Brand Management Guide for Startups
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Brand management is all about controlling and maintaining your company’s personality. Just like that friend, if your startup’s brand has a quirk that goes unchecked, it can wreak havoc on your reputation. As a startup saudi arabia numbers you invest time, energy, and resources into developing your brand. The last thing you want is for your reputation to go down the drain because you weren’t on top of things and a controllable situation got out of hand.
What makes up a startup's brand?
Just like human personality, a brand is made up of multiple traits. There are tangible brand assets and intangible ones. Tangible assets include
Brand Name: Is your brand stable and reliable? Or are you the rebel of your industry? You are the one and only ABC Widget Corp; your startup's good name is the first thing people will see and remember you by.
Design Elements: Your logo, color scheme, typography, font, and other elements represent your brand’s personality and how you present yourself to your audience. They are the second thing people will see and associate with your brand.
Content style guide: The attitude and tone with which your content represents your company. All content, whether a blog post, landing page copy, or individual tweet, should adhere to this style guide and be written in a consistent brand voice. Don’t have a style guide? Start by creating a social media branding checklist. You can use our free template.
And we come to the intangibles, which are the most difficult traits to define. That friend with that something that everyone adores, but that no one can put a name to.
Awareness: A general idea of how people view your brand. This ranges from those who have never heard of you to those who are regular followers of your social media presence and repeat customers.
Reputation : What all those people think of you. Is your business thriving on Instagram? What about your blog? What are people saying about you on Yelp? All of this combines to create an overall sense of your brand’s reputation.
Gravity : Brand gravity is the term used to describe brand reputation + awareness + the attraction your brand has on people. Do they know they have to go directly to your website to find interesting content? Or do they find you by chance when they are looking for answers to their problems? When you develop brand gravity, that attraction leads them directly to you.
Loyalty: Do you have a loyal following of repeat customers? Then you have brand loyalty. This is when people come to you first for a solution.
All of these traits and aspects of your brand require regular attention to ensure that things are going well. If you forget to monitor social media mentions for a while and then come back to find a viral thread criticizing your customer service that hasn’t been reviewed for a week without your team commenting or mitigating the situation, nothing good can come of it.
Monitor external influences
We’ve mentioned monitoring your brand’s reputation online, but what does that mean? It means that while you can’t control what people say about you, you can respond and mitigate any negative news you receive.
This includes “social listening”—using your social media profile to observe people talking about your company. Find a positive conversation and jump into it, thanking people for using your widget, offering exclusives to followers, and generally being awesome. You can turn those casual fans into die-hard brand advocates.
And if you do find negative conversations about you, by stepping in and answering questions, addressing complaints, and again, just being generally awesome, you can take those detractors and turn them back into fans.
As a next step in managing your online presence, consider creating a dedicated support account on popular social platforms. If you're seeing increasing traffic on Twitter, create an account for ABCWidgetSupport and direct queries there. This way, you'll have a dedicated place to address brand management concerns on the channel. And, when you have a positive interaction with a follower, you can repost it on the company's main presence to show the world how amazing your startup is at customer support.
Internal Resources: Don't Ignore Them
While you're putting time and effort into keeping an eye on your external influences, don't let your internal resources go unnoticed. This refers to everything within the company, from physical assets to team member morale. Creating a culture that allows people to thrive and truly enjoy their work is the key to building a base of team members who act as brand advocates.
Keep an eye out for any signs of discontent among your workforce and take the initiative. A happy team member is more than willing to act as a brand ambassador when they're out of the office. And so is an unhappy one. Which one would you rather have talking about you to friends and family?
Brand management: It's not just about marketing anymore
In today’s market, startups that understand the power of word of mouth and the pull of the best social media platforms for startups are best positioned to stand out from the crowd. Whereas a solid marketing strategy was once enough to set your widget apart from the rest, today you need to seamlessly combine it with customer service, sales, and even HR to truly thrive.
Maintaining your brand reputation and marketing strategy is like getting to know yourself and your personality traits and understanding how they influence your interactions with friends and strangers. It's how you introduce your startup to the world and make a first impression that will not only last, but will serve to turn strangers into customers and customers into brand evangelists.