Whether you want to promote yourself or your business and reach your goals, branding plays a critical role. Branding is key to how people perceive and understand your business. And it’s integral to getting you or your business known. But branding can seem pretty nebulous, and many people can’t understand it. Where do you begin with ensuring your brand is both accurate and recognizable?
Read on to learn more about brand awareness and strategies for creating a solid and recognizable brand that will get your name out there.
Launch your website on a reputable host
A website is the one space you have complete control over how your brand is defined visually, tonally, and more. While social networking is undoubtedly important these days, you’re limited by the options available when creating a profile. With a website, the sky’s the limit. So consider how you design it, and choose a reputable web host with excellent uptime and support, such as spaceship.
Define your brand values and unique identity
This step is one of the most important things you can do to establish your brand. What makes your brand stand out from others in your niche?
Make things easier by answering these three questions:
- What is your brand vision?
- What is your unique selling point?
- What are your brand values?
Once you answer these questions, you can hone in on what makes your brand unique. After that, it’s time to research your audience and competition. Find out your customers’ needs and pain points and how the competition is targeting them. Then figure out how you can make it better.
Ensure messaging and style reflects brand identity
By following the steps in the previous point, you should have some idea of how to ensure messaging and visual style reflect your brand identity. For example, a hip online retailer selling custom phone covers to a teen/young adult audience will look very different to online counseling services for middle-aged people. For the former, you might use brighter colors and more casual language. While for the counseling website, the color palette would likely be muted, with language that evokes a more serious and comforting tone.
Consistency is also of the utmost importance. Ensure visuals and copy style are used everywhere, from your website to social networks.
Utilize content marketing and social media
We’ve made mention of social media a few times already, and with good reason: it’s all but necessary to make your brand known in this day and age. Content marketing is also essential if you want people to find you on search engines. If that sounds intimidating, you can start simply. You can start with one social platform and expand later if need be. If you’ve done your audience research, you’ll know which platforms are most relevant and only join those. Do keyword research and competitive analysis in terms of creating content, whether video or copy. From doing this, you should be able to pre-empt your audience’s needs and provide the content they’re looking for before they even know it.