Brand awareness is the difference between a company that regularly sees returning customers and one that struggles to pull in leads. In fact, brand awareness is so important that 89% of marketing teams believe it is the single top priority when it comes to building and running a business. Beyond any other strategy or reason, including generating sales, brand awareness places top.
But, considering how impactful brand awareness can be, it’s frustratingly difficult to build, with the vast majority of shining examples being companies that have been around for over 30 years or more. As a more recent company, the process of building up a base of customers that recognize your branding, identity, and logo can be a daunting process.
To help you win the uphill branding battle, we’ve outlined some of the very best tips that you can take to create a solid brand and then get recognized by your customers. Each of these methods will help you break into different markets, get eyes on your brand, and develop a voice that people start to follow.
Let’s get right into it.
How do you go about forming a brand?
While forming a brand can take many years of brainstorming, you’re likely in a position where you want to get started as soon as possible. With this in mind, there are three main pillars that you absolutely must know before you start a business. Each of these pertains to a large portion of your branding and will be used across your whole business.
Once you understand these core pillars, all the other elements of creating a brand – marketing style, tone of voice, social media presence – will come naturally, as you can simply extrapolate from these initial concrete ideas.
The three core pillars that you should begin with when forming a brand identity are:
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Business values
Creating a set of business values should always be the first thing that a business owner does when trying to formulate a brand. Alongside feeding into ideas like company culture down the line, identifying what’s important to a company at this stage can help to inform in terms of how the company communicates with others, what style designers should opt for in the logo creation process, and even form a foundation for decisions in business. Creating and understanding what your business stands for, as summarized in a few value keywords, is vital.
Colors
Feeding off your company values, you might instantly have a color scheme or pallet that aligns with the core of who you are. Company branding colors can come from your values or can reflect the product itself. For example, lots of beauty brands opt for very neutral pinks and blues, which demonstrate cleanliness, transparency, and care. Alternatively, companies that work with nature to any degree often use green in their company colors, as this has the strongest human association with wildlife. Every color represents something different, so you should take your time to think about which colors speak to the core of your company. If you’re not sure which color palette is best for your brand, then use a color palette generator tool like Canva.
Logo
Once you know what solution you’re providing and what your core values and colors are, you’re in a great position to start working on your logo. You want to ensure that your logo is recognizable, meaning it should be simple and easy to reproduce. Think of the McDonald’s ‘M’ or the Nike tick, both of these are incredibly simple, just using a generic symbol and color to distinguish themselves. Don’t over-complicate things; you want your logo to be easy to recognize from a crowd.
Moving through these pillars, in that order, help you create a clear vision of what your company stands for, what ideas represent it, and how best you can make that visible to the world. Once you’ve identified your brand in your own mind, you’ll be in a much better place to then go about distributing that brand and your values around the world.
Whenever you need to make a decision about other areas of branding, come back to these core areas. With the solidified in your mind, you’ll be able to quickly make a design that aligns with your current branding, helping to expand your scope without increasing the workload by a huge amount.
How do you create brand awareness from scratch?
Building brand awareness can often feel like an uphill battle, especially for companies that are starting from the ground up. This is often due to the fact that no matter what tactics you employ, there is a degree of awareness that simply comes from having time in the game. A company founded three months ago is going to have a hard time breaking into the industry, while a business founded back in the 80s will already likely be a big name if they’re still active.
That said, there are a few core methods that you can use to boost the chance that your brand hits the ground running. Let’s explore four fantastic ways that you can create brand awareness from scratch. We’ve focused on high-reward methods, helping you to generate awareness as quickly as possible:
- External guest posts.
- Offer educational advice.
- Cohesive branding.
- Deliver on what your promise.
Let’s break these down further.
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1. External guest posts
One of the best ways of gaining exposure at an early date is to work with other companies or influencers. If you want to go down a more collaborative route, writing guest posts for other companies and for news outlets that feature your business to some extent is a great way of getting your name out there.
