The Art of Brand Building - Storytelling Narratives
In a marketplace dominated by established players, early-stage startups can also create their own identity and differentiate themselves through the power of “Brand Building”.
Hundreds of startups are emerging daily with fresh ideas, strong core values, and an invincible vision. But it’s a constant uphill battle for these young ventures to gain traction and stand tall among market giants. Consequently, many young startups get lost in the crowd. So, is it not worth it?
Nivas Ravichandran, a Marketer for nine years, begs to differ on this opinion. Having worked at Freshworks, he now heads marketing for Spendflo and brings in a wealth of experience and a proven track record of driving pipe through events, webinars, and campaigns.
“Brand is just a ticket to get yourself invited to the party- a party with the top players in any field.”
In simpler terms, the brand you're trying to build is the mind space you are capturing among the consumers in the market. And most of the time, it works if it resonates with the target audience and can build trust & credibility.
The idea is to position yourselves in the big game. You can be an affordable alternative or a complete rip-off, but your name should be in the top four of five brands in your vertical or category. This might solve hundreds of scaling problems, but it’s fairly tricky for an early-stage startup trying to stand out as a brand from scratch.
So, how do you build a brand at an early stage?
Create an attractive website- Bring in an intuitive interface or highlight value or numbers to emphasise vital aspects of life as metrics- time & money!
Flaunt good badges or metrics to show yourself as a good brand.
Build around a repository of big logos; Collaborate with other companies, feature them, and run campaigns or events partnering with big brands.
Invest in customer marketing. Get testimonials and feedback from customers while adding value to their lives.
Do a lot of webinars; Inviting prominent leaders will create more visibility.
Represent yourself at events. Don’t self-promote or shout it out loud in the initial phase, but subtly start a conversation around the product you’re building and probably carry it forward to future connections.
Introduce fun & interactive In-house events. It should be different from your regular monotonous hosting sessions.
Create excellent thought leadership content in ebooks, reports, etc.
Once created, distribute content in various repurposed forms & in different channels to gain coverage.
Market your products right! Pitch in any new launches or developments with a message that resonates with your customers.
If you have the right persona identified and have a decent strategy, you can go ahead and experiment with a lot of these things. There is no hard and fast rule to go about it. Just don’t downplay yourselves as a brand, and believe in the magic of experimentation. What worked for other brands might not work for you, but it’s worth a try!
Is there a way to measure your brand growth?
Honestly, it’s challenging to calculate the brand growth or the ROI of a branding campaign. In most cases, it has a compounding effect. Eventually, how people perceive you or people trust in your product adds up to something big.
Much like gymming, there is a scale to measure if you want to lose weight, but the same can’t be said about gaining strength. It takes way longer to build strength with no scale to measure, and half of the time, wondering- “Am I doing things right?” But then you see it for yourself!
A brand isn’t just one piece. It’s very qualitative, starting from product development to packaging. Everything involves branding & to measure that is never going to be easy! For starters, let’s keep it simple and measure how people feel about your startup, product, and so on.
How to appear as a big brand?
“You can change how big you are by changing the way you represent your brand.”
There might not be a measurement of your brand's size, but you sure can make yourself appear like a big one. “Fake it till you make it!” - A great website, a well-designed business card, or an unbeatable presentation deck, anything to set your standards high in this competitive world.
If you are a founder just starting out, you can also take reference from the picture below for some quick hack to make your brand appear bigger both in the picture and the market.
Summary: No matter which stage of the startup journey you are, be it PMF, Pre-PMF, or mature, Brand building is important. It’s like telling the story of your faith in dreams that you saw. You should continue to share them for years to come- the instances and flow might change, and you might change a few words here and there, but the gist should always remain the same.
By defining their identity, forging emotional connections, and navigating competition, startups can carve out a unique space for themselves and leave a lasting mark on the market. This article explores brand building in-depth & how an early-stage startup can stand amongst big players by strategising correctly to deliver a trust-worthy brand.
Dive into Vault today & unlock a world of possibilities.
This post on art of brand is really informative! I especially appreciate the detailed explanation in this post and i can understand the effort to research the topics is really inspirational . To add to your point, we also posted a blog on art of brand building. You can read more about our findings in this detailed guide: https://synwolf.com/from-vision-to-reality-unleashing-the-art-of-brand-building-services-in-bangalore/