What are the Stages of the Branding Process?

If you’ve been considering establishing a brand, brand strategy and brand process are what we will guide you on. Cloud Vertix knows that we’ve been working on mixed branding. We have recently published a blog on it. Entrepreneurial branding needs to know the must-have stages. That’s why it’s important to learn how we do it. So this blog, we really want to kind of tie everything together and show you how you can build a holistic brand online for your business. 

Pave Your Brand Foundations 

The first thing that you want to think about is your brand foundation. These are the most pivotal aspects to do all of these steps in order. You should start with those foundations. The basic paradigms are your values, your vision, and your voice. These are the instincts that you care about as a brand. You need to define your mission statement and your brand’s story. These are the things that people really connect with on an emotional level. It is really what gets people to buy. It’s not the information that you share or the knowledge that you have, but these things, because people are going to vibe with those values and the vision you have for your company. They are going to want to be a part of that journey, and that’s going to really let them connect with you on a deeper level, which will grow your community that much more. 

Build Your Brand Strategy

Your niche is a paramount passion and profit. It’s something that you should be good at but that you also love doing because the first couple of years in business are hard. So there’s no guarantee that you’re even going to be making money. So you really want to be doing something that you’re passionate about. It can be something that you’re going to stick with long-term, even when things get difficult.

Create Your Brand Avatar  

The next stage of business branding is your ideal client avatar. If you know more about your ideal client, you are going to sell online for better. Our goal is for them to know their ideal client 100% when we work with clients. It means 100% of the time they are connecting with the right kind of people. The right kind of people are getting onto their email list. So you are selling to the right people. Your goal should be to know as much about your ideal client as you possibly can. 

Define Your Selling Proposition 

Your brand’s unique selling proposition is what defines you different from your competitors. What makes you a different t-shirt company if you make t-shirts, than all of the other t-shirt companies? You should learn if it is your personality values vision, and voice that we were talking about with the foundations. What is it? Do you have some sort of awards or more knowledge or expertise than the average person in your industry? Knowing what your unique selling proposition is and really leaning into that will help you get engagement, leads, and sales that much more.

Deck up Your Brand Appearance 

Brand appearance leads us to the third thing, which is your brand appearance. This includes things like your fonts, colours, and logo. Most people skip steps one and two and go straight to this because they think that’s what branding is. However, if you don’t figure out your values, vision, voice, niche, ideal client, and unique selling proposition, then when you go to create your brand appearance, it won’t shine through in terms of who you’re actually trying to connect with. The emotions won’t be there.

State Your Brand Values

If you know what your values, vision, and voice are, then when you go to create the colors for your brand and the fonts, all of that is going to come through in those colors and fonts and make people feel a certain way. If you haven’t learned about color psychology or font psychology, it’s a really deep dive. We don’t want to go into that today, but we would really recommend you read a couple of articles because you need to understand what emotions different colors and fonts invoke so that your brand appearance is coherent with your values, vision, voice, brand foundation, and brand strategy (niche, ideal client, unique selling avatar).

Set Your Brand Visuals

After you’ve done the third step, which is your brand appearance, you move to your brand visuals. Now that you have the fonts, colors, and logo, you can start to create graphics for your social media content, all your marketing materials, and your website. You can start to put your brand onto pages for others to see. Now it’s time to put your brand out there for others to resonate with. If you’ve done those first three steps, step four will be really easy because you’ve laid the foundation to connect with the right audience, resonate with your content, and build a community. 

Anything you do now with your visuals, video, reels, etc., will just enhance your values, vision, voice, and foundations even more. 

Publish Branded Content

The fifth and final step is your branded content. This includes your sales pages, courses, or any product or service that you have. For a product-based business, this includes your packaging and its design. Now, if you’ve got the foundation, strategy, and appearance in place, you can brand all of that onto your sales pages, website, packaging, etc. Your audience will really resonate with it because you’ve done the legwork to figure out who your ideal client is, what resonates with them, what colors and fonts resonate with them, and what are their values, vision, and voice. 

Givebacks of Your Strategy 

When it gets time to sell, it will be a simple sell because your ideal clients feel connected with your brand due to all the foundational work you’ve done. This builds cohesiveness in your ideal client’s mind. They start to see your content and your marketing materials, and it’s all on-brand. You’re using the same colors and fonts, invoking the emotions you want to invoke, and building a community. When it comes time to sell your product or service, it’s very simple because they feel connected with your brand. 

Conclusion 

We hope this was helpful to you in understanding the five stages of branding. We would recommend saving this blog and referring to it because you can do a brand audit right now. Look through all of these things. If you’re struggling with engagement online, getting leads, or selling, one or more of these areas probably need work.  

If you need help with branding, that’s something Cloud Vertix does for our clients all the time. We would be more than happy to sit down with you and see if we can help your brand, do a brand audit for you, or anything like that.