Introducing a Brand: Steps and Ideas for Your Business
Creating a product and making it known may seem simple, but in practice, it is not an easy task. The same goes for a brand in general.
In this article, we offer you some tips on this.
Reducing the Steps to Make a Brand Known
Really, if we reduce the brand awareness strategy to its simplest form, we are left with these three steps:
1. Define Your Target Audience
The first thing to do is to think about who you want to direct your brand and your offer to.
You need to clearly establish what type of customer you are looking for, their personality, lifestyle, habits, etc. Success will be easier to achieve if you can properly define this aspect.
Using the Buyer Persona technique helps a lot since it allows you to delve deeper into aspects of your ideal customer that go far beyond the identification of socio-demographic attributes.
2. Develop a Communication Plan
This is the base document you should follow. Thanks to this document, you can organise yourself and create a suitable strategy. You must draft it realistically, knowing what your achievable goals are – especially in terms of available resources – and ways to achieve them.
Do not deceive yourself at any time: if your company is newly created or is very young, logically the world has survived until now without your brand, so it is not actually waiting to know about it.
This means you will need to give your target audience reasons to want to learn more about it. We recommend following these 5 key aspects of a Communication Plan for SMBs, while also keeping in mind 2 elements:
– Investment in branding does not produce entirely tangible direct results, but it is undoubtedly necessary.
– Any form of communication from anyone associated with your company (whether it be the director, employees, or others) affects the brand image. Take care of this by including a style guide in your Communication Plan.
3. Calculate the Investment
After developing the communication plan, it’s important to determine how much you will invest to make your company known. Once you have calculated the investment, you can distribute it across the different chosen platforms, for example, LinkedIn, Facebook, blog, website, etc., as long as we are talking about paid campaigns.
If your company is B2B and you are interested in launching a campaign on LinkedIn Ads, we recommend reading our definitive guide to LinkedIn Ads, where you will find key recommendations, tips, and relevant information not found on the internet.
Lastly, it’s important to develop organic campaigns, however, those that require an investment can facilitate providing results more quickly.
3 Essential Factors for Making a Brand Known
Next, we offer up to 3 essential elements when it comes to making your brand known.
1. Define What Makes Your Brand Different
To get your brand known, you will need to make it stand out among others.
For this, you will need to define what makes it different from the competition. At the same time, you will need to provide reasons why people should choose yours over another.
In marketing, this is known as the Unique Selling Proposition (or USP). Test yourself on this: can you define what makes your company different in one or two lines of text?
2. Offer Quality Throughout the Purchase Process
For your brand to become positively known, one of the main factors is that it offers quality in all aspects, besides complying with all established norms and having an innovative aspect that breaks with everything established.
It may seem like a minor thing, but it certainly is not. In an era when we look for naturalness in brands and where we have many options when choosing almost any commercial need we may have, it is vital that the business offer starts from a perspective of quality.
It should be noted that this not only includes the value of what we receive at the product level—if the brand sells products—but in terms of the entire purchase experience that we live as consumers. And this experience includes absolutely the entire purchase process.
In this sense, if you strategically approach your ideal customer through an Inbound Marketing perspective, you can cover the potential customer’s experience throughout their entire buying process.
Discover the phases of Inbound Marketing3. Identify Your Customers and How Your Offer Can Benefit Them
Related to the definition of your market that we mentioned at the beginning of the article, we highly recommend researching everything you can about your ideal customer profile. Certainly, if you want everything else to be successful, don’t doubt that you need to start by placing the ideal customer at the centre.
This includes, without a doubt, understanding aspects about them, such as:
– What situation or problem do they need to resolve?
– With respect to your product or service, in what phase are they? Are they in a phase of becoming aware that they have a problem to solve, are they looking for options to solve it, are they looking for specific suppliers…?
– What can you do to help them in all phases of their buying process?
4. Talk with Your Target Audience
In order to offer the best possible buying experience, we recommend speaking directly with your target audience. In this case, use your customer base, but also include in the analysis people who are not yet customers.
With your current customers, you can communicate via email or phone call (in case you have their details). Thus, the communication will be closer, and that will score points in your favor. For those users who are part of your target audience but are not yet customers, we recommend you communicate through your social networks or you can also introduce surveys on your website for them to give their opinion.
In the survey, you can ask what they look for in a brand, what they value the most, what factors cause them to become loyal to a brand, among others.
Some of the Best Ideas for Making a Brand Known
Next, we offer you 3 more ideas that you can apply from this very moment to make your brand known. We divide them based on different objectives related to brand awareness:
1. To find the right place in the market at the level of brand positioning
There are many ways you can carry out this strategy. To give just one example, searching on Google you can see companies in your sector and analyze their brand positioning:
– What messages do they use?
– How do they address potential customers?
– In which online spaces do they have a presence?
– Could their actions be improved?
Asking yourself these types of questions will place you in a position of strategic thinking about your brand positioning. It’s crucial that you have it clear and that you make it known properly. LinkedIn is a key B2B platform that you must consider in your strategy.
2. To distinguish your brand
Following on from the previous point, make a brand positioning statement, also known by its English expression ‘brand positioning statement‘. Good practices on this say it should be something appealing, but brief, easy to remember.
In this statement, it should be clear what you offer and what makes it different from competitors. It should be part of the message you want to share about your brand.
You should relate different adjectives to your brand. Just as it is done with people, describe it using several adjectives.
To do this exercise, you can answer the following questions:
– What personality does it have?
– What is it like?
– What values does it have?
– What does it want to achieve?
This usually helps to reflect on it concretely, forcing us to use specific labels and adjectives.
3. Para extender la marca
To make your brand known consistently, thinking in the medium to long term, the ideal is not to stagnate at a certain point. It usually does no good to make a large initial investment in mass media and then not carry out any further action.
What you will achieve is a great peak of attention towards your brand, but then this rising effect will pass. Unless you need it specifically for a product launch, we do not recommend this strategy, and much less for working on your brand awareness.
In this sense, and continuing with the example of television or radio, we recommend making sustained investments over periods of time, spread over a relatively long term.
If you cannot count on a high budget, we recommend reading these specific tips for creating brand awareness without a large budget.
Download our guide “brand awareness, from 0 to 100”