Have you ever wondered what the branding is?
In this article, I’m going to discuss the idea of branding. A lot of my blog readers own businesses; some of you are self-employed individuals, and a few of you might be bloggers. This article could turn things around for you all. The reason is that I want to shed some light on the importance of branding. You’ll be able to understand what branding is. Furthermore, you’ll learn how to convert your business into a brand.
What is Branding?
Branding is a concept of putting your brand on a pedestal and attracting the eyeballs across multiple areas; through outdoor advertisement, commercials, social media, content, and packaging. The spectrum of branding is quite wide and a lot of people think that branding means designing a business logo and website.
How to Convert Your Business into Brand in 2023
The idea of converting a business into a brand revolves around putting a company under the spotlight. There would be hundreds of thousands of businesses around you and some of them might be super successful. It may be your shoe company, supermarket, or the tailor ; if you don’t remember the name of these businesses, it means they are bad at branding. If you know Samsung, GUCCI, Nike, Amazon, and Netflix, it means these brands are good at branding. So this is the difference between a company which does branding and the one which doesn’t do anything special in terms of branding.
Did you remember my post on How to Build Your Personal Brand? I discussed the same idea but it was for personal branding.
Today, I’m going to share 5 tips on branding so that you could elevate your branding game right away:
Get your logo designed
First things first, you need to get a logo for your business. If you got a logo designed in 2003, then it’s time to update it and develop a better one. Companies update their logos all the time. It’s a part of improving your branding. A lot of companies such as Microsoft, Facebook, Instagram, Pepsi, Coke, and many more change their logo designs and colors.
The purpose of branding is to attract the audience and stay relevant in the industry. And, getting a fresh look after a few years or a decade could help brands get the attention. If you haven’t designed your business logo, then it’s time to get your first logo designed. Because you’ll be able to use that logo everywhere, for example, website, social media, and stationery.
Understand Your Audience
See the Image from Coschedule.
Not everyone is your customer or potential customer. You need to sort out and segment who is your exact customer. Sorting and segmenting is very important because with the help of this data, you design your marketing and promotional strategies for your brand. For instance, if my product focuses on young kids, my strategies will be different and if i target females, it will be different. Even more, if i plan to target a certain segment such as shown in the above picture, my strategy will be different then what i would have designed for general females or ladies.
Use social media bios and covers properly
Many of you are still neglecting the fact that branding is all about grabbing attention. You might be quite active on Facebook and Twitter, but if people aren’t seeing your company’s name, logo, and website URL, you’re doing social media wrong.
In my article, How to Start a Brand with Facebook Page, I have emphasised a lot on using Social Media for branding and gave some examples too.
Make sure that you’re using profile cover and bio properly to let others know about your brand. It does make a lot of difference because people you’re connected or your friends are connected to often visit your profiles. It happens every day, maybe you left a comment on Facebook or liked a tweet from a friend, it sends out a notification to many others who are not even directly connected to you. So some of them might check out your profile, and if they don’t see your brand’s logo and name, then it’s a shame.
Develop your blog and website
It’s necessary to have an online presence from a marketing and attention standpoint. Just using social media isn’t enough because you could be missing out on various things, especially the search on the internet. You might want your business to show up in Google results when the audience searches things related to your industry.
It isn’t just about the Google search; you need a blog and website for other purposes too. Firstly, you need a professional website for developing your online presence so that people could find you online to get the information or reach out through via email. Sometimes, people want to know about the brand, and they go through their websites to check out the history, products, services, or contact information. Your website must be up and running.
Moreover, an official blog does help in the process. You could either use your blog for sending out updates or use it as a marketing tool by publishing helpful content for the prospective audience.
Checkout my post on How to Choose Blog Name and Domain to get started.
Publish different types of content
Content is a great way of marketing your service or product, attract eyeballs, gain attention, and build a connection with the audience. A lot of marketers, entrepreneurs, and businesses publish content to convert the prospects into paying customers, which is also a benefit of content publishing. But the point is that when you’re trying to make your business popped up in front of everyone, you have to make it visible.
So content is a great way of making your brand appear in front of the audience. Not only would be helping the audience through content, but you’d also be engaging them to convert into paying customers in the future. This is how brands build communities around their businesses. So use articles, podcast, videos, images, and live stream to engage, attract, and retain the audience. It will help you convert your business into a brand because you’ll have their attention.
Do you know why Coca Cola keeps showing you those TV commercials of friends or family enjoying the coca cola? Because they want you to grab the bottle of coke when you’re shopping at a supermarket for dinner with friends or family.
Cross-promote your accounts
What I mean is that you should talk about your brand through your personal social media accounts and blogs. It may not be the case with everyone reading this, but if you do have a separative personal page or account, then you must be cross-promoting your accounts.
Plus, mix it up a little bit, for example, mention your brand’s page in your personal profile status while talking about it, or tag your company’s twitter handle while tweeting about it through your personal profile. What it does is that it spreads awareness about your brand. People who barely know you find out about your brand and your brand starts to attract more people for free.
Don’t limit the idea of cross-promoting to Facebook and Twitter. Instead, do it wherever it’s possible. For example, mention other businesses on your main business website. Similarly, highlight your new blog’s link to your main blog’s content so that the audience finds out about it. Remember that you should keep it simple and natural. It shouldn’t look like that you’re forcing people to see it.
Last Few Words
All these strategies may not look extraordinary because they don’t give you instant results. In fact, they will bring results in the long term if you keep doing this.
Businesses aren’t built overnight, but instead, it always takes a long period. So don’t expect quick results from the branding point of view. If you understand how branding works, then you won’t worry about the outcome because somethings happen but you don’t see it first.
Have you met someone at an event who told you that he or she has seen on Facebook or YouTube? If yes, then you’d understand this article better than everyone else. Because you don’t get active on Facebook or YouTube for that, but instead, you do your thing and have fun most of the times. On the other hand, you’re building a brand through your social media presence.
All this happens because of your presence on the social media. So that’s what I was trying to teach you that your appearance in front of the audience changes an ordinary presence into an important one. This is what you should be doing with your businesses.
What have you learned from this article?
Let me know!