Introduction:

Local Where 2 provides a platform for businesses to showcase their goods and services through events, discounts, and promotions. We aim to help small businesses grow their online presence and build a brand online. This guide aims to help businesses understand brand marketing, how to create a brand vision statement, and how to use your brand’s presence to tell your brand’s story and gain your target audience’s trust.

When creating a voice for your brand and creating brand marketing campaigns, you must start with a guiding vision and mission for your brand. These key elements of your brand will drive how you communicate with customers, which emotions your brand invokes in your customers when they interact with your brand, and which people choose to interact with and buy from your brand.

What is Brand Marketing?

Brand marketing creates brand awareness, or what gets people to recognize and trust your brand as a company they want to do business with. Think of the brands you trust. What do they have in common? I bet you can see their logo and their marketing materials’ colors without even putting too much thought into it. Beyond that, what do they stand for? Do you know who they aim to serve, what organizations they support, and their overall guiding mission?

All the above plays a factor in creating your brand identity and harnessing that power for your brand marketing campaigns.

Your brand messaging and communication campaigns for raising brand awareness need to speak your target customer’s language while conveying your brand’s story. With clear and concise messaging, you can increase engagement with your brand’s marketing materials and convert more views into loyal customers and lifelong sales opportunities. When your content is easy to digest and sent in ways that tell your brand story and convey your mission, you connect with your audience on a deeper level and build trust.

People will buy from people and businesses they trust. That’s not just marketing talk. There are hundreds of research studies and surveys that prove trust is the number one factor in any purchase decision made by a consumer. Are your brand marketing efforts building trust with your audience? To build trust, you must start with integrity and a clear vision, and follow that vision through to fruition.

While brand marketing jargon and verbiage have evolved over the years, marketing goals and guiding principles have stayed the same. You want to create a brand marketing campaign that gets people to start a conversation, attracts new customers, and falls under budget for marketing.

You need to realize that not every person is part of your target audience, which is okay! Your brand messaging should speak to your people, not to all people. Think back to 1988, when Nike introduced their “Just Do It” campaign, which hit athletes and highly active people with motivation, while skirting away from less active folks. Thirty years later, we still remember this marketing campaign, and it remains a core message for Nike’s brand awareness marketing materials.

The same messaging would not have worked for nearly any other business. Brand marketing is not about creating a carbon copy of another company’s marketing campaigns, but about finding your brand’s voice and shouting it out loud.

How can your business use Brand Marketing?

Brand marketing goes into every aspect of your business. When you start with a clear picture of your brand in your vision statement, you can relay that vision to every aspect of your business. It goes beyond your logo, beyond your brand’s fonts and color schemes, and gets to the core of why your company is in business and who you seek to serve.

Consider your target audience when using brand marketing. Research how they like to be approached, the type of messaging they respond to, and what social media profiles they interact with online.

Use a Brand Marketing Kit

A brand kit covers all of the little things that come together to create your brand identity and keeps them in one place. Use the same brand kit across all channels where your brand shows up, whether that be your physical storefront, your website, or on your social media channels.

Brand Vision

Your brand vision will guide your brand marketing directives. The end goal should have the same vision as your brand vision.

Brand Mission Statement

Your mission statement will guide the overall narrative of your branded marketing materials.

Style Guide for Writing

Would formal or informal writing tell your brand’s story the best? Do you want to use AP or Chicago Style guides? Are there words you want to avoid using at all costs? Create a style guide that all of your in-house writers and freelance writers can use to create content marketing and advertisements that follow your brand’s messaging style.

Style Guide for Graphics

Your graphics style guide, or visual identity guide encompasses how you get your audience to recognize your brand. It covers where you will place your logo on your designs, what color palette you will use, the style of photography, and which fonts represent your brand. When creating your brand’s visual identity, make sure you include the following in your guide.

• Color Palette
• Branded Imagery
• Brand Fonts
• Logo & Sub marks

In this guide to creating a brand identity around your brand vision, you will notice that Local 2 Where places our logo at the top center on the first page of a document, and then uses a sub mark of the logo at the bottom left of each page in the footer. Your sub mark should be a recognizable piece of your full logo that can fit in spaces that are not appropriate for your full logo.

Create a Brand Vision Statement in 60 Characters or Less

In places like Facebook and Twitter, you only get about 60 characters to relay your brand’s vision statement, so it is time to get super clear on your messaging when conveying your messaging. Boil down your statement by thinking about what impact you want to have on the world due to the services or products your company provides.

A brand vision statement is different from a mission statement. A mission statement covers the what, who, and why of your business, but a vision statement covers the where. When you can condense your vision statement into a small, digestible blurb of text, you can fit it into more platforms and see the most impact from your vision. Here are some excellent examples of brand vision statements that are short and to the point.

Short Brand Vision Examples from Real Companies:

LinkedIn Brand Vision: Create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce.

Microsoft Brand Vision: A computer on every desk and in every home.

Alzheimer’s Association Brand Vision: A world without Alzheimer’s Disease.

Facebook Brand Vision: Connect with friends and the world around you on Facebook.

From these vision statements, you get a clear look at these companies’ overall goals and the changes they want to see due to their business being in operation.

Brevity holds colossal value when it comes to creating your brand vision statement. Facebook page descriptions have a character limit of 155 characters (including spaces), and shorter statements are more comfortable to digest and implement throughout your business. If you want to post your vision statement on Twitter, it needs to fall under 280 characters. Instagram ad and photo captions cut off at around 135 characters, so if you want people to see your vision, you need to keep it short and sweet.

LinkedIn’s company pages need to fit all of their about us and summary information into 2,000 characters or less, so don’t let your vision statement take up too much real estate in this limited space. Your vision statement is an immensely impactful part of your business. Keeping your message clear and to the point is the best practice for creating your brand’s vision.

Present your Brand and Lead by Example

When you show up as your business online, led by example by showing up as your brand. No matter what is happening outside of that moment, you are showing up as your brand, not just as yourself. Conduct yourself the way you want others to view your business brand and show your employees and team members how they can evolve into better marketers for your company while interacting online as well.

A great brand to follow for leading by example is Wendy’s, who honor their founder’s legacy, Dave Thomas. His foundation, The Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, became a key part of Wendy’s brand identity. Wendy’s is a champion for children in foster care. Their Frosty coupon books and other promotional marketing materials help spread awareness and move children from foster care to forever families.

Wendy’s might be sassy on their social media channels. However, they still lead by example by showing their core values and refusing to cut corners with their quality of food and the added quality of life they bring to those they support through their fundraising efforts.

Thank you for reading Local 2 Where’s guide to building a brand vision statement that is concise and clear. We hope you will take the time to craft a brand vision that centers on changing the world we live in for the better. Let us know what steps you are taking to build your brand, and join us on our platform to help your business blossom into its full potential.