Target Practice: Using Brand Identity Design to Hit Your Target Audience

Know your customer well, and you can build a brand identity that they’ll love.

Your brand identity is so much more than who you are as a company. It’s also how your customers—past and prospective—see you.

Or, put another way, your brand identity is what people respond when they’re asked, “What is that company?”

No matter what business you’re in, how people see you matters. That’s why, when it comes to creating your brand identity and designing your brand’s look, understanding your target audience is so crucial.

In fact, that’s where the process of creating your brand identity should start: with your target market.

Define Your Specific Market

Know who your market is by defining your service or product. In doing this, answer questions that show:

• who would be best served by using your product
• how it can help your potential customer
• what problems it solves

In other words, what makes you different from every similar product or service out there? What needs do you meet that have been unmet? Think especially about the benefits your product or service offers your customers.

Once you have identified your general target market, you can begin to think about your ideal customers in more detail…

Research Your Ideal Customer

To have a truly appealing brand identity, you should conduct in-depth research of your potential clients. Find out:

• who they are
• what kinds of activities they like
• what they do with their free time
• where they work or learn
• how old are they
• what they are most interested in spending their money on

You want to understand your potential customers so well that you know what about you will appeal to them. Are you a rebel like they are? Or are you the consummate professional they desperately need? Are you traditional and established, or trendy and edgy?

When you understand who your prospective customers are and how to appeal to them, you can craft your brand identity to do just that.

Make Your Brand Identity a Cornerstone of Your Marketing

Now that you have a brand identity based in an understanding of your target audience and its personality, wants, and needs, you should make that brand identity the key component of your marketing strategy.

Because you’ve built your brand identity on what appeals to your target market, you’ll find it’s not only easier to convince them to buy from you—you’re more likely to nurture loyal, repeat customers. Why? Because they won’t just love your product; they’ll love you.

That’s what we offer at Splash Omnimedia: comprehensive marketing based around your business and brand. We are experts at creating a brand identity and an effective, measurable marketing to go with it.