How startups should create their brand image

Many times I have participated in discussions about „the reason for having a profile on a specific social media platform”, or „how to communicate” with followers or clients.

I believe that at least half of such meetings would not have to take place if mission, vision and values were set at the initial stage of the company's activities. After all, those are the directions in which the brand is developing and which show how to communicate with their customers and fans.

Take care of your Vision, Mission, and Values

Mission, vision and values - three basic elements that are the starting point for all internal and external communication activities. However, how to choose them in a smart way?

Option one: You can organise a meeting with all the people who have an active influence on your brand's image, on the creation of the team, or just want to take part in such a workshop. However, it is good to remember that the more people you will have in attendance, the longer the whole decision process will take.

The next step is to reach for specific tools that will help to develop a common point of view. The design thinking methodology is very useful in this situation - you can read more about it in Gosias article on our blog or in a variety of books available on the market, such as Designing Brand Identity - Alina Wheeler.

The second option is to hire a moderator, who will guide the team through the whole process and support you by efficiently managing the planned time (you know the moment when the conversation shifts off the course? The moderator will take care of it!). The effects of such workshops should also be displayed somewhere in the office so your team will never lose them from sight.

Here are some examples missions and visions chosen by the successful IT companies.

GOOGLE – Mission and Vision

Source: GOOGLE

Software AG – Mission and Vision

Source: Software AG

Upnetix – Mission, Vision and Values

Source: UPNETIX

Hi! I’m John Doe and I am your ideal customer!

After working out your mission, vision and values, you should analyse what are the issues of your recipients. Who do you want to reach and who are you actually reaching? A useful tool at this point is to create an ideal customer profile and based on that establish the general persona (or even a whole set of personas). Let's think about what our customers like, where they live and work, as well as how they tend to buy. Today, a persona is one of the key analytical tools. After that, we should think how to reach them to achieve the best possible results.

Examples of Questions:

Marketing tools - use them wisely!

There are many ways to reach out new customers. Of course, at first, people pay attention to social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.) and official websites. However, we should not limit ourselves in such a way. We can appear at events related to our brand (as participants, speakers, advertisers, or even as sponsors).

We can run advertising campaigns in the media. Press, TV, and radio are still proper channels for reaching some industries! We can also show up in the media run by other people or brands via all kinds of cross-promotions or sponsored articles.

Source: TWITTER CD PROJECT RED and TWITTER GUERRILLA

The next forms of promotion are influencer marketing (reaching for various representatives and bloggers), which is quite popular nowadays, and paid advertisements (e.g. on Google).

Source: ADWEEK

These are only the most popular options, but we can be creative and reach for unusual tools or marketing campaigns. We have plenty of places where we can publish our content, and only our brand’s direction will limit what we can and cannot do.

Let's summarise:

1. before you start to promote your brand, you should take care of designing the fundamentals: mission, vision and values;
2. establish your target group and create the Ideal Customer Profile;
3. choose the tools that will reach our dream customers in the best possible way.

These are quite obvious actions; however, I saw a countless time that brands have accounts on every possible platform without giving their presence a second thought, just to achieve high stats. It is much more important (in my honest opinion) to reach our right recipients since they are the ones who will truly like our profile and could become our clients in the future.