Brand presence, awareness, or recognition refers to the level by which your customers remember and recognize your business. The higher your brand awareness, it also follows that you’ll have a wider range of audiences who are familiar with your existence. This includes the products and services you’re selling and promoting, your logo, messaging, and even your brand strategy.
In today’s highly competitive business industry, establishing a strong brand presence is said to be very important. When you have strong brand presence or brand recognition is strong, it also necessarily follows that more consumers recognize your business. Therefore, you may win a significant market share. In effect, your profitability and stability as a business strengthen as well.
This article serves as your guide on how you can establish a strong brand presence.
1. Give Away Freebies
Everyone loves to receive gifts and freebies, so you can’t go wrong with using it as a tactic in building up your brand! In fact, giving out freebies is still one of the best and most effective marketing strategies to strengthen your brand presence. When you give out freebies, you’re driving more traffic towards your store as now you’re enticing more buyers to come in, so they can also receive the freebies.
You can do this as frequently as needed, or as your budget can afford. Your freebies can be any promotional product from suppliers like Shop Strange, among the many others in your local area.
2. Conduct A Brand Audit
Conducting a brand audit makes it first on this list, as it’s a strategy you don’t just do once, but periodically. This step is crucial as a starting point for establishing a strong brand presence, so you can first determine where you currently stand with your target market. It’s also through a brand audit that you can successfully determine what your brand’s weak points are and what you can do to move beyond, and correct those weak points.
Brand audits allow you to take a third-party perspective, as to how you currently stand with your customers. By doing so, you can create the necessary alterations to strengthen your brand with the goal of meeting your customers’ expectations.
With that in mind, here are tips you can apply, so you can successfully start performing your own brand audit:
- Create a hypothesis. This step is important, so you can understand what it is specifically about your brand presence that you’re testing and measuring.
- Go through your web analytics. If you have a website, search engine systems also now make it easier for businesses to track their analytics. This means you can make data-driven decisions in your pursuit of establishing a strong brand presence.
- Send out customer surveys. This step can be done through email, text automation, or even through pop-ups on your brand’s website. The information you can gather from customer surveys may be insightful enough to fill out any gaps in information that you may not necessarily have from your web analytics.
3. Guest Blog On Other Websites
In today’s digital age, other e-commerce (electronic commerce) websites along with the same niche as your business aren’t just your competition. When you utilize those websites strategically and to your advantage, you may actually be able to turn the tables around with the positive effect of strengthening your brand presence.
How? Guest blogging is a failproof way to increase website traffic, grow your business, and heighten brand awareness. When your brand is linked to other authority sites, you’re sending the positive message that you’re an authority brand as well that’s worthy of trust from your target market.
If you haven’t started already, here are five useful tips for guest blogging:
- Brainstorm ideas for blog posts. Do this regularly, so you’re never without any ideas of content to come up with. Otherwise, any stagnancy in your schedule of posting may affect the success of your guest blogging endeavor.
- Research. This is always an inherent step of any plan. Never start any marketing strategy without first studying it and doing your own research. It’s your job to make sure you’re not guest blogging on spammy websites or else your own brand identity will suffer as well.
- Write a clear author biography. You should have an author bio to include your brand. This will make it easier for the readers of your guest blogs to get to know your brand’s existence, thereby strengthening your brand presence, in the process as well.
- Conclude with a call-to-action. With this, it makes it easier for your guest blog’s readers to get to know what they should do on your post. For instance, when more readers are encouraged to comment on each of your blog articles, you’re getting the word out about your brand by creating hype in the online community.
- Find sites that interest your audience. Otherwise, you may be wasting time and effort guest posting on sites that are irrelevant to your audience and thereby also not bring in any effect towards your business.
4. Develop Your Creative Elements
Your business can’t say that you have a strong brand presence when you aren’t even able to develop your unique creative elements. Human beings are visual individuals and it’s through your creative elements that the proper association with your brand can be made. This means that through your chosen strategy, you can establish a sense of coherence and consistency towards your brand. Whenever your target market sees your logo and colors, they’ll instantly know it’s from your brand.
5. Create A Referral Program
If you already have a loyal set of customers, use them to your advantage. Reach out to them and encourage them to spread the word out about your brand’s existence. This can be achieved by giving out perks. Customers will have that higher likelihood of promoting your brand, together with its products and services when they know they have an added perk to enjoy by doing so.
Use these tips to create and rock your referral program to win more customers, and in the process, also build a strong brand presence:
- List your possible referral sources from your current list of customers, so you can first start reaching out to those customers whom you know with higher certainty will be willing to refer your products and services;
- Identify what your incentives are so you can make them crystal clear when you’re still reaching out to your possible referral sources; and
- Set up a tracking system, so you can verify certain information like who was referred by this source and how many new customers they were able to bring into your brand.
6. Post Infographics
Media comprising of videos and images are universally helpful in your pursuit of building a strong brand presence. But, if you were to choose only one type of image to focus on, for the time being, you can’t go wrong with having shareable infographics. Post these on your website and social media sites and. With only a few clicks, so many more individuals can get to know about your brand’s existence.
The reason for this goes back to the very nature of infographics. They’re informative, easy to digest and understand, and also visually engaging. It puts into photos what your target market would’ve had to spend so much more time on reading and trying to digest long text.
Here’s how you can consistently come up with awesome infographics for your brand:
- Choose a color scheme that also resonates well with all the other creative elements of your brand. That way, there’s that seamless connection between the shared infographics and your brand. Remember your main purpose for posting infographics, which is to increase your brand presence.
- Use a maximum of three fonts, so as to avoid any confusion with getting your message across.
- Avoid the big no-no’s in infographics like overloading your infographic with too many visual elements and posting misleading information.
- Choose a layout that’s easy on the eyes for more seamless digestion and flow of information.
- Use visuals that are helpful in aiding visual comprehension like bars, charts, and graphs.
7. Increase Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Success Through Keywords
Lastly, it’s said that you can’t go wrong with abiding by the metrics set forth by SEO. These refer to the standards in place for your website to rank higher with search engines and to make it appear on top landing pages. When this is achieved, it necessarily follows that your brand presence is strengthened as well, as now you’ll have more customers coming in to purchase from your brand.
Among the many SEO strategies you can follow, a good and classic one is to use the right keywords. When you do, you can make your website rank higher, as search engines’ crawlers now have keywords to skim through in your content.
Conclusion
In practicing the strategies above, your business will be on its way towards enjoying a strong brand presence. This is a very important metric to achieve, as with high brand awareness, it also necessarily follows that your audience can be better able to remember and identify your brand. If not, then your business will only find it challenging to stand out from the competition. The goal should always be for your company’s identity to be etched on the mind of your target market, so your offerings become like a household brand to them. Whenever your market needs to purchase products and services that are within your niche, your brand becomes their first choice.
