You should work on your brand before you work on marketing.
First off, let’s get this out of the way: a brand is not a logo. A brand is your audience's gut feeling about your business or organization.
‘Branding’ also isn’t the same thing as ‘marketing.’ Your marketing efforts should inform your target customer that you can solve their problem. Branding means modifying the way you consistently present yourself so that your solution is appealing to that target customer.
Marketing efforts invite people to try your business, your brand reinforces the initial invite and makes them want to come back a second time.
What does this mean?
You should start building your brand before you start marketing.
Imagine creating commercials or paid ads that lead people back to your social channels, website, or physical location - but your channels, website, and physical location have no substance because you haven’t worked on your brand.
Your brand has a lot of things factored in to create substance:
Foundation:
Your purpose, vision, mission, & goals.
(The reason you exist, and the reason why anyone should care.)
Personality:
Comprised of your values, culture, attributes, benefits, actions, tone of voice, and aesthetics.
Target Audience Identification & Research:
You identify your target audience in order to research them to learn about how you can position your business/organization to solve their problems or appeal to them.
Gap Analysis
Compare how you perceive you VS. how your audience perceives you.
The combination of theses elements directly informs every area of your business:
Storytelling
Brand Identity
Branding and Messaging
Marketing Communication
Business Development
Figuring out who you are is always the most important first step before attempting to attract others.
When you don’t understand the key areas of what makes your brand; there’s no story to tell, no identity to know you by, no messaging (that works), no marketing communication (that works), and no overall business development.
