Having been in sales and marketing of some sort most of my career, the idea of branding ourselves is not new to me. Branding is obvious when the big companies do it. We learn to know them by their commercials, catch phrases, and logos. Many of us can recite by memory some of the famous commercials of our youth just because they were branded in our mind so well that we may never forget them.
Branding is done by repeating the message through a mixture of sound, visuals, and constant repetition, over and over, under we are singing the jingle in our sleep, and our kids know it better than their own names. And there is no question that branding works.
Branding is not only used for profitable ventures. It is also used by religions, non-profit organizations, schools, and organizations of just about every type. One excellent example is the pink cancer ribbon, a symbol of the breast cancer research movement and Susan G Komen fund. Everyone knows what the pink ribbon stands for unless they have been on another planet in the last several years. In this case, you don’t even need the words, just the pink ribbon lets you know that the person is supporting breast cancer research.
While we cannot compete on the internet with the very large companies in the branding arena, it is really not too hard to create a brand of our own when we are working online. Branding has the value of creating an immediate link to a person, company, or idea when the recipient sees the brand.
There are a few ways to create a brand for yourself. And part of the decision as how to do this depends on your business. For example, my primary business is the art business. Therefore it makes sense to have a visual artistic type brand. In order to help with this, I have a logo for my business that I use on everything that I send out.
Lake Erie Artists Gallery logo
This is a clean, easy to read logo, and I also use the same colors to identify any of my signs, flyers, and postcards that I send out to customers. This way when someone sees one of my ads, then they come to my store, they know that they are in the right place. If they see me at a craft show, they can identify with my sign, and they remember me.
We can do the same thing with our online brand. It can be a visual, for instance, using the same avatar for all of our work. We can create a brand surrounding one identity for a specific niche, then separate ourselves to write about another niche. But we can connect everything we do with one simple brand.
This is something to think about as you go about creating content online, because this is something that Google is looking at as well. Part of your brand is your reputation. Reputations are how we are perceived by others from our actions. They may or may not actually be true to who we are, but the perception is very important, so you need to be conscious of this. Branding can be done by auditory sounds, like music. This is what many companies do on television commercials, tie their branding to a musical jingle. So as you develop your online persona and business, think about branding yourself online to create an identity and visibilty. How will people remember you?
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