By Andy Lai

As a brand, your main goal is to gain traction with your target audiences and possibly retain target audiences. However, many people tend to skip the many steps that allow their brand identity to be a cut above the rest.

In this article, these are some of the methods you can use to help you push the popularity of your brand to a new high!

Determining Your Target Audience

When you are building your brand, it is important to understand who your target audience is. This allows you to tailor your values and mission according to what your target audience will definitely respond to.

The trick is to always be specific. In order to identify your target audience, you must first figure out the behaviours and lifestyle of your consumers.

Here are a few examples of specific consumers you may want to target:

• Tech-savvy young parents
• Executive recruiting professionals
• Single dads working at home

Once you identify their main role in life, you can then tailor your brand identity according to these few points:

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Income
• Education Level

If you are able to narrow these points down, you may also want to figure out their motivations and goals in using your products or services. This ensures your message to these target audiences to be crystal clear and coherent to what they want from your brand.

Establishing your brand’s mission statement

If you still do not have time to ponder on what your company is so passionate about, then your brand is still not as successful as you think it is.

A brand mission encompasses of your beliefs and is the reason why your company exists. It can tell your consumers what your brand strives for, defining and streamlining your thoughts of the brands into a few simple sentences.

Everything from your logo, tagline to your even the tone of your words should reflect to your brand mission. When people ask you what your company stands for, tell them your brand’s mission statement.

For example, we can take a look at Nike’s mission statement. Nike’s mission is ‘To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world’.

Nike’s mission statement is bold and covers all Nike using athletes or users around the world. To put that mission statement to another level, they have also added ‘If you have a body, you are an athlete’. By essentially putting every human on the same level as a professional athlete, they have given every Nike user ownership to their product and expands their target audiences to everyone in the world.

We can also take a look at Public Crane’s tagline, ‘Beyond Bigger and Heavier Limits.’

While this is not a mission statement, their tagline is enough to tell the consumers what they can come to expect from Public Crane’s products. By saying that they do not have limitations to the size or weight that their cranes can carry, their entire tagline oozes the mission statement of Public Crane out.

Before you write your mission, it is important to understand why your company exists for in the first place, and what your company should adhere to for years to come.

Let your brand personality shine

Your brand personality also creates traction for your target audiences and who you want to target in the first place. It should remain humane and relatable to your consumers. If it does not, you may find your brand to be lacking flavour and the ‘oomph’ that attracts clicks and devout consumers.

It should be as simple as:

• A conversational voice in communication (using ‘I’ and ‘You’)
• Telling people about personal experiences
• Quirky ways to describe your products/services

Once you do use the methods above, you should have a skeleton of what your brand should look and feel like. Don’t skip on these steps when you are building your brand!