Minimum Viable Brand Archives

How To Measure The Success Of Your Brand Building Campaigns

Building a successful company is hard, really hard. There is a reason that nine out of ten startups fail.

The holy grail for all companies should be to start generation traction. After all, traction is the best way to improve your chances of startup success. Traction is a sign that something is working. If you charge for a product, it means that customers are buying. If your product is free, it means your user base is growing.

Traction is powerful. Any problem you might be facing as a company is easier to tackle when you got traction.

In other words, traction trumps everything.

And while it is easy to measure more people buying your product, it is a different story if you want to measure your brand awareness is growing. How the traction of your brand is happening.

In previous posts we talked about the different building blocks of a brand, we talked about finding your ideal customers, we talked about creating your brand story, we talked about finding a name and a logo for your company, building a visual brand and your brand voice. But all of these different building blocks of your brand have been mostly untested for now; they are still assumptions.

If you want to grow the awareness around brand you need to start running tests and validating the different building blocks of your brand. Eric Ries coined the term “validated learning” in his book the lean startup:

Progress in manufacturing is measured by the production of high-quality goods. The unit of progress for Lean Startups is validated learning, a rigorous method for demonstrating progress when one is embedded in the soil of extreme uncertainty.” – Eric Ries

When building a lean brand, we need these same principles to measure our success. After all, a high equity brand gives you many advantages.

In addition to the obvious benefit of driving market share, a strong brand can command a price premium, augment customer relationships, ensure successful line extensions, and help an organisation attract talent to name a few.

In this post, we’ll discuss the importance of building brand awareness and how to measure it, so that you can add structure and success to your brand building efforts.

Posted in Minimum Viable Brand | 2 responses

Branding Essentials: Finding Your Brand’s Voice

If there was no logo or no company name next to your posts on social media or your blog items. Do you sound different, unique—like yourself? Or do you sound like everyone else… including your competitors?

Would someone who is viewing your content on different channels know it all came from the same brand? Could your potential target audience identify the content as coming from your brand?

In a previous post, we already talked about How to Create an Authentic Brand Story and 5 Easy Steps For Building A Great Visual Brand as part of the process of building your brand. And just as you took the time to think off, create and test your brand story and the visuals elements that make for your brand, if you don’t pay attention, you can end up with a scattered and non-consistent tone of voice in the content you produce across your entire marketing ecosystem. A non-consistent tone of voice that doesn’t provide a consistent picture of your brand.

This inconsistent brand experience becomes even harder to keep under control when your organisation grows. You start hiring freelancers, or more people to help produce content, and how do you keep it consistent when you’re not the only one anymore who creates your company’s content?

You may ask yourself, why a brand voice matters. Isn’t it enough to make your brand sound more human? The tone of voice of your brand, though, isn’t about sounding more human. It’s about being consistent with the voice you’re creating. Being recognisable for the people reading your content, ranging from social media posts to newsletters, to “What’s New” messages in the app store.

Making sure that even if you forgot to include your logo or name in one of your writings, people would still know it is about you.

Just like creating your Brand Story and your brand visual template, you need to create a Brand Voice Template to have something to fall back to. Here at Inbound Rocket we got you covered though and outlined a seven-step guide to establish, create, and maintain your brand’s tone of voice to drive consistency in your content marketing efforts.

Posted in Minimum Viable Brand | one respons

Brand Essentials: 5 Easy Steps For Building A Great Visual Brand

We started looking into the branding of your startup, we build our brand story, and we gave our company a name. In this post, we will be looking into creating the visual aspects of your brand identity.

The first thing which pops into the minds of people when talking about a brand are the visual aspects of that brand. Although we learned by now that a brand is so much more than just the visuals, it’s visuals are the items which help people to recognise you easily on a first glance.

Why Your Visual Brand is so Important

The way you visually present yourself in all of your communication is more than just merely a design. It’s a reflection of your company.

Brands who have a consistent visual identity are resonating better. This identity will, in turn, give you the benefit of spending significantly less money in the long run on your advertising and marketing materials. The less consistent you are in your visual branding, the more brands have to get their material in front of their customers to be recognised.

The visual presentation used in your communication is more than simply design; it is a reflection of your company. You want to make sure that your visual presentation speaks the same language as what’s being said in any text, audio or video. If your visual presentation doesn’t match the conversation, it’ll lead to inconsistencies in your communication.

That’s why you want to make sure that the visual representation of your brand speaks the same language as what you’re telling via your brand story in things like text, visuals, video or even audio. If the visual presentation of your brand doesn’t match your brand story, it will lead to inconsistencies in your overall communication.

