When you start a business, you have to do more than purchase inventory, hire someone to take care of customer service, and set up a website. A major part of running a business is building up a brand. Your brand communicates who you are and what you stand for to the public, and it is the way your customers view you. Your brand is how your company is perceived and can play a big role in your business’s long-term success.
Building your brand isn’t always easy. It takes a lot of thought, effort, and time. Your brand includes more than your logo, slogan, and business cards. It includes your presence and may require that you spend time building up authority and establishing expertise in your industry on social media and through other means, in addition to the operations work you have to do for your business.
Luckily, there are several business tools available that can help you not only get your business up and running but also help you build your brand. Here are some of the best tools and tech that you can use to build up your brand and
Canva
Although your brand goes far beyond the visual aspect, your logo and the images you use in your marketing and advertising do play an important role in building your brand. Canva is a free tool that lets you create visual brand tools like business cards, logos, social media graphics, etc. so that you can put out the best and most consistent image of your brand possible.
In addition to designing the visual side of your brand, though, it’s important to remember to protect it. You will want to hire legal counsel like attorney Aaron Kelly, who has experience helping businesses to ensure that your intellectual property is protected.
ReleaseWire
Press releases can be a huge asset when it comes to building your brand. They can help you reach interested audiences that you may not have been able to reach before, they can help you announce the latest and greatest news, and they can help you keep people up to date on your industry and your business, painting your business in a positive light and helping you build a good brand.
ReleaseWire is a tool that lets you take control of your press releases and draft them yourself, so you know what is being said about you. Then, after you’ve published your release, it enables you to track where the piece ended up, people who’ve read it, and other valuable information that can help you continue to grow your business.
Medium
You’ve likely read at least one article published on Medium since it now has over 60 million active users every day and posts on Medium rank very well in search results. The platform offers businesses a lot of benefits and cool tools that help them integrate and connect with social media, get analytics for their posts, etc. Medium lets you write about any topic you please, making it a great way to build your brand and authority since you can write not only about your industry and business but also about challenges customers and businesses in that industry face and how you’re solving them.
Whether you’re looking for a job or looking for people to hire, LinkedIn is a great tool that many take advantage of. At this point, most professionals maintain a LinkedIn profile to help them connect with others for current and potential business opportunities. LinkedIn can be used for so much more than that, though. As a business owner, you can use it to build your brand by answering questions, writing articles about your industry, and establishing your expertise and your business’s authority in other similar ways.
YouTube
YouTube is an awesome tool that can be used for so much more than wasting the day watching cat videos, (as cute as they may be). YouTube lets you publish videos and share them for free, so all you have to do is create videos about your brand, your business, and your values, then you can publish them through YouTube and share them on the world wide web. You can use them as presentations for potential partners and investors, or you can use them as informational videos to help your customers learn more about you and your products. All thanks to YouTube, it’s easy to use videos to help build your brand.
Google Alerts
If you’re not familiar with it already, Google Alerts is a tool you can use to stay up to date with companies, people, certain topics, diseases, etc. It’s also a tool you can use to build your brand and keep an eye on what’s being said about you. When you know what people are saying about your business, you know what you’re doing right and need to keep doing, and you know what you’re doing wrong and need to correct or address. As simple as the tool may be, it’s invaluable.
Final Thoughts
It’s easy to get focused in on managing the operations side of your business, but building your brand is just as important and should be given as much effort. Thanks to tools like Canva and Google Alerts, it’s fairly easy to get the word out about, build up, and maintain your brand, establishing authority and attracting more customers. Have you already been working on building up your brand? Which tools are your favorite?
