Building a brand is a timeless activity in which all businesses should engage. In part, new businesses continue to boom every day across all industries. A competitor can sweep you off before you notice if you are reckless with your business.
In addition, we all want to make an additional sale, which means expanding our audience reach and building loyalty among our customers.
In this article, I explore five strategies that can help bootstrap your branding efforts from a more futuristic perspective.
Visualize your brand
Using visual components to present your brands can have a persuasive effect on your target audience. Research shows that visual communication converts 3X more than plain words. Visualization stems out of creativity, which can spur engagement according to this article by Forbes.
You can choose to visualize your brand either using print media such as flyers, brochures, banners, and getting a company profile or digital media such as getting a logo, launching your website, launching your mobile app, or social media brand assets.
If you already have a poorly performing website or a mobile app, you may want to consider redesigning it to improve both the user experience and user interface.
Paying more attention to online communities
This may sound cliché but it is worth emphasizing. I joined social media early enough but I did not realize the massive opportunity on these platforms. It is one thing to be on social media and it is another to be actually utilizing it for business growth.
The continually expanding social media cannot be ignored. The world saw a surge in the number of internet users to 4.38 billion while social media users expanded to 3.48 billion. That this number will continue to expand into the future is expected.
New research by Forrester has revealed that brands could spend to a tune of $112 billion (KES 11.2 trillion) on social media in 2020. You can picture that and imagine the gain of being not only present but also active on social media
Become a creator
To emphasize, I believe that being on social media is not enough – at least not for a business. Growing on social media necessitates that you generate information that will resonate with your target audience.
Apparently, the modern consumer is continuing to embrace value. It is easier for brands to build an audience when they generate value through the content they produce than even through advertising.
In 2020, you want to not just be on social media promoting your products but rather creating value for your audience and watching growth follow you. Read this article here on how to become a content creator on social media and this on the best practices of content creators.
4. Building authentic relationships
People always appreciate authenticity when they are associating with other people and the case is no different for brands. Whether you are building a personal brand or one for your business, it is very beneficial that you build a relationship with your audience.
Relationships on social media are built through giving shout outs to your fans, sending direct messages, and replying to comments.
5. Learn to measure your effort
If you are spending money and time (time is money) building your brand, then you may want to consider measuring on a regular basis the return on your investment. To measure the growth of your sales performance or a marketing campaign is one thing and to measure your brand performance is another.
However, measuring a brand is not an outright activity, which is why most businesses sideline it. It requires deciding the metrics you want to measure and determining how to measure them.
Some of the commonly used brand performance metrics include brand awareness, familiarity, consideration, and advocacy.
Measuring brand awareness
There are two ways of measuring brand awareness according to clutch.io.
First, you may want to examine the traffic to your website either on a daily, monthly, or annual basis. The awareness of your brand may be coming from social media, a direct search on search engines like Google, or direct traffic.
This will help you decide whether you need to invest in social media marketing, search engine optimization, content marketing among other ways of branding.
Second, you can measure the number of people searching for your brand name on search engines or brand mentions on social media.
Measuring familiarity
Brand familiarity is about knowing whether your target audience knows not just your brand name but also your brand promise and values.
According to this article, it is possible for your customers to know you and not know what you stand for. It is key to ensure that your audience knows your brand and its products or services.
Brand familiarity is measured by checking the average session on your website and the bounce rate.
If people are aware of your brand and not your products, they can land on your website from any source and leave within no time.
Brand consideration
Another branding component you might want to measure is purchase considerations. People might know your brand name and your offerings but not actually buy. It makes sense, therefore, to want to know how much of your audience want to buy your products.
Interactions are the key points of concern for brand consideration. This could be the interaction with your marketing messages, engagements on your website, and previous purchases.
Considering that companies deal with different products and have different sales procedures, it becomes challenging to come up with a general metric that gives insights for brand consideration.
You can only design your own metrics and diagnose the smallest of the factors that can hint at purchase intent.
Brand advocacy
We all love brand advocates. Referred customers are fun to engage with, their sales process is faster than the normal customers are. You want to measure whether your existing customers are advocating for your brand and its services.
Some hints that your brand has advocates are social media mentions. You can also conduct online surveys to measure your net promoter score.
It takes effort to build a brand
The five strategies above are part of our internal branding plans because we find them handy to our business objectives. While your objectives are almost certainly different from ours, we believe that the strategies can work for nearly all business if properly executed.
That being said, none of the strategies is a walkover. It takes work to build and maintain a brand. You have to fully commit in order to see the results.
Luckily, Convenience Designs Limited is out to help you build a stronger brand. We design bespoke brand assets both for the print and digital media. Learn More about our brand identity services.
