Why Is Your Brand Important?
There is a difference between branding and a brand. Branding is a series of attractive and eye-catching colours, a logo, the words on an advert, and the familiar feel of a social media graphic. A brand is much more. A brand is your business identity. The value that you offer, and most importantly, what you are known for within your industry. Your customers build trust in you from your brand, they see your business as a personality, one that speaks to them.
Ultimately, your customer owns your brand. Their perception of your brand is your brand.
Here are some key steps to enable your brand to shine and build credibility and assurance throughout your customer base.
How to Build Brand Awareness
Business plan - The key starting point. You'll use this plan like a GPS for how to structure, run and grow your business. It's an essential plan to detail all of the key elements of how your business will run. You will then deep dive into every section of your business plan, writing a strategy for each objective you set. Here is a free business plan template to kick-start your thinking.
Your value offering - Dig deep here, what is your niche, your Unique Selling Point and what value do you offer to others? We can't just sell our products and services, we need to provide education, and solutions and show others how we can help them. Another aspect to determine is your Unique Value Proposition. How are you different to your competitors? What do you do differently?
Audience research - An essential part of any marketing activity, knowing your audience and what they need from you. Over time, you can build detailed customer personas, but initially, carry out some online research, utilise social media, follow key hashtags that your customers follow and look at comments. Forums and Facebook groups are super handy for this too.
Marketing strategy - OK, so the essence of this blog. Once you know your value and more about your target customer, and you have your thoughts mapped out in your business plan - How are you going to get there? Your Marketing Strategy will include the following steps to build your brand.
- Content strategy - Before you start creating content, you need to do two things. Develop your messaging that will resonate with your target audience, whilst understanding where your ideal customer hangs out. Your content strategy will then map out the pieces of content you will create that will bring customers down the customer buying funnel. Typically your content will be structured into (Brand) Awareness, Interest, Consideration, Intent and Evaluation/Action. Visit my free templates page to look at 'how to structure your content'.
- Strategy by channel - An overall marketing strategy is a must, but in this document, you'll list the channels you'll use to promote your brand. Your website, social media, directories, paid advertising, print, out-of-home - How are you going to use these channels, individually, to their best potential, what does your content and messaging look like across each? What is the goal by channel?
- Website - Although this is a channel in its own right, there are various steps to take when building a website that will support your brand and extend your reach. Such as renaming your images that include your brand name and location, the use of keywords in the correct places, adding an excerpt to your pages with your brand name, and building content in line with what your audience is looking for.
- Keyword search to improve SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) - Your marketing strategy should contain keyword research. There are online platforms that can give you hundreds of relevant keywords that are suitable for your audience and industry. Using keywords that your customers use when Googling a solution to their problems, will support your SEO and enable your brand to appear sooner rather than later over competitors. You can use your keywords across your website, social media captions and in the graphics/posts/stories/reels too. Another thing to consider is local SEO. If customers are searching for 'a marketing consultant near me' - I'd want to appear. Adding yourself to local directories is a good approach.
- Cross-promote digitally - By this point, if you've completed the steps above, you'll already be promoting your brand across various digital marketing platforms that are available. Especially social media. If you're on Instagram, and YouTube, promote your new YouTube video on Instagram - just one example to get you started. Going back to your content strategy you can future-proof your content creation days with a solid content creation system to make the use of your time efficient. Consider your whole plan and all channels when you film or create graphics. Think broad and create scripts and messages for themes that you can space out over a month. Don't be a one-hit wonder.
- Outreach and networking and building relationships - Probably not a favourite for everyone but I'd say it's essential - and fun. You want to meet your customers and learn from other experts in your industry. This doesn't always have to be face to face, you can 'community manage' and build trust in Facebook groups, through Instagram comments and on LinkedIn too. You can join groups, online networking, and forums to share your expertise.
- Google Search Console (GSC) and Google Analytics (GA) - Both of these services are free and come with your Google account. GSC helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site's presence in Google Search results. You don't have to sign up for GSC to be included in Google Search results, but it will help you to understand and improve how Google sees your site by submitting your website site map. GA dives deeper into your website traffic so you can see where your customers find you and which pages are popular on your website. A useful tool to see if local SEO and cross-promoting are working, and ways you can amplify your content.
- Paid advertising - When you feel the time is right, and you've spent your time building up your content and organic reach, paid advertising and PPC (paid per click) is a route that can be valuable when increasing brand awareness, directing relevant traffic to your website, and capturing leads from customers who are ready to purchase. Your results can be tracked through Google Analytics too.
- Analyse and adapt - You'll be able to track engagement against all of the content you post. Blogs on your website, every.single.post AND reel AND story (!)....but give it time. Don't get too caught up in the reactions and followers, look at Impressions and Reach instead. Keep going back to your Business Plan and your Marketing Strategy. But mostly your value offering. Are you providing what your customers need? If the answer is yes, then you'll reach the statistics anyway.
What Does Your Brand Mean to You?
If you feel your business needs to reconnect with your brand mission, purpose and values, I provide brand audits interlinking your messaging and all of your marketing channels. You'll receive recommendations and tailored advice to tweak and boost your brand visibility.
If you’re unsure where to focus to make the biggest impact on your business visibility, start here:
- Listen to this episode of my co-hosted podcast, A Measure of Marketing ~ Maintaining your brand identity