Make Your Brand Resonate With Your People

Creating a great brand can be difficult. Branding is much more than your visual assets and tone of voice; it should be based on your purpose, mission and vision. Building your brand in a way that reflects those core values will make it resonate with its audience and internal people.

On our brand new Skill Point Podcast we spoke to Richard Williams, the founder of the digital branding agency Unearthed about how he helps companies brand themselves effectively. Here is his step-by-step process for creating a brand identity that resonates with people:

1) Get Leadership Involved

Get the key people in your business in a room and have a conversation about your purpose, vision and mission. When you get people inside the company involved, your answers will reflect the core of the business. That makes it easy to get internal buy-in, because the people who are there every day have played a part in making it.

Start with the purpose. Ask yourselves ‘Why are we doing what we’re doing?’ The answer shouldn’t be about financial success or fame, it’s the thing that drives you all to get up in the morning and come to work.

Next comes the vision. Discuss what it is that you’re looking to achieve. That doesn’t have to be an achievable goal, it’s more of the overall aim of the company. Think things like ‘ending world hunger’ or ‘creating world peace’.

Finally your mission is your plan for how you’re going to achieve your goals in a way that matches your why. Think about what you do differently, the processes you’ll need to put in place and the culture you want to create for the people who interact with your brand.

2) Communicate With Your Whole Company

Once you’ve heard from your leadership team, look at the impact that their goals have on the workforce. Have roundtables to see whether those ideas are being reflected in the way that the company works. Take your employees’ perspectives and see what themes you can pull from both sides.

If you’ve built your brand successfully these two perspectives will match up. If not, that shows you where internal work needs to happen before you take your shiny new brand identity public.

Take the information from your leadership team and workforce and distil it into a powerful message. This will inform everything from website copy and visual assets to your service proposition. Your message acts as a guiding light, so whenever you make content or grow into a new area everyone in the company can see how that aligns with your purpose, vision and mission.

Your message becomes the glue that binds the company together and communicates the fact that your business is driven by more than profit.

3) Get Your Audience Involved

Your clients and candidates provide the motivation to keep the company going.

The most important part of a great marketing strategy is to listen to your audience and see what is working for them and what isn’t. Do the qualitative research that tells you why they do business with you, what’s keeping them up at night, why they chose you. Distil those answers down until it gives you a clear vision and mission so that your output speaks to your audience, making it resonate with their needs.

By aligning your brand’s mission with your audience’s input, you can craft a marketing strategy that adds value to all of your people.

4) Create Value-Driven Content

Once you’ve established your brand’s messaging, you can create content that your company can buy into and your audience resonates with.

Consider what value your content is adding for your customers or clients. Aim to translate your message into consumable content that people are excited about interacting with.

Find a tone of voice that speaks to the culture that you’re trying to create around your brand and comment on things that align with your mission. If you want to be positioned as a thought leader in your industry, share insights that you’ve learned from working in it. If you want to transform the industry, shout about what you’re doing differently and what’s working for you.

Once you’ve structured your brand around your purpose, vision and mission, your marketing strategy will make sense. If you’d like to hear more about how you can level up your recruitment company’s marketing game, tune into the first episode of The Skill Point Podcast here.