If you’re a small or medium sized business owner looking to reach potential customers, you’ll want to ensure you have a marketing strategy built on a successful brand. Brand-building involves creating a distinctive product or service and then crafting a story and identity for your business that properly reflects what you offer. In today’s marketplace, a well-made product, or a high quality service will only get you so far. To reach the very top of today’s marketplace, you must also have a brand identity.

What Is a Brand?

A brand is a company’s identity. This goes beyond the actual products and services the business provides. When a company has a strong brand identity, its customers know what to expect in terms of quality, aesthetic, function, and social significance. The components of a company’s brand include the brand name itself, the product lineup, the product design (including typography, shapes, and brand color palette), packaging design, advertising, and the slogan or tagline used in content marketing. All these elements convey a brand message and brand voice to target customers—from their very first impression all the way through their life long relationship with your brand.

Why Is Branding Important?

Branding is important because your brand image is intrinsically tied into your business’s reputation. When you’re running a small business, you can’t engage with every single potential customer in your target market. You have to let the brand speak for itself. Potential customers may engage with your brand in a wide variety of formats, slowly building brand awareness over time. They might happen upon it in an online search. They might see it in a store. They might see friends and family using the product themselves. Brand strategy helps you manage perception of your product in all these contexts. And to do that you need to hire true professionals in the design and marketing field. There is no room to leave this up to chance.

How to Build a Brand in 5 Steps

When you start the work of building your own brand, it’s essential to create a strong brand identity worthy of the products you provide. Here are some ways to do that.

An extra note from the author: Embrace sub-branding when appropriate. Some large companies employ different brand identities for different product lines. The same parent company can own various sub-brands that each have their own identity and customer base. It’s that kind of specificity that can separate a great brand from a forgettable one.