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When your business first launched, your focus was likely on getting those first orders coming in and fulfilled. Once your business becomes better established, you may be thinking about the future and how you can best ensure your company continues to attract customers while maintaining your existing ones. Growing your customer base is not easy, especially when you are competing against other businesses selling similar products. It is in this situation that the importance of building a brand becomes clear.
For many businesses, branding is an afterthought. Many companies only begin to strengthen their brand and create an authentic brand identity after their company and its core products have launched. This is because branding is often considered an optional extra or something that only large corporations can do successfully. But, strong brands can be built by companies of all sizes and should be at the heart of every business.
Read on to find out more about branding and its importance, plus how you can improve brand awareness for your business.
Why Your Business Needs Branding
If you have not thought too much about your business's brand before now, you may be wondering why branding matters. Well, if your company has reached a plateau and you are keen to drive it forward to greater success, then thinking about your brand is essential.
The main driver for developing a brand is to differentiate your business from its competitors. There are likely to be many businesses selling products similar to yours, maybe at an identical price point. So, how do you ensure that consumers choose your products over the comparable offerings of your competitors? The answer lies in your branding. A strong brand adds value to a product over and above its intrinsic value. This is the reason consumers are willing to pay more for a designer brand rather than a cheaper alternative, even if the products are identical.
What is Brand Awareness?
Building your business's branding is your first task, but once this has been done, you will need to focus on spreading the word and developing your brand awareness. Brand awareness refers to your brand's visibility and whether consumers can recognize the brand as belonging to a specific company. In short, you want to build your brand and get it recognized so that consumers want to be associated with it and choose it over and above your competitors.
Strengthen Your Brand
Ensuring that your brand is as robust as possible is vital when you are building brand awareness. Strengthening your brand is a key part of the process when growing awareness of your brand. One of the most effective ways to improve your brand is by ensuring it is cohesive and consistent. If you have several different versions of your logo and switch between using different colors, your brand can become diluted, which makes growing brand awareness challenging. Using your logo in a consistent way, and selecting your corporate colors, and sticking with them will speed up the process of building brand awareness and ensure your products are distinctive and instantly associated with your business. Creating branding guidelines is an excellent way of maintaining consistency throughout your products and ensuring that everyone in your business is aware of how to use your branding correctly.
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Improve Online Presence
Improving your company's presence online is another useful way to build brand awareness. Working on improving the use of branding on your website is an excellent starting point, as it will ensure that customers notice the similarities between your company's physical and online branding. So, thinking about the types of images used on your website, the fonts you use, how the logo appears, and the colors that feature throughout will ensure that your website is consistent.
Working on your business's social media pages to ensure they take the same consistent approach as your website is also vital. Your social media platforms are also the perfect place to give your brand some personality and to reflect your brand values. The more effective your social media posts are, the more likely it is that you will attract new followers, which increases awareness of your brand and leads to a broader customer base. One of the best things about utilizing social media for your business is that it allows you to interact regularly with your target audience, which provides valuable insight into how your followers and customers engage with your brand. The more engagement and interaction on your social media pages, the more likely the algorithm will work in your favor, and your brand will be visible to a wider audience.
Use Memorable Promotional Material
Finding unique ways to bring your brand to people's attention is a really effective opportunity to get noticed by a much wider audience. Using promotional products featuring a company logo and corporate colors is a popular choice for many businesses. But, for your promotional efforts to have the desired effect, you need to be sure that you choose the right products. Selecting practical items to use as promotional materials is always an excellent idea, as they are more likely to be used and to get noticed. You could get playing cards printed featuring a unique design and your company logo and give them to your customers when they make a purchase. Everyone loves to receive free items, especially if they are something they can actually use and look fantastic, so this is definitely something to consider when looking for additional ways to get your business noticed.
Take a Combined Approach
Improving brand awareness is not something that can be achieved overnight. Instead, you will need to make a consistent effort and strengthen your branding in every aspect of your business so that it builds awareness. Building brand awareness is an ongoing process, but it is incredibly worthwhile. When you focus on building your brand and growing brand awareness, you are making a long-term investment in the success of your company which will continue to benefit your business for many years to come.
