How to make your business recognizable? (Full Guide)
The goal of any business is to have customers. For this, it is a necessary but not sufficient condition that they know you exist. In order for customers to come to you, they must first understand what you offer, what you can do for them, what are the qualities of your products/services. And yes, to gain their trust.
Accept that no matter how brilliant your business idea is, no matter how many sleepless nights it’s cost you, and no matter how useful your business is to consumers, they won’t know about it if you don’t make a concerted effort to brand it you are recognizable.
Every business owner would like to start selling their products/services directly, and with great success, but sales are a consequence that comes after a certain number of steps taken. Just like the belly tiles – you can’t decide today that you want tiles and tomorrow you’ll already be taking proud selfies with them (if you do find a way – don’t forget to share with us ;)).
CREATE A STRATEGY FOR YOUR BUSINESS
Before you start selling, think first about the business itself. Build a strategy – who will be your users, how will you reach them, what will you do to arouse their interest and more difficult – how will you keep it. Against the background of the free market in which every startup exists and must establish itself, think about how you will distinguish yourself from the competition.
Of course, if you are boiling and boiling in confectionery and have created the most wonderful cookies in the world, you are unlikely to have the time, energy and knowledge to put together the optimal business strategy. The good news, however, is that people are different and there are experts who have no idea how exactly to make biscuits, but are boiling and seething in business strategies. We have the chance to share an office with them, so we can cooperate.
CHOOSE A LOGO AND SLOGAN
The logo will be everyone’s first encounter with your business, be it a potential customer, partner or employee. Your logo makes you recognizable, it will literally be the face of the company to the world. That is why it is important to pay enough attention to its creation. It should suggest in an attractive way exactly what you do, convey your message graphically and carry the character of the company.
The slogan, like the logo, is the calling card of the brand. A slogan either represents the object of your business or verbalizes its idea. It is as short as possible, easy to remember and reflects the essence of what you offer.
Both the logo and the tagline should be chosen for long-term use, as it is not at all advisable to change them frequently. Slight variations are possible once you become recognizable enough, but while you’re still trying to establish yourself in front of customers and stand out from the sea of products and services on the market, it’s not a good idea to completely change their concept
However, it is important to note here that for businesses that evolve over the years and stand the test of time, it is not only recommended, but even mandatory, to update periodically in order to stay up-to-date and up-to-date with trends. Otherwise, your brand will look archaic and unattractive to young people, and you risk boring those who have known the company since its creation. In this case, the change is necessary, the point is that it should be at the right time and not radical, for so that consumers have no doubt that it is the same business.
BRAND COLORS
Speaking of logos and image building, we can’t forget to mention how important it is to choose a color that will properly translate your business message. Each color and even sometimes each shade has its own meaning and it is good to consider it before choosing it as YOUR color.
You realize that it wouldn’t be appropriate for your branding to be all black or gray if you’re selling children’s toys, and vice versa, it wouldn’t be appropriate to weave the colors of the rainbow into a legal services logo for example (unless you specialize in defending the rights of people with an alternative sexual orientation).
BUILD YOUR ONLINE PRESENCE
Once you’ve chosen your logo and tagline, it’s time to show them off to the world, and with them, announce your business online. The truth is that it is difficult and unprofessional to try to do business in the 21st century without having a web page. We recommend that it, like the logo and slogan, be professionally made. It is the site where customers can learn about what you have to offer and (if you offer such an option) buy your product/service. It is important that the site presents you as professionals who understand their work and are committed to quality.
Besides the purely visual and textual side of things, there is another reason why it is advisable to have the site made by a specialist. There are mandatory requirements for success that he must meet. It needs to load quickly, otherwise you will lose users. It’s critical that it’s mobile-optimized because of the progressively growing share of users browsing from a phone. And more – along with the offered products/services, you are required to submit information about yourself and contacts. This is the way to instill trust in the user – they can read about you, even see your face (many businesses introduce their teams in person – with a name and photo of everyone) and of course, call/write or even visit you at the office. The more open you are with users and the more discoverable you are, the more the sense of trust is enhanced. There is another thing – it is the contact with consumers that will lead to the ultimate goal – sales.
An extremely important point that we cannot ignore are the regulatory requirements for each site to clearly and unequivocally inform its users whether it collects data about the user and his activity on the site, as well as how he stores personal data. You have hardly missed the topic of GDPR and the debates surrounding it. However, we will not go into more details now. It deserves special attention.
SOCIAL NETWORKS
Now that you’ve gotten this far, it’s time to take the next business step toward brand recognition. Be where your target audience is. In other words, ride the social media wave and be social.
