Just like people, businesses have personalities. Whether or not you’ve intentionally created a personality for your company, you have one. This concept is referred to as “brand personality.” The world’s most successful brands know how to shape their brand character to appeal to the proper target audience. Showcasing this brand that you’ve worked so hard to build brings a human touch to your business. Highlighting the people behind the company helps potential and existing customers alike to connect to the business on an emotional level.

Providing this level of transparency can be scary, but it can also come with great rewards. Start by gathering the best traits of your company’s internal personality. Have your team brainstorm ideas. Then poll current customers. Compare the two lists of ideas, and create a concise brand personality that portrays your company’s image accurately.

Once you’ve collected the top traits of your company’s internal personality, you can bring brand personality into your customer touch points. Every business uses varying touch points, such as email marketing, paid online advertisements, and paper brochures, to reach new customers and maintain relationships with existing customers. Your brand plays a major role in creating these touch points. For example, a brand with a young at heart attitude is likely to use bright colors and trendy fonts and designs for their website and marketing materials. In comparison, a brand with a more reserved attitude is likely to use neutral colors and classic fonts and designs.

To convey your brand personality across all of your touch points successfully, you must be intentional with your branding efforts. A customer will gain instant appreciation for a business with a killer website. However, an initial visit to a website is just the beginning of a customer-business relationship. The same customer won’t be impressed if he calls the company and speaks with a crabby, unhelpful receptionist. You don’t want the customer to end the conversation thinking of your business as grumpy.

During touch point creation, guide all five user senses. It may not seem like the color of a call to action button or the music that you use in a website introduction video will make or break a sale. However, both visual and auditory elements are critical for creating the ideal user customer experience. A CTA button that gets lost in a cluttered landing page or an obnoxious jingle in a video may send a customer clicking away from your page.

As you create new touch points and assess existing touch points, ask yourself the following questions.

• Are your internal and external personalities in line with each other?
• Do you have consistency across your touch points? If so, is it the right consistency?
• Are there any touch points that you’re missing from your portfolio?
• Which touch points are weak and require improvement?

Finally, remember that your brand personality should be an accurate portrayal of your business environment. Pretending to have a formal company atmosphere when employees routinely go to work in jeans and t-shirts is only going to backfire. Instead, strive to create a positive first impression with potential customers so you reach the right target audience for your specific products and services.