Most of your marketing strategies are likely geared around increased brand awareness and adding potential customers to the sales funnel. Creating processes around branding and marketing is the best way to ensure consistency and a widening customer base as your company grows and evolves.
Whether you are just starting a business or your company has been around for generations, it can be tempting to hope that your product/service will speak for itself without all the effort of branding and marketing. In a recent podcast interview, Zack Miller, Founder of Hatch, shared that the Field of Dreams concept that “If you build it, they will come” doesn’t work. If you build a product and tell no one about it, no one will find your product. There is too much noise in today’s attention economy for this method to work.
During their interview, Zack and Adi Klevit, CEO of Business Success Consulting Group, discussed effective branding and marketing techniques that have been proven to help business owners promote their products or services. Read on to find three branding strategies that you can include in your marketing processes.
Three Strategies to Improve Brand Recognition
1. View your brand from an outside perspective.
Many business owners fall in love with a particular color or font style but fail to take a step back and examine the brand from an outside perspective—and on different channels.
When determining how to best brand your company, it’s vital to take a step back and view the content, logo, signage, etc., from a customer point of view. Is the signage something a person can read at a glance when driving by? Does that branded video capture your attention within the first second or two of viewing? Do messages written in your brand colors work on a variety of media, even when someone is viewing that content on their phone?
You can hire an outside advisor or ask a few honest friends to look at your branding from a customer perspective if it’s too hard to do so on your own. Do this periodically, not just one time for a logo check. Perhaps your team decided to use the blinding yellow color in your business colors for text – rather than the easy-to-read purple, or the first three frames of your video feature just a logo and don’t capture attention. These are easy to fix once you’ve recognized them, but spending lots of money on content that goes over like a lead balloon can be devastating.
2. Value brevity
You have less than 8 seconds to grab someone’s attention. Usually, it’s around 3 seconds. So, value brevity while still staying on brand. You can do this with attention-grabbing (without clickbaiting) headlines, images that pull the viewer in, short videos that share the main point right at the beginning, and more. Crisp, clear, on-brand communication is vital in today’s attention economy.
3. Consistency counts
A business needs to stand out of the crowd – consistently. This is one area where documentation and metrics can play a crucial role in ensuring that your company stands out in a good and repeatable way. Test out a few stand-out actions, looks, products, or pieces of content and measure the results. What worked? Was it creating a concise and eye-catching headline and then providing a helpful article for the reader? Was it having your team wear blue jeans at a networking event where everyone is usually suited up? Or was it a donation to a unique charity that makes people proud to be your customers?
There are many ways to stand out. Consistently and repeatedly standing out is a great way to create brand recognition.
Finally, be sure to document what works and what doesn’t. You would be surprised how many businesses forget to document a successful marketing process and then lose the knowledge of replicating that success. Documentation helps the business preserve that vital information for future marketing campaigns.
Are you unsure of how to build a robust documentation system? Contact the process experts at Business Success Consulting Group! We are here to help.
