What is your brand personality?
Although it might seem like a silly question, the truth is that you have one. Whether you are consciously aware of it or not, everyone and every organisation has a brand personality. Whether you think about it or not, people will be forming an opinion about your business based on how they feel when they experience your products and services.
Being a successful organisation isn’t just about having a professional logo or a responsive website – those things can definitely enhance your visual identity as an organization, but they don’t make you who you are as a brand. What makes you stand out from the rest is an outline of your brand identity and communicating that to your customers in a way that represents who you are as an organization as well as connecting with them as people through any pieces of content you decide to share. This connection helps build relationships, which in turn will lead to engagement.
Key points in building a brand personality;
What makes you different?
Take some time to think about what makes you different from other organisations. What is it that you really offer your clients? Not so much in terms of the specific programs, offerings and services but the characteristics you want your brand to convey. Think of things like friendliness, belonging, growth, achievements, self-worth… In other words, what would make people want to interact with your organisation?
Explore adjectives
“Brand personality” is simply your company’s character – the traits that define it in everyday people’s minds. We all want to develop a brand personality for our organisation because it helps potential clients understand what they can expect when dealing with us, and how we interact with them during their experience. Our advice when it comes to building your organisation’s personality is to be playful. Be fun! There are many different adjectives that one could associate with your brand depending on the emotions you would like to drive home when marketing with words. A good tip for using adjectives is by keeping a list handy. When you’re thinking about branding, jot down a few words that will help define the organisational voice you’d like visitors to read on your website, in your emails, or in your printed material.
Know your audience
To ensure that your branding and communication strategy succeeds, you need to know exactly who your target audience is. Try to identify what kind of communication preferences they have and how you can put them right at ease with a branding tone that resonates. What do they like to read about? Where do they hang out online? Are they in their teens or middle-aged adults or seniors? And more importantly, how can communication mirror – or better yet, complement – the experience the target market member already has while interacting with your product?
Set your tone
Keep your tone playful and upbeat by synthesising humour with the choice of words you use to talk about your organisation or product/service, or making it personable – avoid creating an overly formal tone (i.e. too stuffy), as users will tune out immediately. If you let your voice shine through positive affirmations like “we love” or lighthearted exclamations that include words like “best” or “never,” customers feel more comfortable interacting with you than they otherwise might.
Get visual
Sometimes integrating all of your brand’s visuals can be daunting, but you’ll find once you’ve got it done it makes everything so much easier. Whether you’re looking to design your very first logo or it’s time for an image update, picking out colour schemes, finding the right fonts and so on will be essential to finishing the package off. We highly recommend enlisting the services of a professional graphic designer to help you put together a branding guidelines package. Make sure everyone in the organisation has it, refers to it, and uses it all the time.
Of course it goes without saying that if any additional promotion is needed, web design layout is also a great asset – marketing wise at least! The internet has indeed changed how we advertise our brands, but just because crowds hit websites in masses nowadays doesn’t mean graphic design only has space online. It still holds true that strong logos and graphics are some of the best trademarks an entrepreneur could hope for when they’re looking to put their name across. A consistent look and feel is essential, wherever a client comes into contact with you and your organisation.
Conclusion
When it comes to your brand, it is important to think about how you want your organisation to be portrayed. In order to do this, you need to work on defining your brand personality . Your brand personality is essentially the way you want your customers to feel when they interact with your brand. You want them to feel that you offer a great service and that you care about them and the problems they are facing. To help demonstrate this, we’ve put together these aspects that we think can help you start developing your brand personality.
And if you’d like some help with conveying your brand through your website, be sure to get in touch to find out more!