Why great branding is essential for start-ups and scale-ups

Great branding lies at the heart of all successful businesses.

Whether you’re a start-up, in the early stages of product development, or a scale-up with a validated product in the marketplace – there’s so much to think about and plan to make sure your company grows how you want it to.

You may not realise it at the start, but investing in your branding is just as important as investing in your product, and it should sit somewhere towards the top of your priority list.

Here are a few reasons why great branding makes all the difference for start-up or scale-up businesses.

Establish your unique identity

Having strong branding will help your business to become more recognisable. A cohesive brand message allows you to communicate clearly with both your customers and your employees, encouraging you to attract and maintain more business.

Doing this from the get-go is a good idea, but if you’ve already begun to establish your product or service, it’s never too late to incorporate great branding into your marketing strategy.

Investing in top quality branding will help to launch your product into the forefront of people’s minds, giving you an edge over everyone else.

Which leads us to…

Differentiate your brand from the competition

No matter how unique, radical or disruptive your start-up or scale-up is, it’s likely that you’ll still have competitors, both for investors and for customers.

By giving your business a voice, a personality, and a distinct image, it helps to differentiate you from everyone else struggling to earn attention in what can be a saturated marketplace.

Great branding can really set you apart, ensuring you look like a professional, established and serious competitor to the big fish – even if you don’t feel like it yet.

Gain the trust of your customers

A strong brand image can be vital for creating trust in your business.

By helping to convey your core business values to your customers, branding helps to build a sense of trust and confidence in their minds.

Not convinced? Think about how many times you’ve chosen a product by the well-known, trusted brand over the unbranded one you’ve never heard of. It’s powerful stuff.

Of course, it takes a lot of work to foster trust and loyalty within your customers. Along with great branding you will also have to ensure your product is top quality and your online presence is unmatched by rivals.

Ensuring your branding is unique and identifiable from the start will go a long way to building the trust you need to build a solid customer base.

Make a lasting impact on your audience

The very best branding helps to create loyalty in your customers. We all have that friend who only buys tech from Apple, coats from North Face, and homeware from John Lewis.

Perhaps you always buy Colgate toothpaste or L’Oreal shampoo. Maybe you don’t even realise you’re doing it.

That’s brand loyalty.

You might think it takes years, even decades, for businesses to become a household name that garners such intense loyalty from its consumers – and it can do – but it always starts with strong, recognisable branding.

Building a solid brand with real values and a consistent message will help you create a lasting impact on your customers and secure that loyalty that will make your business a success.

Increase your visibility 

There is nothing that is more important to start-ups – or scale-ups – than gaining visibility. After all, it’s visibility that brings in the opportunities.

Creating a branded online presence with a website, social media, and email marketing platforms will help to draw attention to your business.

Guide your advertising and marketing 

Without a strong, clearly defined brand, it’s impossible to really know what to say to customers or how to say it.

We see it time and time again, where start-ups and scale-ups are so eager to push out any and all ads that they end up wasting their time, money and effort sending out the wrong messages to the wrong audiences.

Having really good branding in place will help to guide your advertising and marketing strategies. It will ensure all marketing platforms are cohesive in look, style and voice, and will make paid advertising a lot easier and less painful in the long run.

Attract top talent

If you’re a start-up business, you might not be thinking about this yet, but when the time comes to scale-up your company, you’re probably going to need employees.

In the same way you’re building a customer base, there are so many reasons that strong branding can help to attract the top talent to your workforce as well.

Because everyone wants to work for a cool brand. 

People are generally attracted to companies that they recognise as being successful and fun. Great branding will naturally position you as a strong company, and that could be the difference between the best candidate choosing to work for you, or choosing to work for the competitor next door.

As you’ve probably realised by now, great branding is really essential for all businesses. There are so many advantages to building your brand from the early stages, so if you haven’t started thinking about it yet – now’s the time.

We’ve worked with dozens of the world’s most trusted businesses over the past 10 years to develop strong branding concepts and strategies that are built to last.

If you’re looking to build a brand for your start-up or scale up, and we sound like your kind of people, we’d love to hear from you.