Starting a new business includes a lot of hard work. Every day you have to juggle between many tasks; meeting investors, recruiting people, sweet talking with clients and managing contractors. With so much daily commitment, you are left with very less time for important stuff. But, if you want your startup to grow healthily, you will need a unique identity.

Brand reputation and position is something that is built up slowly and earned over a time. Having said that, the actions you take at the initial stages of branding will dictate where your brand will move ahead in the future. It is important to get things right from scratch. Here are some important things you should know about branding your startup with the help of a branding agency in Seattle, New York or Los Angeles.

1.       Define Your Brand Clearly

The majority of the startup founders has a clear idea about things they are trying to accomplish. However, when someone asks them what their company does, they come up with an explanation of conceptual solutions rich with technical jargons that are not easy to understand. This is not good.

The best way for effective branding is coming up with a simple descriptive sentence. It’s okay if the sentence is not long enough and does not convey everything you do. The point is to achieve clarity while communicating your brand. For example, the branding of Nike has just three recognizable words – Just Do It. It does not say anything about their shoe business. The tag line has become a communication model for the company that is relevant to all fitness enthusiasts.

1.       Craft a Visual Identity for Your Brand

“Picture speaks a thousand words” and it holds true for branding. Your Logo is the first visual your customer gets about the company. Your logo should represent your business in some way.

The famous Amazon logo has an arrow starting from alphabet “A” to alphabet “Z” which also looks like a smiley that tells customers the company wants its customer to be happy. So you need to make sure, your startup logo tells some story to your customer.

1.       Brand Positioning

Positioning means giving information about your business. In simple words, it’s communicating what you stand for a specific customer segment in the market. Your brand positioning should clearly tell what problem in the industry/society your startup is trying to solve.

Brand positioning is different from taglines. Positioning statements are more for internal use. For example, when zipcar.com was launched in 2001, its brand positioning statement was “To urban-dwelling, educated techno-savvy consumers, when you use Zipcar car-sharing service instead of owning a car, you save money while reducing your carbon footprint.”

The above brand positioning clearly states the target market and the problem the startup was trying to solve.

1.       Bringing Customer to the Brand

Today, you need a strong presence in the mass media to get recognition for your brand. You can give advertisements in the newspaper, but that is not enough. Your customer is dispersed across different marketing channels and you need to explore every marketing channel you know where your customer exists.

You can use SEO, Social Media and YouTube to get attention of your customers. Given the short attention span of customers, startups need to develop a strong brand marketing plan and put in consistent efforts to stay in the limelight so that your brand in always in front of your customers until it becomes memorable and easily recognizable.

1.       Customer Service That Supports Marketing Efforts

Every brand that stands strong today is able to achieve the position only because of exceptional customer service. For example, if you Google about Amazon’s customer service, you will find several examples where the CEO, Jeff Bezos gives high importance to every issue faced by customers. There are examples of customers amazed by the action taken by the online retail giant just to make the customer happy.

Your customer service needs to back up claims made in marketing campaigns. If it does not, your brand will attract negative reviews that can be disastrous. Make sure your operations team always reads about the action taken by the marketing team to build your brand. Never forget, you need to always put customers first.

Do you recognize any other branding elements that need to focus by startups?