Branding is a process of building your businesses or your reputation, as well as its visibility. Your brand’s reputation will often be known by people who have never bought from you, due to what other people think or what the general public thinks and feels when your brand is mentioned or is seen.
The truth is, branding is a complicated thing that is all about how the customer thinks about you.
You can increase brand awareness on purpose or by accident. Your best bet if you want a long-lasting profitable business is to plan the branding you want your audience to know. Create the brand from the bottom up and live the branding so that over time it becomes second nature.
FREE Checklist: Branding For Small Businesses
9 Actionable Tactics To Increase Brand Awareness
1. Know Your Target Audience
A lot of people think that your branding starts with your product, but it doesn’t. Smart businesses don’t even create products until they know who their audience is. They design their entire existence around their target audience.
2. Understand Your Products and Services
Once you know who your audience is, you can create or find products and services to promote to them. You need to know these products and services inside out. Understand how they benefit your customers and solve their problems.
3. Define How You’re Different from Your Competitors
Once you know what you are selling and to whom, how does your offering stand out against the competition? What’s different? What’s the same? What’s better? The more competitor information you have, the more you can explain why your customers should use your products and services over someone else’s.
4. Develop Your Brand Personality and Image
As you work toward building your brand, it will become clear that you need to be who your audience wants you to be, but you need to be honest and transparent about it too. If your brand were a person, what would they look like? Give them a name, an outfit, and an image so that you can easily describe yourself to your customer.
5. Determine Your Brand Message and Mission
Once you know the type of personality and image and your brand, start working on your brand message. Your brand message starts with your mission statement. Create a mission statement that will define everything you do from this day forward. In fact, before you get involved with anything new, you can look at that statement to ensure alignment with your mission.
6. Create a Marketing Strategy Based on Your Branding
Your audience defines your marketing strategy. Whether you want to be irreverent or you need to be serious, depends on your audience and your mission. Whether you use video, text, or a combination to get the word out, each action you take determines how your audience will feel about you.
7. Define Your Online Presence
Use all the information you’ve developed to define your online presence. The messages and images on your website and social media platforms need to work together. Different types of messages and images on different platforms will confuse your customers.
8. Develop Your Marketing Collateral
Using what you’ve learned about your branding and your audience, now it’s time to develop all your marketing collateral. Make sure the words you use and the colors you use all make sense in the scheme of your branding and your mission.
9. Track, Measure, Tweak and Repeat
Nothing is ever done in marketing without checking the metrics. You need to know what’s working and what’s not working so that you can improve. Then when something works, do more of it.
Free Checklist: How To Increase Your Brand Awareness
Branding is something that can take years to develop, but it doesn’t have to if you have a plan in place. Know how you want your business to be represented and seen from the beginning. Develop the right content and information that spreads that message far and wide.
Download my free checklist, Branding For Small Businesses for more actional tips on how to increase brand awareness, reach your target prospects, provide a positively memorable experience related to what you have to offer and improve customer retention.
