Creating a brand is easy. Making a compelling brand is not.
That’s because a brand goes far beyond a series of logos and taglines. It’s your company’s public-facing identity. When people hear your company’s name, what thoughts, feelings and ideas should be going through their minds?
Building a compelling brand is a multifaceted operation that requires thought, design, consistency and constant reinforcement. Whether your brand is in its infancy or it’s well established, here are some tips for making it stronger.
Get Existential
Everyone has a reason for creating their own travel company. Maybe you were researching a trip you wanted to take and noticed a gap in the market, so you decided to build the trip yourself. Maybe you became passionate about taking your friends on winery tours across the country. Either way, no one goes through the time, effort and expense of creating a travel company unprompted. Identifying your reason will help strengthen your brand.
Getting existential means thinking back to the foundations of your company and asking a few deep questions: What inspired your journey, and what exactly do your trips offer? Who does your business serve, and what are they like? How do you do it better than anyone else in the market? These questions might seem basic, but taking the time for a brainstorming session and writing down the answers will help you see the full picture and identify your business’s core ideas and principles, which can be useful in later stages of design.
Refine Your Design
Your brand’s design is often what makes its first impression. If your logo looks like it was drawn by a child, you might be turning off potential customers who doubt your legitimacy or capabilities. Your brand design is your company’s stamp, so when people come across your marketing materials — whether they’re posts on social media or a postcard in their mailbox — they’ll instantly recognize that it came from you. That means you’ll need a professional logo, a series of brand colors, and a set of design standards to apply across your materials and website. They also need to go well together. Making sure colors, fonts and graphics don’t clash with one another (or with your company’s core ideals) is key.
If you’re unsure how to do that, don’t fret. There are many freelance designers and artists who can help make sure your brand assets are in good shape. It’s an important step in creating a strong brand, so don’t skimp on hiring a professional who can do your company justice.
Be Consistent
Consistency is key for creating a trustworthy brand. You don’t want someone to see one logo on your social media and see a completely different logo on your website; they might start to question if you’re even the same company. Likewise, you want all your materials to contain similar messaging and tone. This ensures a uniform experience across all touchpoints and creates a recognizable, trustworthy brand that earns loyalty from customers. Your business will come across as reliable and legitimate, and your message will be more likely to sink in.
Tell a Story
Storytelling is one of the most entertaining and effective means of communication available to humans. It’s particularly powerful for brands because it builds emotional connection between the company and prospective customers. In a saturated market, narrative storytelling feels more authentic and sets your company apart from the rest.
While telling the world your company’s origin story can be a plus, a far more effective means of storytelling is positioning your customer as the hero of their own story, with your brand acting as the trusted guide that helps them overcome their unmet needs and struggles. The narrative arc can go something like this: Your customer has an unmet travel need, so your brand gives them the tools and the means to meet that need, and then their travel dreams are fulfilled. It’s easy for other prospective customers to see themselves in this scenario, and it resonates more as a result. Whether you use real customer testimonials to create brand storytelling or hypothetical scenarios, there is almost limitless potential here.
Keep Reinforcing It
Having strong, consistent design and messaging is imperative, but none of that will matter if you’re not consistently reinforcing your brand. Make sure you take the opportunity to do this at every stage of the trip, from the pre-booking communication to the post-trip surveys. That can be done in very subtle ways, such as making sure your trip leaders always wear a shirt with your logo and brand colors on the first night of the trip or putting your company’s tagline in your email signature. It can be more direct, such as giving your travelers a speech at dinner the first night about how your company got started and how your trips differ from others.
You can also reinforce your brand by sticking to your word — whatever you’re telling your customers to expect, make sure you deliver every time. If your customers expect the opportunity to customize their trips and you fail to offer them any kind of options, they won’t see you as reliable and likely won’t book with you again.
