Marketing and brand building go hand in hand whether you’re an established small business owner or an emerging entrepreneur. Many of the practices you’ll use in marketing your business will also help you establish your organization as a recognizable brand. If you’re unsure about how to use marketing to build your brand, these tips can help you get started.
You Need a Blog
While you may know that your business needs an attractive website with a simple user interface, you may not know that a blog plays a key role in making your website an effective marketing and branding tool. When you create posts that use SEO practices to increase your rankings in relevant search engine results, you’ll increase your site’s overall visibility. As you rank higher, your site will become recognized as an authority in your industry. That will lead more users to seek out your site when they need insight related to your area of expertise. Additionally, maintaining an active blog will provide you with a wealth of content to share on your social media pages. You can use images and embedded videos to make your blog posts more engaging, and that will encourage your blog readers to share your content on their own pages.
Stay Active on Your Social Media Accounts
Even before your company launches, you should be working on building a social media presence and building followers. This will help you create brand recognition and generate buzz around your products ahead of the launch of your business. You should start by interacting with users in social media groups and on related social media pages. Users who recognize that you take a more active approach will be willing to follow you. By following users in your target demographic, you’ll also get those users as followers in return. Keep interest high by creating posts that link back to your blog pages. In each post, be sure to use hashtags with relevant keyword phrases to reach a larger number of social media users.
Give Something Back
Consumers look for transparency and corporate responsibility in the brands they follow and support. This doesn’t mean you have to embrace every cause that seems important to the consumers in your target demographic groups, but it can be helpful to choose one or two causes that you do value. This will show consumers that you have goals other than to simply turn a profit. In fact, a popular strategy for businesses of all sizes is to choose a cause that can be linked to their products. If you own a cosmetics company, taking a stand against animal testing may help you connect with more environmentally conscious consumers. The cause you embrace isn’t as important as showing consumers that you do genuinely care about using your brand to benefit that cause.
Reach Out to Past Customers
An award winning branding agency can help you choose a number of different premium digital marketing methods for reaching new customers. However, that won’t grow your business or raise brand awareness if you’re not bringing back past customers. You can reduce customer churn by improving the quality of service your business provides. Each business is unique in how it can improve customer service, so the best place to start is to send out questionnaires that ask your past customers to rate and review your business. You can bring past customers back by offering free gifts or discounts on their next purchases. This can also encourage past customers to refer your brand to their family and friends.
Attract New Customers With Incentives
There are many ways you can build a more recognizable brand as you market your business. A common tool that’s growing in popularity is the development of an app for your business. Once a consumer downloads your app, they will have a small icon on their phone that acts like a free ad for your business. Every time they scroll through their apps, the icon for your app will remind the individual of your brand. You can also use text messaging to notify users about new products, sales, or giveaways. Another way to build brand recognition with new consumers is to host a giveaway on your social media pages. This will help you connect with users who may follow your brand but haven’t bought any of your products.
You can maximize the effects of these practices by also working with a digital marketing firm that specializes in branding. Together, you can develop a marketing strategy that will help you grow your business by increasing recognition for your brand. When you use this strategy consistently, you’ll be able to reach more new consumers with your brand’s message and products.
