What's the first thing you think of when you hear the words "running shoes" or "coffee"? It's very likely that you thought of Nike or Adidas for running shoes, and Starbucks for coffee. Why is that? What causes a person to conjure up a company's name in relation to an everyday product?
It’s the power of branding.
Creating a powerful brand makes a mark in people's minds. It's how you can make people associate a product they need with your business right away. Making your brand memorable has a profound effect on your business's success. A memorable brand needs less advertising spend. It can drive sales on its own and makes it easy to get more engagement on social media. You'll also get more traffic and conversions.
Sounds good? Great! Let's dive into four ways you can make your brand more memorable.
1. Build a membership site for an online community.
You can build a membership site to host your online brand community. Creating an online brand community enables greater communication between your business and customers. A membership site creates a space for meaningful discussions. It's a place where your customers can ask questions and get answers to their problems. A brand community can create an online identity for your customers related to your brand.
Building a membership site has other advantages that can help with branding:
- You can create a free repository of information.
- You create better customer support, since your support staff can focus on important concerns. This also reduces customer support costs.
- You can test products and generate ideas from users to build better products.
- It increases customer retention and reduces the need for customer acquisition.
- You can create repeat purchases.
- It's possible to focus on your present customers to increase the frequency of purchases.
Building a membership platform can make your customers more invested in your brand and make it memorable.
2. Use giveaway contests.
This is a fast and effective way to create an impression on your audience. Creating a giveaway contest is an affordable marketing exercise. Your only investments are the giveaway prize itself and your contest-creation tool. All you need to do to make a giveaway contest is to add a plugin to your WordPress site. There are over 50,000 plugins available for WordPress that you can use to build your site.
Giveaways trigger positive emotions such as excitement and anticipation. By giving away a prize that's relevant to your target audience, you'll engage the right group of people. You’ll also be able to showcase your work if you choose to give the winner access to your product.
Use giveaways to get the following:
- Social media attention
- Engagements through likes, shares and comments
- More traffic to your website
- More email subscribers
3. Leverage content.
Your brand image can shine through with content. You can leverage content in many ways that have an impact on customers. Create relevant posts and infuse your content with personality. Good-quality content tells users that you offer real value.
Here are some ways you can make your content speak for your brand:
- Use interactive content. Interactive content makes users a part of the conversation. Post polls, quizzes, assessments and other content to get responses from users. This keeps them engaged on social media and your website.
- Share user-generated content. It is very likely that there is a lot of content about your brand available for free online. This is in the form of user reviews, ratings, testimonials and social media posts. You can use such user-generated content and share it on your website and social media. You'll tap into free content that people find authentic. You'll also build social proof, as the content is not branded communication but real reviews by your customers' peers.
- Create a blog. Creating a blog and posting content is an important online marketing activity. You can go beyond marketing communication in a blog and create related but more casual information for customers. A blog drives traffic, supports SEO and makes your brand memorable.
Content matters. Use content in different ways to make your brand memorable. Add pictures and videos aside from written material. Make sure to use good grammar and punctuation and simple sentence structures. This makes your business appear trustworthy.
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4. Engage with users on social media.
Social media is a great platform to make your brand memorable. Create business pages on all relevant social media platforms. Share content such as articles, images and videos. You can use a social media management tool to post to multiple places at once.
There are some other things you can do to stand out on social media:
Use casual language. Avoid "business speak" and formal language as much as possible. Add humor to your posts, but keep it clean and fun. Injecting humor into your content gives your business a personality that's more relatable to people.
Create a persona. Creating a persona for your business will help you keep your communication consistent. Decide on a brand tone and voice. Is it carefree or more serious? Is it witty or kind? Developing a persona will help you draft content that's appealing and consistent.
5. Design with care.
Your brand image will consist of colors, typography, logo and your online persona. These are some design elements that help convey your business's values to your audience.
Color palette
By defining a color palette for your brand, you create a consistent brand image for your audience. You can make your website, social media posts, logo and print material appear unified with a signature color palette. It's important to choose colors based on the qualities you want your business to be associated with. Do research on the psychology of color. You can use color to invoke feelings of warmth, integrity, professionalism and more. Make sure that the colors complement each other and look good in different formats.
Typography
When choosing a set of fonts for your brand, check that they are easy to read on different devices and work well on printed content too. It's also important to choose fonts that are common and available on any device.
Logo
There are no hard and fast rules about what your logo needs to look like. As with the other design elements, your brand values, tone and approach should guide how your logo looks. It's important to work with a professional who specializes in design. They can help you shape your brand's image while using best practices. This can save you considerable time and money, as you won't have to do it over later.
Make an impression that lasts with great branding.
Making your brand memorable should be a key activity from the start. A memorable brand can reduce costs and increase the impact of your marketing activities. It helps people associate your business with value and credibility. Build your online community, use great content and engage with users to leave an impression. It's also important that everyone in your business is on the same page when it comes to branding. Use documentation to create templates that will keep your brand image consistent. Use the tips here to make your business leave a positive impression on your audience.