Posted in Minimum Viable Brand | 5 responses

Branding Essentials: How To Come Up With The Best Name For Your Startup

In our series around the branding of your startup or small business, we already talked about how you can use lean startup principles for branding your company. We also talked about the 6 P’s of branding, which helps you make up your brand story (positioning, promise, personas, personality, product, and pricing).

Every brand story, however, needs a hero, somebody who people can relate too. Recognition will start with your brand name. The name appears on your website, your business cards, your social networks, your product, and everywhere else.

In both offline and online, to identify your company and your company’s products and services. Today we will be looking into one of the most frustrated items around branding: the naming of your startup.

Naming your newly founded company is often met with a lot of frustration. It’s hard enough to come up with a name that isn’t already in use, but in the end, your entire team has to agree on the name as well. At the end to only found out, you forgot to check if the Twitter, Facebook or any other social handle wasn’t already taken and you’ve got to start your searching from scratch again.

Not to put you under even more stress, but getting the right name for your new company can help make or break your branding.

For example, in 1997, athletic gear company, Reebok, launched a new women’s running shoe with the name Incubus. The big problem was, though that an incubus is a male demon who visits women in their sleep to rape them, as pointed out by a newspaper in Arizona. Reebok recalled 18,000 boxes of shoes and had to apologise for the mistake they made.

So how do you come up with a good and effective name? What things should you do (or do not do) when naming your company?

Posted in Inbound Marketing, Inspiration, Minimum Viable Brand, Social Media Marketing | 6 responses

Brand Essentials: How to Create an Authentic Brand Story

In our previous post, we talked about how you can utilise “lean” startup principles to start building your brand. Today we will look into the six essential parts of any brand story: positioning, promise, personas, personality, product, and pricing.

Most marketers spend countless hours (either in college or at your work) learning about the 4Ps of Marketing. Philip Kotler has left an enormous impact on the industry. Product, Price, Promotion, Place.

A lot has changed in the world since these were first introduced. As a follow-up on our previous post in which we gave an intro into how you can utilise “lean” startup principles to start building your brand. We talked about different ways to describe what a brand is, but what is it that a brand does?

Brands help simplify and accelerate decision making

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A brand is something intangible, but for most business their brand is or becomes their most important asset over time. An amazing brand will help influence the choices your potential customers, employees, or even your investors are making. In today’s world with so much different choice, such an influence becomes crucial for commercial success and the creation of value.

But that still leaves us with big questions about how to grow your brand.

Why do some brands acquire market share faster than their competitors? Why does the marketing of one brand seem more effective than that of others? What makes a brand powerful?

Today we will be looking into the six essential parts, which make up any great brand story:

Positioning – How are you useful for your customer?
Promise – What do you promise to do for your customer?
Personas – Who are the heroes in your story? Who are the persons you’re trying to help?
Personality – Who are you?
Product – What will you offer, over time?
Pricing – How much is this going to cost your customer?

Posted in Inbound Marketing, Minimum Viable Brand, Social Media Marketing | 3 responses

How Startups Can Utilize Lean Principles For Branding

You’re 99% sure that whatever it is that you’re going to build will change the world forever. And the next days, weeks, months you start building on your steps to world domination.

Then all of a sudden, it hits you: how will the world know about your “thing” when it is ready to launch and go out there? What is the name of this “thing”? Okay, the naming might be something that you’ve already come up with after hours of brainstorming and checking that domains are available, but what about a logo? What will be your unique message to the world? Do you have a unique message to share with the world?

Having a logo, and maybe even a website are already some real steps to building your brand, but these alone don’t add up to having a brand.

Any damn fool can put on a deal, but it takes a genius, faith, and perseverance to create a brand.

—David Ogilvy

Your brand is everything. Your brand is how you present yourself every day to your existing and potential new customers, it’s what you have to offer, it’s who you are!

Your brand is the promise you make and keep every day.

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Branding is not something that just comes out of nowhere. However, it’s something you should think about and plan way before you’re even ready to start thinking about launching. Branding is an integral part of your overall marketing strategy.

Before we dive into building your brand, let’s first talk a bit about what “brands” and “branding” really mean.

Posted in Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Inspiration, Minimum Viable Brand | 7 responses

How To Measure The Success Of Your Brand Building Campaigns

Branding Essentials: Finding Your Brand’s Voice

Brand Essentials: 5 Easy Steps For Building A Great Visual Brand

Why Your Visual Brand is so Important

How Startups Can Utilize Lean Principles For Branding

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