How to grow your brand? Best Tips & Tricks
Having a business can prove to be a life-changing event. What’s more important than owning a business is generating revenue and ensuring the brand's growth that you have created. Be it an online business or an offline one, infusing growth and attracting customers is very important.
Having a significant brand presence not only helps you lay a milestone in customer conversions, but it also helps you create brand loyalty. However, to start utilising awareness, you need to first learn your ways around growing your brand.
Now, let’s begin with the process and steps to follow to build a brand from scratch.
What is brand awareness?
To explain in layman’s terms, Brand awareness is the possible recognition of a brand. Awareness about a brand represents its strong customer base and presents the fact that it needs no introduction as potential customers recognise it. Having brand awareness is the key to growth. However, when it comes to small businesses, their brand awareness is limited to a certain geography.
If you have the basics around your brand, you are successful in the following ways:
- Consumers have an idea about the existence of your business and the services that it provides.
- You have a stable social media feed where users come in daily, adding to your feed's high views.
- Your products are sought-after. If you have built a brand that can easily grab customers and make them switch over to choosing you over others means that you have successfully induced loyalty.
- Your business is being searched in the Google search engines.
How Eponyms form a foundation for your business?
Have you ever wondered how we can relate some very common terms with brands and identities? Ever wondered why you ask for ‘Coke’ instead of Cola when you order your drinks at fast-food restaurants? Moreover, ever wondered why you go looking for Band-Aid and not a plastic bandage when you cut yourself?
Now that you have an idea of these terms, they are known as proprietary eponyms. They can also be considered to be the synonym of a brand. This is a basic but powerful strategy that brands use to use generic terms to introduce their brands in simpler terms.
No, we are not telling you that it is only for brands that have a global reach. This step is more of a marketing strategy. Even if you don’t have a global brand presence, you can try coming up with such proprietary eponyms to boost your brand awareness.
How to create brand awareness?
Now that you know your basics around growing a brand lets advance with the majors.
Yes, it’s no doubt that you can invest all your money in offline marketing, but it will only leave you with no money to run the business. Therefore, you need to have a plan and a budget to invest in advertisements for brand awareness.
Advertisements are not cheap, and most business owners fail to develop the exorbitant prices involved with advertisements. Moreover, having increased advertisement won’t necessarily generate you results that are needed.
You can build yourself from scratch, following the suggested tips. To build effective brand awareness, you would want to:
- Create a hashtag that speaks for your brand.
- Become a member of local events or sponsor one.
- Start being a regular over social media handles and start creating a voice for your brand.
- Make use of the display ads on the Google Display Network.
5 Steps to grow your brand on a budget
1. Understand your target
The first and foremost thing to understand is the type of customers that your business will attract. By understanding whom to serve, you can make an impact in the market.
Having a buyer persona is important as it provides you with the details of your ideal customer. Having a buyer persona helps you figure out what you would want to add to your strategy and, most importantly, have an idea of your business from the customer’s point of view.
2. Referral Programs
Referral programs are like a magnet that attracts high amounts of traffic and engagement in your business. People try to generate maximum buzz to gain profits from the ongoing offers. Moreover, these referral programs are one of the most powerful tools for brand growth as it helps your company spread your product or service.
3. Mark your presence over the social media
Social media is one of the most powerful marketing tools that can help you grow your business. Having an added advantage of using social media to generate your business presence is free.
Social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn helps businesses grow exponentially. Interestingly, 4 out of 5 people on LinkedIn 'drive business decisions', such as social media's power.
You want to be there for them when they arrive.
Moreover, as per reports by MarketingSherpa, a study represented that around 58% of social media users are known to follow at least one brand over social media platforms.
4. Tell your story
It is no doubt that the audience connects well with stories that they listen to. This is pretty much the USP behind running daily soaps.
This factor is also important for you to consider when deciding to grow your brand. Consider the option of telling a compelling brand story about how you began and how you are here. Stories are the knowledge that you share. If you can connect to your customers on a personal level, you can grow the awareness around your brand.
Also, you don’t have to share rags to riches stories to keep your customers engaged with you. Your goal should be pretty simple, like sharing your story with the readers to resonate with the same.
5. Stop trying to please everybody
Now, before you leap into the race of building brand awareness, understand that your followers are not your customers. You might have a strong media presence but can fail to come up with a sound buyer pattern.
Understand that you can also benefit from a small pool of loyal customers to the brand you are building. You don’t have to acquire a base of big customers but fail to give you the desired output.
Why is brand awareness important?
You might spend all your capital behind the advertising agencies and have pure quality products. However, you will fail to impact the market if you are not a brand that can set itself apart. Your brand is your identity that carries your company name, professional logo, and the quality experience you want to share with your customers.
Recognition vs Awareness: Know the difference
Brand recognition is where customers know your brand with its logo or the products you are offering. Example: Apple.
On the other hand, brand awareness is the process of simple awareness for your brand. It binds customers with you.
Conclusion
Creating a brand is not only about the required skills; it also includes a lot of extras, like industry knowledge and awareness. Irrespective of whether you are dealing with an offline business or online, many ways can help create a buzz about the products or services you deal with.
Perhaps, marketing and promotional plans would help loads as well.
Also read:
What is a business loan? How to apply for a business loan?
What is Time Value of Money? Examples & Value of Time & Money
Debit-note vs Credit-note: What are the major differences?
Business Safety: Tips to ensure safety at a workplace