Before we continue, we should make this caveat – you don’t need to build your business reputation on every social platform you’ve heard of. This would be an extraordinary waste of time, effort and, last but not least, money. Moreover, not only will it not bring the expected results, but it can also have a negative effect. Concentrate on one or two platforms relevant to the company’s field and put your effort into them. The best approach is to entrust the maintenance of the profile, or at least the creation of it, to professionals. You remember the cookie example, right – there are subtleties here too.
An important point that you should not miss is to respond to the messages that you receive on your business profile. Whether a user asks if you have model X blouse in size Y but in coral, wants to reserve a table at a restaurant, or needs information about opening hours, answer them. At the same time, try to answer him as quickly as possible. It does not matter that the site clearly states the availability of the items, numbers and colors. It doesn’t matter that you wrote the working hours in black and white. What really matters to the user is that you open to them. And what matters even more to you is that the user is satisfied with your business and his communication with it. Satisfied users today will be your customers tomorrow, and it is definitely in your best interest to have as many of them as possible.
BE ACTIVE
Once you have a site and a social media presence, it’s wise to start publishing content. The question of content is a particular favorite of ours. Although it sounds rather immodest on our part, it is our specialty.
The content itself can be in the form of text, images/photos, infographics or videos.
THE TEXT CONTENT
When it comes to text, blog posts and news are both popular formats for business websites.
The news format is suitable for a synthesized presentation of news in the company or in your field of activity.
Blog posts, on the other hand, are larger in volume of materials, which also carry information in themselves, but do not necessarily communicate something new and unknown until now.
Both formats are a good way to get more organic traffic thanks to search engines. In other words, the regular publication of information relevant to your business helps users reach your site and your brand through search engine results.
SEO
Quite naturally, we also came to one of the main factors for your success – that of being discoverable by Google. Ranking on the results page is based on about 200 factors that the search engine takes into account, with both the factors themselves and their weight changing over time. SEO is a broad topic with huge importance in being discoverable to your customers. In order not to shift the focus, we will not go deeply into it for the moment, especially in its technical part. We’ll take a quick look at the influence of content.
Generating useful, in-depth and interesting information for users greatly contributes to the discovery of the site by a search engine, because through the publications you achieve an accumulation of keywords related to the field in which you operate. As you can probably guess, search engine optimization is much more than that. The way the texts are written on the site, the optimization of the photos, the url (link), the meta description – all this matters and it is highly recommended not to be neglected.
In addition to text, it is more than desirable to provide visual content as well. It’s no secret that photos, graphics and videos are much easier to attract the attention of users and much easier to be “consumed”. In order to attract, but most of all to keep the attention of users, it is highly recommended to offer them high-quality, directly related to the theme of your business, both on the business website and on its social network profiles. Effective content is content that elicits a reaction – a comment, a like, a laugh or even anger. Engaging your audience is essential to your company’s success.
On the one hand, you stay in the mind of the user, on the other hand, by sharing the content, he actually makes free advertising to his network of contacts.
PROVIDE A VIEW FROM THE INSIDE
And while we’re on the subject, let’s hint at one more thing. It is interesting for users not only to learn about the advantages of your product, but also to see how it is produced or what kind of people are on the team. That’s why, along with photos and videos related to the products, it’s good to provide a different type of content – for example, from the production process, from the factory/studio, or even a photo of how you got together with colleagues in the office and eat cake at the end of the working day day.
So far so good, but there’s a catch – no matter how useful the products are, no matter how original your content is, there’s no way users will know it exists if you don’t take care of your first meeting with them. This is where advertising comes in.
THE ADVERTISING
The easiest way to make your brand recognizable is through advertising. Advertising in its traditional form – television, print, outdoor and radio – still produces results, albeit difficult to measure.
ONLINE ADVERTISING
However, the effectiveness of online advertising is significantly greater, as it allows for much more precise targeting. Thanks to her and the tools she handles, the company’s advertising message will reach exactly the audience you are targeting. On the other hand, you have direct measurability of results. You can see how many people a given campaign has reached, how many times it has been viewed in total, how many people have entered your site through it, etc.
Digital advertising has the advantage of targeting a specific group of users – for example, men between 30 and 45 years old who live in the city of Sofia and are interested in BMW cars, other luxury goods and a healthy lifestyle, or women in Plovdiv between the ages of 25 and 30 years old who got engaged in the last 6 months and are interested in bridal gowns and wedding photography.
A huge plus is that your business ad can be shown when the user searches for certain keywords on Google. This effectively means that he has an interest in the topic and is much more likely to be inclined to buy, or more than that – to have already made the decision to buy. You understand yourself that if you are an importer of car tires, it is much more effective for your ad to appear when searching for “winter tires brand X price” than if the user searches for “recipe for Turkish delight pie”.
THE INFLUENCERS
Influencers are individuals who have become famous among a certain audience and have many followers on social networks. It is the large number of their followers that makes their profiles a preferred platform for advertising. This strategy works particularly well among teenagers, who tend to be easily influenced by those they would like to emulate.
