Mini masterclass: the fundamentals of brand building 

Brand building is essential for small businesses because they compete in such a competitive landscape. They’re not always the category leader or the most innovative brand. So the brand itself can give small businesses a strong point of distinction if they lean into it.

A brand’s primary job is to help a company be thought of early and often in the buying process and, if possible, within a specific buying context. Small businesses can lean into those specific buying contexts and moments and help build their brand association at those points.

The beauty of a brand is you can make it whatever you want. A brand is a hollow shell until you or the world injects it with meaning. I tend to default identity-wise to things that are simple and distinct. Distinction drives memorability. 

Everything comes back to trying to be as memorable as possible in a crowded space.

Brands need to craft brand stories to be memorable. Stories allow you to inject emotion into a message. Humans latch on to stories and emotion better than facts and figures or product features. It’s just something that we innately can store in our brains better.

So when you’re telling a brand story well, you’re setting yourself up for better brand recall later.

Great brands tend to have an enemy. And I don’t mean a competitor. I mean something that they vanquish on behalf of their customers. Nike has the couch. Dove has traditional beauty standards.

And these brands challenge those things with the opposite of an enemy – perhaps a point of view or a belief. So, going back to Nike, the belief is that everyone can be an athlete. That’s how they vanquish the couch. These beliefs create unifying and compelling brand stories with which brands can be consistent over the years.

Email marketing can help you build your brand because it’s a direct line of communication with your customers. They have opted in to receive messaging from you. It’s a great space for images, gifs and videos – all those colourful elements of storytelling. You can be short form. You can be long form. It’s a wide open space and a lot of brands aren’t using it for storytelling. 

Email has a reputation for being a bit of a naggy promotional tool because a lot of brands use it that way. They exclusively send promotions through email. But there’s this huge opportunity to brand build there. From our Edelman research, we know that 70% of customers appreciate receiving emails that aren’t just trying to sell them something. So you can stand out by deciding to tell stories and brand build with email.

Brand emails can build long-lasting customer relationships by being distinct. It’s about figuring out the stories only your brand can tell and the best way to tell them, and then mapping those out into a content calendar. Then you’ve got an email brand-building strategy.

The cadence and the timing of brand-building emails is really up to you and your audience. You should rely on the data you have about your audience and how receptive they are to emails. What’s your open rate like? What’s your click-through rate like? Find out what works best for everyone. I don’t think every day is the right answer, and I don’t think once every two months is the right answer. It’s probably somewhere in between. But it’s going to be a custom fit for you and your audience.

Don’t send an email without something compelling to say. This is all about distinction and building memories. A cheap, watered-down story doesn’t do that. You want to bring your A-game when you’re sending a brand email.

Brand success metrics are not going to be things that you can measure day to day or overnight like performance and sales.

It’s going to take a little more time and patience. And big brands have it easy. They have tools and market research that can measure things such as awareness and consideration.

If you have access to tools like that, that is a great way to track your brand awareness and brand consideration over time.

But smaller brands that don’t have access to tools like that might need to get a little creative and think outside the box.

For example, if you’re an ecommerce brand, you might want to look at where the traffic to your site is coming from. You might want to compare direct traffic to category keyword traffic and branded search to unbranded search. What’s bringing people to your website? If it’s more direct and branded search, you’re likely doing a great job generating brand awareness.