Every serious business knows the place of brand perception in their overall long-term success. The greater your brand awareness, the easier it will be for people to know, like and trust you. And this invariably means more patronage, and hence, more success.
How you present your brand to your potential customers is what determines how they perceive you, and if they would like to do business with you. That is why the big brands budget a minimum of 10 percent of their income on their marketing branding campaign.
To build a formidable brand, your focus should be to showcase your brand as relatable, authentic, recognizable and always available. Your potential customers should see your brand so much till they get very familiar with it unconsciously. All these lead to greater credibility in their minds, which will definitely translate to better patronage.
The question is what is the secret to doing all these? How do you build a formidable online brand presence for your business? Here are eight quick steps to help you do just that.
1. Share a Relatable Story
Storytelling is one of the most effective ways to capture your audience’s attention these days and turn them to loyal customers. This means that your marketing strategy must involve stories. What is it about your brand that makes it worth the while? Why did you have to start your business in the first place? What problems have you been able to solve for your customers that prospective customers can relate with?
Don’t just focus on placing your logo on your audience’s face, share a story they can relate with.
2. Optimize Your Website
The days of having a poorly designed website with eye-assaulting graphics is over. If you want to be seen as the go-to brand, then you must look the part. If you can’t do it yourself, outsource it. Just make sure you avoid these outsourcing mistakes.
Let your website reflect the image you want to project. Your landing page is the first thing your customers would see. Invest heavily in it. Use any of these tools to build a great and highly converting landing page. Use high-end resolution pictures for all you do there.
3. Retain Your Authenticity
Don’t fall into the trap of doing things a certain way because all the successful brands are doing it. Your prospects and customers are interested in you and what you do. Show them what makes you unique.
This means you may have to share a little bit about what happens after work in your business. If you are having a weekend retreat with your employees where you all play squash ball, share it too with some nice pictures to go with it. Your prospects want to relate and do business with real human beings and not just inanimate brands. Do not disappoint them.
4. Go out of Your way to Make Friends with Micro-influencers
If you are serious about growing an online brand, then you must network. You can’t do it alone. Share value with these influencers. Make sensible comments on their posts. Make yourself visible and valuable to them, and very soon, the law of reciprocity will apply. And when they shine their spotlight on you, you will get visible before a totally new audience.
And trust me, when an influencer talks about you, or even as much as retweets you, it sends a message across their followers that this brand is worth following.
5. Make the Most of Multiple Social Media Channels
The goal is to be seen, known, liked, and trusted. And to do that successfully, you have to be everywhere. Or almost everywhere. That means your social media marketing must cut across multiple channels.
Don’t just focus on Facebook, make yourself visible on LinkedIn. Run Ads on Instagram, build a following on Pinterest, get seen on Tumblr, and tweet like your life depends on it (actually it does). You can use scheduling apps like Buffer or Hootsuite to help you out.
6. Churn out Great Content Regularly
If you want your audience get upset immediately they see your brand online, then annoy them with posts that only talk about your products and services.
However, to turn your customers to brand ambassadors that would recommend your brand to others and even share your posts, then you have to produce great content. Make it a habit to share content that they can relate with. Let your content inform as well as entertain.
7. Leverage Video Marketing
Video marketing is not just the future, it is the present. According to Cisco, 82 percent of internet traffic would go to video content by 2021. This means that if you have not yet started maximizing the use of video content for your brand, you are losing out already.
Now is the time to start producing great videos. If your brand doesn’t have a YouTube channel yet, you are doing it wrong. Get on YouTube, Vimeo, Snapchat, and still make videos on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
Post branded videos that are relevant to your niche. The more you do, the more you get seen, and the more you get known, liked and trusted.
8. Start Blogging
It is not enough to have an awesome website. Make sure your website has a blog. Blogging is an effective way of building a formidable online brand. It helps you rank better on search engines. And the more you turn up on those search engines, the greater your reach and brand visibility.
As a final note, make sure you find a way to build a list. No matter what you do on any platform or channel, build a list. Whether it is an email list, a Facebook page, a LinkedIn group, etc. Build a list. Doing all these will not just help make your brand a formidable one, it will definitely give you the accelerated growth and success you desire for your business.
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