-hosting market, such as small business, you may want to focus on that group in your mission statement more narrowly. Now that you've written your mission statement, you can begin thinking about creating a brand that reinforces and supports your mission. So, getting back to the fundamental questions of who you are, what you do and how you do it, you can now begin to think of your business in these terms. You're a web-hosting provider, you host websites of small businesses and you do that by offering cost-effective web-hosting solutions, guaranteed 99% up-time and 24/7 telephone technical support. When you create your brand, you need to keep the who, what and how firmly in mind but also use the brand to establish your relevance to your target market and build credibility with that market.

If not, you're going to have the devil's own time getting that message across to anyone else, let alone establishing your relevance and credibility. Let's turn now to the details of creating your brand. Describe What You Are Branding List out your business's key features and characteristics, your competitive advantages and anything else that sets you apart from your competition. Using our web hosting example, you'll focus primarily on the objectives from your mission statement namely, reliable, cost-effective web hosting solutions supported by 24/7 technical support. The key elements from your mission statement were reliability, cost-effectiveness, and customer service. List names that are suggestive of these elements. Let's use Reliable Web hosting for our example. (I don't claim to be a creative genius.) Don't limit yourself to real words, though. A coined name with no obvious meaning is a perfectly legitimate name provided it conveys something about your business. You will find coined names easier to trademark and secure domain names for too - a definite plus!