There are thousands of brands out there, all looking for a place in the public eye and looking for business, often making it difficult for you to get your brands voice heard, especially for smaller brands looking to compete against larger, more popular organisations.
So how do brands actually stand out? Is it through social media, advertising, events and even PR? In fact all of these ways can help increase exposure, however there’s more to it than simply implementing them in your marketing strategy and hoping for the best, so let’s take a look at how you use the best marketing tools for your business and help your brand be seen by an even larger audience.
Building Your Brand
Some of the biggest brands out there are so popular because of how recognisable they are, from their identifiable logos, colours, slogans and even through their brand voice and whilst some of this does come primary from TV ads, there’s no reason online businesses can’t reach the same heights, building a brand identity that can be easily recognised and loved by many.
Logos, Slogans & Symbols
Coming up with your logos, symbols and catchphrases is one of the most fun and creative parts of building your brand identity, letting you show off your creative side and helping establish something that your audience will be able to associate with your brand for years to come. While you might not be able to create the logo itself, it’s your ideas that can help shape your logo, before your creative team get involved in creating the logo digitally, so it’s important you have the right idea.
In order to work out a rough idea for your logo, think about what your business does and what you have to offer, thinking about what type of logo would best represent your business and your services, be it a font based logo or a more image based logo. Inspiration can come from a variety of places, your logo doesn’t have to be objective, just because you sell cars doesn’t mean your logo needs to be a image of a car, take Nike for example, who’s logo is the identifiable tick, nothing to do with shoes or sports clothing.
The same goes for your slogans, while they might not seem as important as your logo, your slogan can be another way to make your brand recognisable, especially when used within your email marketing, social media graphics and also within your online videos.
Take To Social Media
Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram all offer a huge range of cost effective opportunities for brands to promote themselves, helping grow awareness and build an online following. While finding the time to use and expand your social media profiles can be challenging and often time consuming, if you’re looking to help increase brand awareness then you need to stay active online, you wouldn’t expect huge brands like McDonalds to stop interacting with people online and you shouldn’t be doing that either.
By posting content several times a day, posting relevant and on topic content you’re likely to find people who are genuinely interested in your content and your business, looking to follow you online, increasing your follower count and also opening more doors for people to check out your website and visit your website, which in turn could potentially lead to an increase in sales and a way to generate more leads.
You should also aim to create conversations online, responding to others and showing that your business is listening to the questions and comments from others and is willing to respond.
Don’t Forget SEO
Having a neat logo and a social media following aren’t always enough to create brand awareness, while they can be effective ways to make your brand recognisable, in order to help audiences recognise you, first they need to find you, which is where SEO plays an important role. Search Engine Optimisation, is hugely important for gaining visibility online, helping your website, blog and even videos rank in search engines, helping people discover your content when searching.
Many of the biggest and most recognisable brands do so well online due to not only their recognisability, but also because they rank so highly on Google and also boast a large online presence. While a great SEO campaign, with a high quality website and relevant keywords isn’t necessarily a quick fix and it’s likely your website rank highly straight away, with lot’s of time and a great strategy, you can have the desired results, helping your brand establish itself online and get found by your target audience.
In order to perform best you need to be creating great content consistently, not just relying on your website content alone, be it blog posts, infographics or videos, high quality content is crucial and offering interesting content that they really want to read, can be a great way to get found.
Brands are constantly trying new, innovative way to engage with their existing audiences, as well as reach out to new audiences. Increasing brand awareness takes time and effort and a lot of experimentation, so it’s important not to get frustrated, you may not see results immediately, but by implementing the above steps, as well as experimenting with your own ideas, you can be building a recognisable and engaging brand, that could drive the results you really want!
