Your brand matters, but I didn’t have to tell you that. There are few companies in this world who don’t want to increase the presence and power of their brand. Having a powerful and persuasive brand can take your company from pretender to contender. Our online document printing business wouldn’t be anywhere without having a solid brand. At Check Issuing, we care about our brand because we realize the importance of it and yours also with our healthcare statements services.
Many companies get lost in the madness of selling their product or service and just hope the brand will build by default. Look, your product or service being awesome is without question the best way to grow a brand. But it never hurts to commit a few hours a week to other methods for brand awareness.
How to Build Brand Awareness for your Company
Why Build A Brand?
Well, for starters, trust. Big brands can typically equate to trusted brands. When people have heard of your brand, they are more likely to purchase your product or buy your service. Brand awareness is typically considered a good thing (unless your brand gets known for bad things, such as scamming consumers). Short of that, brand awareness helps convert sales that is how you define brand awareness. And that’s the name of the game, right?
So what can we, as business owners and operators, do to increase our brand’s awareness?
Offer Incentives To Share Your Brand
For many companies, incentives such as referral or affiliate programs can explode a brand creating brand awareness.
Many website owners are looking for additional ways to create income from their traffic and referral programs are a big way to achieve that. Now, you’ll either need to front money or have a way to monetarily cash in on those referred users so as to make a profit. That could be the tricky part depending on your program. But you could just pay the website owner a small portion of what the referred consumer spends. If you have a site that sells a product or service, this shouldn’t be too tough. If you charge $1,000 to redesign website pages, you could kick the website owner who sent you the referral $100. That’s a big incentive and it means your brand gets shared, hopefully, a lot!
Develop A Strong Meme Game
I know, memes can seem childish and annoying. But the truth is, we all love them when they hit on our sense of humor or sense of emotion. The fact is, sharing on social media is a big powerful thing. When you create memes, you can place your brand logo or url on them. While some places will rip you off and remove that brand, most people in general, will not do such a thing. It takes a lot of effort to do such a crummy thing. Depending on what your business is and what your audience likes, you could truly reach thousands of new people you weren’t able to connect with. Facebook and memes are like salad and lettuce (what a horrible metaphor by me, I’m sorry).
The downside to memes is that depending on what type of business you run, meme sharing could make your business seem a little unprofessional. That said, I’m seeing a ton of companies getting into the meme game, so clearly, the professional boundaries are loosening up.
One way to spread more professional memes is by creating infographics that are specific to your business. For example, if you are a marketing company, you might create an infographic image with supporting consumer behavior data, such as graphs showing the rise in users using mobile platforms over the desktop.
Get Partners
Is your local business relevant to some brick-and-mortar businesses in your community? Maybe your web business could offer some free services, or some charity services, to local businesses that could bring more eyeballs to your brand. Having strategic partners both on the web and in real life stores can be a huge asset to your brand.
Get Swaggy
People love free stuff, particularly swag. Provide free usable swag items, like t-shirts and coffee mugs, for people who visit your website (this could be costly). Or do this at trade shows. Just make sure you giveaway usable swag. Lots of companies give away pens with their brands on them. Hardly anyone uses a pen anymore, but most people drink coffee out of sweet free coffee mugs!
In conclusion, your brand matters. There are lots of really easy ways to reach new consumers and clients. A few simple steps here and there could amount to big-time growth in the future.
Resources:
Measuring brand impressions
How You Can Build a Mega-Brand Without Going Broke.
Our business is our baby. We conceived an idea and we have nurtured it into a real working concept. And because our love and passion is involved, we want the brand to be well known, popular and respected. Those things also help with creating even more revenue for the company.
Building a brand, however, is a complicated matter all on its own. It requires strategy and conceptualizing. Today’s environment is a lot different than a decade ago with the onset of social media and “viral effect.” It has vastly changed out companies approach building a brand.
In order to build a mega-brand, one needs to covet a few concepts. Let’s have a look at those:
Harness the power of social media, but don’t become enslaved to the idea. Look, social media is important to your brand, but don’t over think the matter. It is possible that your product won’t go over well on social media. If you own a tire company, it is hard to get people to want to LIKE your page and then inevitably and hopefully, buy your product when they need tires. There are ideas which exist that could gain you notoriety, maybe a funny blog about tires, but it could be a lot of work. The main point here is to not fall victim to some social media company’s pitch that you need to spend thousands of dollars becoming the next big Facebook or Youtube page.
My suggestion is to first examine what you have, what your product is and does, and then decide how viable it could be on social media in terms of branding. Then, and only then, create a strategy. But don’t get sold on the idea your product’s Facebook page needs to be the next TMZ in terms of popularity. It might be best served as a portal for people looking for more information.
Create a logo you love, but don’t’ overdo it. Logos should be clean, sharp and load fast on a web page. Don’t make some gaudy image that takes 2 minutes to load on your web page and ends up looking pixelated to the end user. In addition, don’t make some heavy flash page unless your company works in a vertical whereas such actions might be considered relevant.
Instead, make a simple logo. Consider things such as if you plan to put a logo on coffee mugs or shirts. Consider the color scheme of your product and consider getting a designer to create a color pallet so that in the future when you design anything, a designer has something to go on and will be able to keep your brand’s color schematic consistent.
It never hurts to promote your product at a relevant trade show, but remember, some guerrilla marketing can save you a lot of cash. If you have the money to set up a huge booth and you think it will serve you effectively, go for it; but otherwise, you might want to tame things down so that your presence is affordable. There is a middle ground: pay the trade show company for a small spot, but then host something like a happy hour off-premises at a restaurant. Give out free t-shirts or swag. You can make up a lot of ground in an economical way by just thinking outside the box.
Your brand is important, but your product’s success will always be the foundation of your brand’s perception, so never lose that focus.
With Branded Checks: We Can Help Brand Your Company!
I know, that probably sounded like a really strange thing to say. Everyone knows that Check Issuing is a third party check disbursement company that helps you issue checks and prevent check fraud. And that’s of course, a huge deal because check fraud cost companies billions every year. And paying staff to issue checks on your own is a waste of money.
So yeah, Check Issuing saves you and your company money, which is uber important. But what’s more? Check Issuing, as that crazy title represents, can help you brand your product. Companies spend millions of dollars every year attempting to brand their company yet so many forget to brand in the most elementary ways. Also, we excel at hospital statement printing and mailing.
At Check Issuing, we allow you to place memorandums inside the envelopes. This can be messaging about special deals or upcoming events or heck, just to say hi! We can also place your company’s logo on the memorandums or even on the checks! I mean, you are giving people money, when people receive money it makes them happy! Shouldn’t that happiness also be aligned with seeing your company’s logo? That would just make sense!
So not only can we clean up your processing of checks, secure them to prevent check fraud and allow you time to focus on your actual business, but we can be your little marketing helpers as well! How cool is that? Oh, and I am working on a Saturday, what does that say about this amazing company?
