As a business or website owner, you probably put a lot of value in your brand. You have probably been through a lengthy branding process, designing the perfect logo, picking out a colour palette that really represents your business’ vision and mood, and adding to that with your brand’s chosen voice and style when you create content, marketing copy or packaging. Every business knows that branding is hugely important, but once you have settled on that great, coherent branding, the next thing to think about is how to get people to connect with it, remember it, and associate it with the concepts you intended.
Photo by Stuart Miles at freedigitalphotos.net
Magic Number 7
It has been shown in research into the effects of branding that people tend to form a cohesive mental relationship with a brand only after they have been exposed to it around seven times. Of course, this is an average – if someone has a very positive and memorable first interaction with a brand – for instance because of a very engaging face to face experience, or an especially entertaining commercial, it may only take once, but in most circumstances you should be aiming for your branding to appear before their eyes as often as possible!
So, other than branding your premises, paying for advertising, and branding your own website very well, what are some good ways to get your targets’ eyes on your brand?
Brand Your Vehicles
Whether you are a small business who doesn’t use vehicles for their actual work, or a company that does send people out on site visits or deliveries, always make sure any vehicles you have the right to the brand are branded. Even if it is simply a case of decorating your own car, motorcycle or scooter using things like decals and black Plasti Dip, people notice branded cars and this will give you more exposure.
Get Bloggers Talking About You
It is well known that bloggers can help you tap into a huge audience, but when you are engaging bloggers you would like to have discussed your business, give them access to brand assets they can use in their posts on their own sites, like your logo. Creating a press pack with brand assets in and distributing this to anyone who may write about you is a great way to spread your branding around the web – bloggers often struggle to find pictures for their posts they can legally use, so if you give them your assets they will almost always use them.
Branded Free Merchandise
If you go to any trade shows or do any face to face marketing, giving away useful items with your branding on is a tried and tested way to build your brand in people’s minds. Pens, lanyards, mugs and mouse mats are some of the common ones, but you can also be creative – even a fairly useless item will work if it is cool enough that people will keep it on their desks and look at your branding often!
These are just some of the ways to get your brand in front of more people often enough for it to stick!