5 Ways Staying on Brand Can Help You Grow Your Business

With so much noise and competition today, to be successful, it’s more than what you’re selling or how you’re selling that matters. The public perception of a business or a founder can significantly affect a company’s bottom line. Couple that with today’s hybrid/virtual world, where it’s hard to reach people where they are; having a strong brand is more critical than ever.

I sat down with Aliza Licht, founder of Leave Your Mark and author of On Brand: Shape Your Narrative. Share Your Vision. Shift Their Perception, to talk about how branding for a company, a founder, and even a CEO, can change the trajectory of a business. 

As someone with more than two decades of experience in marketing, communications, and digital strategy in the fashion industry, Aliza’s expertise lies in storytelling and building brand awareness. We met back in the day on Twitter when she was the voice of the anonymous social media personality, DKNY PR GIRL. Fast forward to today, and with her multimedia brand and consultancy, she works with businesses and individuals and guides them on how to build their brands. 

Her new book, On Brand, is a comprehensive roadmap to personal branding in which she takes everything she knows from her career and applies those tactics to individuals. That said, whether you’re marketing a company or yourself, Aliza’s five pro tips below will help you create a brand with staying power.

1. Decide What You Want to Be Known For 

A strong brand starts with its purpose and is clear on its core values. Why does your brand exist? What problem are you trying to solve, or what void are you aiming to fill? What value are you adding to the consumer landscape? As an individual, what do you want people to think about when they hear your name? How do you want to make people feel when they read your words or meet you?

According to Aliza, every brand aims to achieve a certain status and consumer reputation. Bridging the gap between how a brand thinks about itself versus how the public perceives it is the real game. What do you want consumers to know about your brand? For people, the magic of personal branding is about marrying self-reflection and public perception. The goal is to ensure that your message is received as you intend. 

If you have several areas you want to focus on, a Venn diagram can help you clarify how those ideas intersect or don’t. You must explain your value proposition and offering to be understandable and memorable.

2. Shape Your Narrative and Never Stop Telling Your Story

Continuously operate under the assumption that no one is thinking about your brand or that someone might be discovering it for the first time, even though it’s been around for years. Per Aliza, when we think about storytelling, we need to recognize that once you shape your narrative, you need to keep drilling that story down in new and different ways over and over again. It may feel repetitive, but it’s essential to own a permanent place in the minds of your consumer or audience.

An easy way to test yourself is if someone told a friend about your brand in one sentence; what would you want them to say? What would be your dream headline if someone wrote an article about you or your brand? Then, work to ensure the way you communicate and the reputation you are building live up to that. 

3. Visualize Your Brand

Great thought should be applied to every aspect of a brand beyond its product or services, starting with its visual identity. If two brands sell the same thing, the difference from one brand to the next is frequently less about the product and more about how a company packaged it, spun its story, and marketed it to you. 

Give your brand the real estate it deserves with a proper website. Many brands depend entirely on social media for exposure. While having a solid social media presence can only enhance your brand recognition, your website is the only place on the internet where you have a 100 percent share of voice. How you present on your website is not controlled by an algorithm–extra credit for brand extensions like a podcast or newsletter. 

Every medium your brand lives in needs to feel the same, but you need to consider your branded content made for that medium. Especially today, one size does not fit all. That said, your brand’s DNA should guide everything, no matter where it lives. You need to be both searchable and recognizable.

4. Manage and Safeguard Your Reputation

You might think you are the best at what you do, but we all know reputations can be destroyed in seconds. Social listening tools are non-negotiable when your brand becomes too big to fail. Your understanding of online sentiment and where problems might be brewing can be the difference between company failure and not. 

Putting the right team together where PR, HR, and legal work cross-functionally is essential to avoid crisis communications issues before you have them. Take feedback seriously, and keep issues from lingering unattended.

5. Ideate and Innovate, but Never Lose Your Brand DNA

Starting a business is easy, but staying in business is much harder. Brands die when companies forget who they are and why they were established in the first place. Every company must have a mission statement, a purpose filter, and a brand book. These are the guardrails for operation. If your million-dollar idea started off being drafted on a cocktail napkin, memorialize it somewhere you can refer back to over and over again. As your company expands, it should be your team’s bible. Evolve and grow, but never lose the plot.

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