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Building A Strong And Successful Retail Brand Image

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Brand|Building A Strong And Successful Retail Brand ImageWhen it comes to attracting customers to your retail business, again and again, there are several areas that you could focus on to make a real difference. Having good levels of a varied choice of popular products will help you to a broad extent. However, having a recognizable and memorable brand will make sure that your company sticks in the mind of your customers and will help them to remember and choose you in the future.

A Visually Recognizable Store

A recognizable storefront help to create a lasting impression in the memories of your customers. This means having a bold logo that represents what your brand is all about. While you don’t need to have anything literal in your logo that shouts about the type of products you sell, if you’re a new company or your name gives no indication of the type of products you sell, this may be a helpful option.

Hire a graphic designer to create a logo and signage for the front of your store. Having well-designed branding will make a big a big difference when it comes to creating a lasting and professional impression.

But branding should not just be on the front of your store, you need to remind your customers where they are when they are inside your store. Branded signage can be used around till points, shelve-edge graphics, branded point-of-sale, posters, and if possible, on your product packaging. Using branded carrier-bags, till receipts, and promotional material will also help.

A Team That Meets Your Brand Standards

Branding is not just about your logos, store fit, and promotional material though. Your team should also represent your brand in both their appearance and how they approach your customers.

Having a distinctive image for your team is crucial as it will make your team identifiable. Whether you want your staff to wear a uniform is up to you, however, if you choose to allow your team to wear their own items of clothing then you should set some standards to ensure that they meet your brand expectations. Consider getting custom lanyards to let your customers know who is a team member.

Setting out your customer service expectations is crucial. This means working out how you want your customers to view the service experience. Instilling your ethos in everything that you do is important. If your brand wants to stand for value, quality, great service, or its ethical stance, then you need to pick the message that you want to put across in your branding.

Social Media

Your business needs to think about how the brand is represented on social media. Having a presence on the major social media sites is crucial if you want your business to thrive. When you use these sites, you should make sure that you are maintaining a standard of communication that is in keeping with the message that you want to put across to your customers. This will mean deciding the type of tone that you want to communicate using, as well as the types of posts and interactions that you will be providing.

4 Rules To An Effective Logo

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Logo|4 Rules To An Effective LogoAnyone who has ever thought about trying to market a business or design a brand will know how important the logo is. And anyone who thinks about this for a moment will be able to determine why it might be quite so important too. Without an effective logo for your business, you can’t really expect it to do what it is meant to. A good logo will draw in attention to your business, make it considerably more popular and make the marketing a lot more effective on the whole. It will have a way of making the brand stick in people’s minds. If you want to make sure that you are achieving all this, then you are going to need to think about what you need to do to make an effective logo. In this article, we are going to look at just a few of the most important rules for making that happen.

Simplicity

One of the most important things you can say about the design of a logo is that it needs to be perfectly simple. The simplicity is what draws people in and it is for that reason that you need to think about working on this as well as possible. The irony here is that simpler designs are often the most difficult to create, and you will probably find that you are going to have to think about it long and hard before you can create a simple logo design which works. At the other end of the scale, you don’t want it to be over-simplified, as that is going to mean that it is completely ineffective in that way instead. So find this balance as well as you can if you want to really make sure that your logo is going to be effective.

Application

The way that the logo is applied is as important as the design, so we’ll take a moment now to discuss this too. Application in this sense means where you put the logo, and how you use it. You need to make sure that it is going to be effective for the branding of the business, which probably means using it wherever you would have your brand appear. But that can be hard if your logo is not likely to lend itself well to various specific kinds of places. You want to try and design a logo, therefore, that will look good anywhere. If you see your logo on a drawstring backpack, you want to feel that it looks right, as well as seeing it on a letterhead, the side of your building, or on the news. Think about the application from the start, and you should be able to have much more success with your logo.

StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Logo|4 Rules To An Effective LogoOriginality

All of this is unlikely to be effective unless it is also original, so make sure that you are working on that too. Originality is hugely centrally important to your logo being successful, and it is something that can be hard to make a reality. If your logo is not original, then that ultimately means that you are going to have trouble with people considering it to be anything special. You want to stand out, in short, and that is not going to happen if your logo does not stand out from the others as well as possible. The best way to achieve strong originality is to make sure that you are focusing on what it is that makes your business unique, and then trying to introduce those elements into the logo itself as best as you can. You can do this more easily than you might think, and it is going to mean that your logo is much more successful indeed.

Boldness

As well as the above, you are also going to need to make sure that your logo is bold. It is very difficult to achieve this in line with the other rules, especially simplicity, but that is why it is so effective when you make it work: after all, that means that you are going to be able to expect much more from your marketing overall. Having a bold logo that really makes a visual impression in a strong way is hugely important for your marketing and branding, and something that you need to work on as much as possible to make it a reality.

If you can make these things come true, your logo is going to be much more effective, and your business will have much more luck in general, so make sure you focus on these.

How to Create Strategy-Driven Branding for Your Business

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Branding|How to Create Strategy-Driven Branding for Your BusinessCreating strategy-driven branding is a matter of creating marketing materials that are simple, easy to remember, and effective. Creating a great logo, however, is only just the beginning. You need to be strategic about where your branding is found, and think about how you can use your branding as more than just an image. You can create a movement surrounding your brand by making your company into something of a cult object. Not every business will be appropriate for such a move, but every business can benefit from using these steps to improve their branding and marketing efforts.

Create a Brand Identity

First things first, you need to either create or remake your brand identity. A brand identity is comprised of a few key components:

Logo

Your logo needs to be easy to recognize, simple, and it needs to have the ability to stand out. Consider some of the top brands today, and the logos that they use. Their logos are, in most cases, so recognizable that brands can use just the logo on their advertising.

Personality

The brand personality you use will be how you speak. How you sound in advertisements, social media, on calls, and on your on-site copy.

Design

Take your logo and your personality and choose design elements like symbols, colors, fonts, and more that will work as a way to reinforce your brand.

Packaging

Put the design onto packaging and make it beautiful. You can sell a lot off the shelves with beautiful packaging, and you might even be able to benefit from social media marketing if customers feel compelled to photograph your product and its box.

Store Design

If you run a physical store, then it’s time to work out how well it is designed. Start first with the layout. Ensure it is easy for multiple people to get through the layout, ensure it encourages as much organic browsing as possible, and then figure out what design elements you can add to really make your store pleasant to be in.

Work On Providing a Clear Workplace Culture

A clear workplace culture can help in many ways. It can help boost the workflow and efficiency of your business. It can also give your employees the groundwork on how to behave so that your customers can enjoy a familiar, professional experience every time they visit.

Ethos

Your company ethos is the goal you have for your workplace culture. It is the expectation that everyone needs to follow. It could be hard work and great laughs, for example, to promote a workplace culture that is productive and enjoyable to be in. By deciding on an ethos, everyone knows better what to expect and can work together to make your workplace culture goals into a reality.

Teamwork Building

You don’t want friends working together. You want a team working together. Investing in teamwork building will give everyone a basis on how to behave so that work can get done, ideas can be challenged, and collaboration can thrive without fights.

Team Unity

Team unity is fundamental when it comes to building up a strong and healthy working culture. There are so many ways you can do this as well. If your business deals with animals, for example, a kennel or a groomer, then you can treat all of your employees to an animal lover’s license plate frames. These custom license plate frames suit all types of professions and can give your employees a sense of community that is personalized to them.

Adapt and Tweak Your Brand

It’s okay if you don’t get your brand identity right off the bat. The goal is to create branding and then tweak it as you go. This way you can use what works and discards what fell flat, both for your customers and your employees. It’s how you will create a uniform, quality company that everyone will enjoy.

The Take Away

You want your customers to recognize your brand instantaneously and to feel like your company is familiar no matter who they interact with or which store they visit. It’s what makes fast food restaurants so successful, especially to those who are traveling. A guest to a food chain can expect the same quality of food and service as they would get anywhere. This is how you build brand loyalty and repeat business.

Accomplishing such a feat means using the right design, and instilling the right company culture so that all of your employees work well together and can provide your customers with the same professional experience.