Defining your target audience.
Before beginning the branding process, you need to consider who you want to appeal to.
It’s always tempting when you have a product or a service to sell, to try and appeal to as wide a range of people as possible. Often with the hope that you will attract more clients or customers than you would with a more refined or targeted focus. This is rarely the right approach. In todays digital world, your potential customers are bombarded with more messages than ever before. The way to cut through that noise and reach the people who are more likely to use your services, is to target the right people specifically with appropriate messaging and a brand that speaks to them on a more personal level. You need to think about the kind of people who are most likely to respond to your promotions, products or services. By doing this you won’t alienate the rest of the population, but you will increase your conversions and more effectively build your customer base. By aligning yourself with the most appropriate target audience, you can build a rapport through shared values, which in turn builds a level of trust that keep those customers loyal to you and your brand.
Build a persona.
Before we put pen to paper, we work with clients to build customer personas. A persona is a fictional character who’s goals, characteristics and tastes make up the archetypical customer that your business attract or who you want to attract. The level of detail here can vary depending on the size of the job and the budgets involved, but there are some basic demographics that we consider. Age, sex, their goals, what is important to them and what are they specifically looking for. It’s often a good idea to include personas of your primary customer, secondary customer as well as a persona of those customers that you aren’t yet reaching but want to attract more of. Once you have these personas in place you can think about how to speak to that particular audience and consider what is important to them. For example, you may be targeting a young audience who care about the environment. If so, it’s probably a good idea to communicate to them what your company do to reduce your carbon footprint or perhaps how you’ve introduced recyclable packaging.
Ensure the brand is loved by your target audience, not just you.
It’s very easy to design a logo and build a brand that suits your tastes and that you find visually appealing. This can be the case for the designer as well as the client or business owner. It’s very easy to fall into this trap, and using personas can give both designer and client an anchor to be pulled back to throughout the design process. By having these fictional characters / personas, it makes it easier for the designer and client to keep focussed on who the brand needs to appeal to. Without them it’s very easy to let personal taste get in the way. If our client is a 60 year old selling fizzy drinks to 20 year olds, it would be detrimental to his business for me to create a brand that suited his tastes. With personas we can both refer back to a relevant character and ask the question ‘would this appeal to them?’.
There’s more to a brand than just a logo
Everything from your tone of voice, visual style and company values all add up to creating a brand that will align with what appeals to your target audience. If you own an exclusive, fine dining restaurant for example, the waiter probably wouldn’t have ripped jeans, a nose stud, tattoos and greet you with a friendly ‘Hey guys!’, they probably will in a burger joint. There’s no right or wrong approach, but it does need to fit with the personality of your business and the expectations of your customers. People are attracted to organisations that feel similar to them in terms of personality, taste and the values they hold. If you get this right and are consistent in your approach, you will convert your target audience to loyal customers. To maintain that loyalty you need to build trust. This can take time, but can be achieved by knowing your target audience, what they need and then consistently satisfying those needs in the products or services you are offering.
Summary
The most efficient way to build your customer base is to have a clear understanding of who they are and set a plan on how you are going to target and attract those people. Don’t attempt to appeal to everyone, you’ll end up appealing to nobody, or at least you’ll appeal to people in a diluted way and your message will get ignored and lost in the noise. Once your target audience is established, be disciplined in how you build your brand to appeal to those potential customers, even if their taste may differ from yours. You need to love your brand, and the chances are you’ll be targeting like minded people anyway, but it’s not the most important factor. Once you have a logo and brand that fits, you need to keep that consistent across your business. In terms of logo design, we supply brand guides, but your brand is so much more. Your staff, interior design, tone of voice, social media personality all needs to speak to your target audience and align with their needs and values.
