7 Ways To Safeguard Your Brand Identity
Building a brand requires a lot of time, effort, and money, and protecting it at all costs makes sense. It’s paramount, especially in this modern age, and with the advent of technology, many others may try to steal or illegally copy your brand. While there are too many things on your plate already, you should prioritize protecting your brand identity just as much.
Fortunately, there are different steps and inexpensive methods to ensure your brand remains safe. Continue placing your brand image in a good light, and this will reflect your bottom line, which will generate more opportunities and growth for your business. t
Apply the following ways to safeguard your brand identity and find out the top brand strategy agencies:
1. Secure A Trademark
There are many advantages to securing a trademark for your business. By registering a trademark, a business can protect its brand, prevent other businesses from using similar names and signs, and ride on another’s success. Thus, your goods or services can be traced back to their source. Trademark also gives your brand legal protection. You can protect yourself from counterfeiting and fraud with it. Before applying to trademark your brand, ensure that your mark is available by checking it through a US trademark search tool.
By registering a brand, a startup can act against parties registering conflicting trademarks. It’s the best way to ensure that your brand is solely yours and yours alone. You can get rid of other brands who try to threaten your own. Remember that your brand is very crucial, especially as you scale your business. Business investors, suppliers, and customers trust your brand. Hence, it makes sense to invest in trademarking your brand.
2. Manage Your Social Media Profiles Consistently
Protecting your intellectual property is only the first step; monitoring your brand online is the next. Nowadays, everyone can easily steal information, pictures, and other public data online. You should be able to protect your social media profiles consistently to ensure that no other third party is stealing your information.
Unsuspecting customers can be confused by fake social media pages imitating your brand identity. Some entities could try to confuse and distract your customers by following your domain name or opening social media accounts similar to yours. You should warn your followers and clients about these.
Ensure your brand identity isn’t being exploited by fake social media pages and websites. It’s imperative for any business in this age where the web heavily influences people’s perceptions of companies and products.
All social media channels must be monitored to protect your brand identity. If necessary, you should have your marketing team designated to ensure that all your online activities and platforms are safe and secure. You should ensure that it isn’t misused or copied by others. Be keen on spotting any malicious or suspicious activities done by cybercriminals.
3. Devise Clear Brand Guidelines
The visual representation of your company makes up your brand identity. A company’s reputation is determined by how people perceive its products and brand. Therefore, you must create clear brand guidelines to remain consistent. You should ensure that distributors and retailers represent your brand the same way you do.
The best way to do this is to publish brand guideline documents for all your business stakeholders, employees, vendors, suppliers, and partners. Colors, product images, taglines, logos, social media content, and web copy should be explicitly specified in these documents. Doing so will create a concrete level of uniformity with your brand.
4. Keep Your Brand Story Authentic And Unique
If you have a brand story to share, ensure they are authentic and unique. Brand storytelling is one solid strategy to receive empathy and allow your consumers to relate to your brand. However, your brand story needs to be as unique as possible, ensuring that it’s different from your competitors or any other brand in different industries and markets.
Brand stories reveal much about a brand’s character, what they stand for, and what makes them unique. Unlike anything else, brand stories package and depict brand personality and meaning in a unique way. Keeping telling stories is a great way to engage people.
5. Ensure Employee Morale
Another important consideration in safeguarding brand identity is employee morale. Having low employee morale will negatively impact your brand. To communicate effectively with your people, you must see them and be seen by them. You should stay as hands-on as possible when it comes to training and communicating with employees. Consider employee feedback and take action before you feel a negative impact on your brand.
Everyone in the organization contributes to brand development, but perhaps none more so than business owners and key employees in leadership roles. Employees can be the biggest brand advocates or critics. It’s important to welcome honest feedback, opinions, and ideas from your staff to help your brand grow. The brand must be viewed favorably by employees, and they must feel a strong connection to the brand. In doing so, they can be the first ambassador of your brand.
6. Consider Getting Your Brand Patented
Inventions that are protected by patents prevent competitors from recreating and copying them. Before launching your product on the market, you should get a patent if your product incorporates innovative technology or a unique design idea. The right to patent your designs and innovations allows you to shut down any competitors who try to copy them blatantly.
7. Protect Your Domain Name
Your brand’s domain name is also an important part of your brand’s identity, so it needs to be actively protected. Your website address is much more than a simple URL.
Websites are essential for spreading brand awareness, keeping customers updated with the latest events, and educating potential customers about your brand. In fact, your business needs a blog for your customers and followers to perceive your brand as a high authority in your industry.
You can protect your brand’s identity by obtaining a domain name for your website. Fortunately, there are a lot of reputable sites where you can buy unique domain names intended especially for your brand. You can reach your targeted audience for a small fee. You can check that a domain name is available when you purchase a domain through reputable domain registrar sites.
Conclusion
You must protect your brand identity at all costs. There is more to branding than just having a logo, domain name, or tagline. You must protect your brand in each marketing and advertising area to ensure that your competitors don’t steal your hard-earned customers. Hopefully, you can apply the steps above to ensure your brand identity is safe.
