Building Your Brand First, Before Building a Business

Before you start pushing products and services, trying to get new customers, focus on building your brand first. It may seem backwards in the way you should build your business, but it’s actually not and far from it. You can’t expect to build an empty business with no brand, with nothing for customers to connect to, especially nowadays. You need to establish yourself and start building your brand first, here’s why:

Establish Who You Are & What You Do

You need to work on yourself before you can start working customers. What does your brand represent, and how will you deliver that message to your customers? What will make your brand unique? What’s so different about what your brand compared to current and potential competition? What is the style of your brand design and theme? Flat, modern, traditional, simple, clean, retro, etc. What will the messaging style of your brand be? Educational, promotional, funny, sympathetic, empathetic, antagonizing, supportive, etc.

Build Something People Can Trust

In order for anyone to buy from you or listen to what you have to say, you have to gain their trust and respect. Your brand should be what people trust and should help propel customer loyalty. The emphasis and core component of your brand should be about staying transparent and beneficial to current and future customers. Whether this be through your message, content, or accessibility, your brand is what will get customers to purchase products or services from you. More importantly, your brand is what will either encourage or prevent customers from telling friends and family about what you do and what you provide for people.

Grow Your Brand & Learn From Feedback

Finally, you want to make sure you grow your brand and improve the authority status you’ve gained within your field or industry specialty. Build on the trust and momentum you’ve attained throughout the process of creating, designing, implementing, and distributing your brand online. Most importantly, you want to learn from the feedback, complements and criticism you’ve received from your targeted audience. This information is more important than any metric, stat, or number you read from whatever business resource you like to refer to.

Your brand is your business. Without a brand, you have no business. Without a brand, you have no customers. Instead, you have this empty plan to make money with nothing for your customers to reach out to, say yes to, say no to, leave suggestions for, or tell others about. So before you go ahead building your business, think about building your brand first, and how your brand will affect your customers.