By focusing on guest posting at the beginning of your company’s journey, you’re able to almost piggyback off the established name of others, helping to acquire a portion of other audiences. Running this tactic at scale is a great way of pulling in new customers and leads your business from a variety of different spheres, providing you with a wide base of customers for early brand awareness building.
What’s more, there are now ample opportunities online to guest post, with a quick google search providing you with countless media outlets or companies looking for partnerships.
2. Offer educational advice (for SEO)
Your own company blog should be a pool of resources that help your customers. Going beyond explanations of how to use your product or platform, you should fill your blog with industry news, information about how to do certain things or anything that you believe will help your customers.
Free advice allows you to help your customers, while also providing the perfect place to launch SEO campaigns. By targeting certain keywords in your industry, you’re able to build up a bank of articles that you can then use to gain natural traffic to your website.
A fantastic example of a strong company blog is Neil Patel. While their actual product focuses on digital marketing tools, the large majority of their traffic – and by extension, their customer base – enters their site through their extensive blog collection. Thousands of different articles cover useful information about branding. Building a website, and the best digital marketing practices is a perfect example of using a company blog to generate traffic and brand awareness.
With educational and useful content on your website, you’ll be able to generate additional natural traffic to your site while also actually helping your customers. With this, people will be much more likely to remember and recommend your brand as they instantly have a positive experience – and completely for free!
3. Cohesive branding
Once you’ve established your brand and have your fundamentals down, you should attempt to incorporate your branding into every area of your business. While major points like on social media sites and on your own company website come to mind, you should extend your branding into every location where customers will come into contact with a representative of your company.
A great example of this is including branding even within company emails, with the opportunity to add an email signature being a fantastic way of incorporating company colors and marketing materials into emails. Especially considering email is going to be one of the most populated points of contact between your business and the outside world, this is a great additional place to include branding.
By using an email signature generator service like WiseStamp, you can incorporate your company’s branding into an email signature in minutes, filling out their templates to create exactly what you’re looking for. With this, you increase people’s exposure to your brand, having an element of branding on every single social communication you engineer.
4. Deliver on what you promise
When companies desperately want to grow their brand awareness, they’ll try any tactic under the sun to ‘hack’ this metric and boost exposure. While there is a range of effective strategies that companies can try, one of the best ways of increasing awareness is to simply overperform and deliver on all of your promises.
If you want people to remember your company and even recommend you to their friends and family, then you need to ensure that your product or platform knocks it out of the park every single time. Instead of just delivering what people expect, try and go one step further to genuinely impress your audience.
When customers don’t expect anything extra, even the smallest thing can radically impress people. For example, if your business is selling high-quality water bottles, and you include some company stickers or a small cleaning tool for free in their package, they’ll be greatly thankful.
Small touches that push your company above and beyond expectations are what inspire customers to tell others about your brand. Considering how effective word-of-mouth marketing can be, you’re going to be able to go a long way in terms of brand exposure if you continually overperform.
Focus on over-delivering and hitting all the boxes (and then one more), and you’ll have the perfect foundation for effective brand awareness building.
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Final thoughts
Building brand awareness for your business is far from an easy process, with the journey toward creating a recognizable brand being one that can take years of work. However, by going that extra mile, extending your network, providing quality, and overdelivering on your promises, you’re able to radically cut down how long it takes you.
Over time, you’ll be able to continuously build up your brand to ensure that customers recognize who you are, what you offer, and why you’re such a fantastic company. While these tactics are a great place to begin, the true building of brand awareness comes from time and hard work. You need to put in the effort early on to reap the benefits down the line.
Using these tips, combined with fantastic and reliable service, will get you far – no matter what industry you’re working in.
Web developer and SEO specialist with 20+ years of experience in open-source web development, digital marketing, and search engine optimization. He is also the moderator of this blog "RS Web Solutions (RSWEBSOLS)".