Collaborating with the right influencer for a given business can have a very positive effect, but it’s important to do your research beforehand and carefully define the parameters of the partnership.
OFFLINE ADVERTISING
Despite the unshakable positions that digital advertising has won, offline advertising is still finding its place. The same rule applies to the brand’s online presence – to be noticed, you need to stand out with creativity and your own style.
Billboards, for example, are an effective way to promote your business as long as they are thoughtfully designed and strategically chosen as a location.
In the event that in your industry there are leading narrowly specialized media such as magazines, for example, it is worth testing the effect for you of this type of advertising. But one thing is for sure – don’t count on wow results with a single post, a single broadcast or a single campaign.
BRANDING
Branding itself is a form of offline advertising. Perhaps putting your logo on stationery sounds rather dated as a practice? And rightfully so. In the age of digital technology, fewer and fewer people use pencils, pens and notebooks in their daily lives. However, this does not mean that branding is a dead idea. On the contrary. Not only did she not die, but she didn’t lose her power either. You just need to be creative and think carefully about what items to brand. It is good that they have some connection with the field in which you work. Even if you do not think of such, there are universal and up-to-date solutions that you can apply. These are a canvas shopping bag, a thermos cup or even a food box, which is widely used both in the office and when traveling.
When branding, pay attention to the quality of the products on which you put your company’s logo. Do not ignore this, because it is precisely these items that become ambassadors of the brand. The idea is that they remind the owner and those around him of the existence of your business on a daily basis. In this line of thinking, it is not far-sighted to choose something of low quality, which instead of performing the function of advertising, will appear in the role of anti-advertising.
SOMETHING FREE
We humans love free stuff… what to do – psychology human. Free samples, testers, trial period, branded products or free information – the campaign still works well when it comes to increasing brand awareness. It is not by chance that universities give out samples of creams to female students, and in the supermarket they offer to try pâté. This approach works in two directions – online and offline.
Offline – these are the examples we have listed ie. when you give a physical product to your target audience. You enable the right group of potential customers for you to test the product and get to know your brand. Of course, the ultimate goal is for them to like it and for the 5ml tester to lead to a purchase of the 50ml cream. However, it is important to “do your homework” and determine exactly who and what to give. Go where your potential customers are and “attack” them.
Online – in the digital space you can provide access to a valuable resource for free, this technique is usually used less for direct selling and more for longer term marketing. It has probably happened to you at least once to sign up for a free webinar by leaving your email or going to download a free copy of a report, but a prerequisite for this is to write your email address. Well, as you know, this is by no means an accident. The very fact that you show interest in the product or service speaks volumes that you have an interest in that area. This makes you the perfect potential customer and business would want to provide a way to send you information about their products, services, offers.
PR (PUBLIC RELATIONS)
PR is the other powerful approach when you want to turn the spotlight on yourself. It’s the way to say who you are and what you offer without directly trying to sell someone something.
PR PUBLICATIONS
One option is for this to happen through a PR publication in a leading media outlet in your field. Here again it is good to keep in mind the power of not only traditional media – radio, television and print, but also online information channels. It is good to know, however, that the PR material can make you stand out and arouse interest in you or, on the contrary, turn out to be a double-edged sword, one of which is too sharp. It’s all about professionalism.
With this type of material, everything matters – from the title, the choice of words, what you’re going to say and how you’re going to say it, the timing of the publication in the context of social events, to what exactly the photo is and whether all the commas and full members are in place. We recommend that you trust an expert who will get to the bottom of the business and take into account everything listed at the moment.
PR CAMPAIGNS
PR campaigns and PR events also produce remarkable results in terms of brand recognition.
With a PR campaign, you can draw public attention to your business indirectly through a cause you stand behind or an idea you defend in society. However, it is important that they are somehow related to your field of activity and continue over time. Thus, the cause in question will begin to be identified with the brand and vice versa. In most cases, the causes have social significance and therefore bring positives for the business. Of course, this does not mean at all that you will be spared from attacks and provocations. On the contrary. It is important to be well prepared for them, to expect them and to know how to react even before they reach you.
PR EVENTS
PR events, unlike campaigns, are one-time events. They aim to promote the brand, the product or the new branch of the company, for example, using the occasion to make a lot of noise before, during and after the event.
This is when we advise you to invite the media, important potential customers or other people who are related to what you do and could benefit you.
One of the strongest advantages of events is that they create conditions for making extremely valuable contacts. Of course, in order to have the expected and desired effect, the event must be organized extremely well and every single detail must be thought out – from when and where it will be held and what its program will be, to what equipment will be needed, how you’ll collect people’s contacts (slight wink – GDPR beware) and how you’ll deal with logistics and catering.
CONTACTS
