Building a brand for your business can create long-term competitive advantage and add thousands of dollars of additional business. Branding your business is all about giving the audience something to remember you by. All the greats (names like Apple, Samsung, Coca Cola and Nike) know that you have to become a part of consumer culture if you want to be a household name. It is equal parts knowing your audience, as in the case of Old Spice, where the target audience was receptive to over the top masculinity, and knowing your product. In today’s landscape, you have to be proactive if you want to develop a brand that will resonate with consumers. We describe below 7 fantastic tips you can use to build and sustain great brand for your business.
1. Own Social Media
One of the first branding steps a new company needs to take is to own its presence in social media. We’re all familiar with Facebook and Twitter, but the lesser known networks are just as important. Look at networks like Google + and LinkedIn and establish your brand presence there. If someone on those networks comments about you, they are more likely to find you and vise versa. Additionally, if you do not claim your brand name then you leave yourself open to others claiming the same name. A domain is great for business, but do not discount the importance of messaging across social media channels.
2. Brand Email Correspondence
You may have noticed the trend of putting brand insignias at the bottom of emails. This is good practice for professional correspondence, especially if your clients are B2B. If you maintain an email list, you should brand your sender address and the name associated with it. The result might look like “brandinfo@brand.com,” and the sender might be the name of a brand representative. These extra steps help your email look more familiar to the client, and give you some consistency in your messaging.
3. Stay Consistent
If your messaging is fragmented, you can’t be sure that customers are getting the right information from your page. That’s why the simplest method of optimizing conversions is to be sure that your headlines and your copy stay consistent. Choose keywords to use and place them in your text and in your assets. Proofread your copy constantly, as it becomes easy to misread something or miss a typo.
4. Use SEO
According to a representative at 29 Prime, SEO is your ticket to a “front page ranking on major search engines.” Learn the SEO variables – a couple of relevant variables with every SEO campaign are: traffic (consider everything concerning the number of visits and keyword traffic), links (obviously, it’s both about domains and back-link based links), rank (which in this case means position for volume series), the social variable (everything concerning likes, +1s on platforms such as Google+ or followers on Twitter) and finally – content. All these variables need to be accounted for and covered in your SEO campaign.
A simple Google Alert will suffice for beginners. You can have these alerts delivered directly to your mailbox, and even choose the frequency. Say you are planning an event and would like to know if any hype is being generated. Alerts will send you real-time updates from blogs and news outlets as they are created, allowing you to keep tabs on what’s being said as it happens.
5. Give Away Swag
Swags, like t-shirts and pens, can be valuable as branding tools. One handy method of branding is to make a Sudoku notepad that potential clients can pass the time with during conferences. Think outside the box and put your logo on something people will actually use.
6. Develop Greetings
A telephone greeting can be a valuable aspect of branding too. If you communicate with clients on the phone, set a protocol for your representatives to follow. While it’s not over the phone, you might notice that Chik-fil-a has all of its representatives respond to customer praise with “my pleasure.” That small acknowledgement is across the board for all associates and leaves the customer feeling respected. Diction, or how you say things, is extremely important.
7. Write Guest Post
Speaking of saying what’s on your mind, you ought to do it on the blogs of others. While it sounds counter-productive, it’s actually quite good for marketing. Spreading your name and link builds upon your status in the community, and it also creates the image that you’re an expert. It’s also useful in customer acquisition, where your writing voice can be a selling tool.
What do you think? Would you like to add anything to these tips?
Great article. It’s true, building a strong presence on top social media and gaining authority from the search engines are ways to building a great brand for small businesses.