You can’t open Facebook, surf the web, or listen to a podcast without getting inundated with advice about what you should be doing or what you should be saying to grow your business. While it’s easy to get caught up in the latest trends and ride the wave of the newest platform or gadget, real business growth isn't achieved in a quick sprint.
Growing your brand and your business is an endurance game. It's a marathon that you must face with focus, intensity, and consistency. We like to call it "Relentless Branding." This is how Merriam-Webster defines the word relentless:
re·lent·less — showing or promising no abatement of severity, intensity, strength, or pace.
It’s no surprise why business owners would want to incorporate relentlessness into their brand. So how does one go about branding his or her business relentlessly?
Branding is more than a logo or a color scheme. It is comprehensive—meaning that wherever people encounter your identity, whether on social media, at a conference, or at a little league baseball game, it always feels like you.
Building a comprehensive, consistent brand is hard work, in part because you never have 100% control of the context in which your brand appears. For example, you can't always pick the color of the t-shirt that your logo will show up on. And you can't control what other people say about you on social media or in a Google review.
But when you pursue relentless branding, you pay close attention to the details that you can control, and make each one a win for your brand. Over time, and through a thousand small decisions, you can build a unified message, position, and visual identity that tells a consistent, compelling story. And let's not forget that the story your brand should be telling is your customers' story—how they can improve their lives by using your product or service.
It takes intensity, an eye for the granular details, and a steady pace to build a relentless brand. But of course, we brand marathoners are in it for the long game!
Here's a tip! Think of relentless branding as always wearing a wrist band that reminds you to ask, "What would my brand do?"
Companies that have strong branding have customers who know what they
can expect from that company at each and every interaction. This is
called a brand promise, and we go more in-depth in this post about how a brand promise can transform your business and propel you toward your goals.
A strong brand promise articulates how you can serve and support your customers whether they are interacting with you online or in-person. When you stand on and deliver that promise, you are offering your customers a strong, relentless experience, and you’re holding your company to a consistent expectation that doesn’t waver.
Your brand promise is what you deliver each and every time someone interacts with your brand. It stems from the foundation of what your brand message is—who you are, what you do, who you do it for, and how you do it. Learn more about brand promises here.
Building a brand isn’t an exercise in set-it-and-forget-it. Building a relentless brand is a process. To start building your brand, you’ll have to identify your target market, create your customer profiles, and create and implement your brand promise and brand identity (plus several other steps that we outline in our guide to building a strong brand). Once these elements are set you will want to reassess them regularly.
Just like you’d nurture a garden, you need to nurture your business. A company can’t run on auto-pilot. When starting a garden, you have to plant the seeds, till the ground, water your plants, and come back to trim them when they start to crowd out other plants in the plot. Same goes for your business. While you need focused intensity to find your target audience and set your business foundation, if you don’t set time to dig back into your business and assess your success, you run the risk of getting out of touch with your brand and customers (which means, in the long run, losing money).
In the pursuit of relentless branding, you will need to assess how effective your branding is across your verticals, learning how your audience is responding to your messaging and auditing your marketing efforts to ensure they align with your business goals. Then, empowered by detailed knowledge of your business, you make changes. Be flexible to testing things in your branding and messaging, and let your market guide you on what is the most effective way to approach your followers.
A commitment to the long game of relentless branding will capture attention, build recognition, and ultimately build your business. Without it, your efforts for business growth will be hit and miss, haphazard, and your customers' need may often go unmet.
If you need help building a relentless brand, Harvest Media is here to help. Our friendly team is happy to give you expert guidance on how to best position your brand for the ultimate success. Contact us here or give us a shout at 847-352-4345.
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