10 Steps to Build a Strong Brand for Startups

Branding is the most important theme for a startup company. You have two option for your startup:

1. Either make your company's brand.
2. Or break your business.

Right?

But yes of course making brand is not that much easy. It requires too much effort, tremendous perseverance, Customer oriented vision and relentless hard work. But once you completed building your brand it's too much easy to carry on. Then things work in a non-linear fashion. And to set up your startup's brand you need to follow certain techniques and steps which I will discuss now.

Step#1: Choose your brand's name:

I have done several researches on this to determine whether a unique and catchy name is most important or any name is okay to build your reputation as a brand. And I found that though the unique and catchy name has some attraction, it's not that much important factor to build your brand. But of course I will recommend you to choose your name mindfully and choose at least 6-7 names as during your brand registration some name may get cancelled by the authority.

Step#2: Create your brand's logo:

Visual is always too important and intuitive for human civilization. So please be careful to create a unique and soothing logo for your brand. I personally feel that the matching logo with your organisation's vision is a plus though I can't give any data to support this. You can hire any logo designer or any freelancer. Otherwise you can create the logo by your own too as now-a-days there are so many tools available to design your own logo in spite of having very little technical or design knowledge. For your reference you can find 10 Android Logo Maker Apps to create logo by your own.

10 Android Logo Maker Apps for Your Business

Step#3: Register your brand and complete other legal activities:

Before marketing your brand and publishing the same you need to register your brand with legal authorities which can vary depending on the locales you are in. This is a mandatory step to build your brand. You can consult with your lawyer in this regard.

Step#4: Standardization and streamlining of your business's process:

Sometimes entrepreneurs feel so hurry to avoid the planning of detail business process and streamlining the same. They just jump to the implementation. But the problem can arise when you have build your brand's reputation and after some growth it's just unmanageable to sustain in that fast pace. And then your brand may seem as the fever, the fret and the leaden eyed despair to you. So you shouldn't show the luxury to skip this section. 

Step#5: Create Business Continuity Plan or Backup Plan for your business:

No one can tell what will happen tomorrow. You can be very optimistic. That's not a problem. But if you miss the task of planning for disasters for that, that's surely a problem. Isn't it? So Business Continuity Plan (often referred as BCP) is just must for sustainable growth.

Step#6: Create a website with professional look:

In this digital era it's very important to build a website with professional look for your brand as without digital presence you can be just absent in today's business world. And here look and feel is also too important as it's the entry point for your clients before going into detail of your service or product or anything else. 

Step#7: If possible create mobile apps:

Use of mobile users is increasing day by day with a high speed. So creating mobile apps for your site is an intelligent entrepreneur's decision to catch this highly growing market.

Step#8: Create social account pages:

Social media has omnipresence in our daily lives. So leveraging by this is a wise decision. I don't think I should elaborate about this. Create your brand's social account in Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr and as many as you can.

Step#9: Launch and Promote your brand:

So now you are ready with the basic structure of your brand. So just jump into market with too much aggression (Caution!: to that extent which is sustainable) and promote your brand. If you have money, you can promote by Google AdWords, Facebook Advertising or you can hire some agency to do this task for you. And you will understand more and more about this and your customer's behavior when you dive deep in this field. Then you have to be prepare for changing some of your plans too according to your findings and insight about your customer. And now onward you will have only one quote:

Customer Is King.  

Step#10: Manage, Improve and Protect Your Brand :

After successful launch and promotion it's time to manage your brand following your created business processes. And of course you will strive regularly to grow your brand more by pushing the boundaries. And this time you have to very mindful to manage the whole stuff. But with increasing popularity of your brand, it's more important to protect your brand from different types of threats as it's more vulnerable then. And this time your mental management is more important. Your mental requirement is: COOL!!

Click to know more about key mental traits of a successful entrepreneur