Welcome aboard the blog series on branding your ecommerce store. In this four-part blog series, you’ll learn how to create a brand for your company and for the items that you sell. You’ll also find out the importance of branding and its part in nurturing customer loyalty.
When is a brand created? For a moment, pause and think about what goes on behind a brand. Picture a business you’re familiar with—your local restaurant chain or your favorite sneaker store, and notice the branding.
Even that antique store downtown has strived to make its customers feel a certain something—in terms of value and in terms of experience. Apply the same to your ecommerce site, and you have a winner. Your home page becomes your glossy storefront, while your website images and content become your decor.
Through the course of these blogs, you’ll learn what goes on behind a brand, and how to get started with building your brand. For the first part of the series, let’s dive into how to define your company as a brand.
Market research
While defining your brand, do extensive market research and internet searching. Look for competitors, spaces in the market, and find out what potential customers are looking for. Find out if there are other businesses in the same market as you, and what audience groups they’re targeting.
Even if there are other companies, look how you can bring more value to your customers, or find ways to add variety to the market.
SEO giant Moz’s convincing About page: https://moz.com/about
Target customers
The majority of your brand is built around the audience group you’re catering to. To identity your audience, form an image of what your potential customer is going to look like—their interests, age group, shopping trends, and demographic. This buyer persona will come in handy for your store aesthetics and marketing material.
For example, if you were to start an online book subscription service, your target audience would go to bookshops and be well-connected to the internet.
Company mission and values
Your company mission is the basis of all your business operations—the reason you’ve set out to do what you do, other than the obvious monetary reasons. Get your company’s mission and values in writing, and strive to deliver on them.
Youth fashion e-tailer Bewakoof clearly state their mission along with their company’s qualities:
Keywords and slogan
As you frame your company slogan, write down the keywords that you want to associate with your brand. These keywords will help you think of the headlines that go on your website and eventually set the tone for the rest of the content.
For instance, if you were to start a company that sells coffee beans, your keywords could be ‘flavor’, ‘taste’, ‘quality’, ‘roasted’, ‘gourmet’, ‘exotic’, ‘blend’, ‘heart’, ‘ground’, ‘delight’, ‘mornings’, ‘brew’, and so on.
Looking at some popular brands, Nike‘s success story lies behind infusing the element of athleticism and fitness into the everyday lives of people with its ‘Just Do It’ slogan.
Brand messaging
As you get down to formulating your brand’s messaging, don’t try to go for too many voices at once. Finalize one version of messaging and stick to that. Whether it’s a professional, quirky, or a casual tone of voice, make sure your message is clear and makes you stand out. Once you’ve determined your message, always remember to remain consistent.
And…
Check out the next part in the blog series, where you’ll learn about naming your business and developing your logo.