7 ways to brand your business With Boudica

There is more to branding than having an easy to recognize logo across all your advertising channels, matching images, similar color scheme, a name people can say and remember, a tagline that tells people what your values and benefits to them are.

It's also how you go about nurturing your customers for brand recognition, loyalty, referrals, repeat visits and multiple purchases.

And about how people feel about you when they think about you. What they say about you to people they know.

Branding ensures when people are ready to buy your services, they already know who you are and what makes you special. Branding builds trust.  I put together 7 ways you can start branding your business to grow awareness and get leads for your business.

#1. It all starts with a plan. Determine your audience, what their behaviors, wants and needs are.

2. You should have a clear goal of the results you want from your advertising, and the current state of your business.  Analyze your strengths, challenges, competition, and threats.

3. Sales Cycle. Depending on what your industry is, you could have a long sales cycle or a short one. How you position yourself in the market will depend on these factors.

#4 Freshen up your online presence. Create matching social media profiles with high-quality images. You really don't have to be everywhere. It's ok to focus on 2-3 platforms your audience spends the most time on. When you set up multiple platforms you can gather your followers wherever they spend time, allowing them to interact with you in real time to improve the customer service experience. You'll want to be able to be found online by the people seeking you out to service them. Social media is indexed by search engines, so the more live your channels, content, and reviews are, the higher your position will be in the search results.

Many social media platforms like LinkedIn allow you to download your list of contacts, giving you a nice start to an email list to start inviting people to your pages and asking for reviews.

#5 Social Listening

Set up a keyword search and alerts so you can respond to any mentions for possible sales opportunities or chances to respond and share any reviews.

#6 Referrals. The highest form of flattery is a client that comes to you and says they heard about you from a friend.The internet is the ultimate form of word of mouth. Whenever you have public reviews and comments, good or bad, be sure to respond quickly, professionally, publicly, and offer a resolution. Many will seek you out online to resolve any of their issues or rave about your great service. When people have a bad experience offline, they are more likely to share this with their friends online than a good experience. Ignoring your fans, trolls or haters comments that pop up online can be harmful to your reputation, and hurt your chances of getting new or repeat business. Your potential clients can see how you handle their complaint. If you handled it well, it will boost your trust and credibility.

#7 Community involvement.

Supporting a cause, or starting one that solves a need in your community can instantly put your brand in front of a huge network of talented, giving people in a positive way.

Share everything with your local media and other publishers relevant to your industry in the form of a press release.  For more on how to do this see 5 insider tips on how to get in the news. Create a physical sales funnel with a bounce back offer so people you are reaching "offline" can connect with you later. This could be a sign up for a contest, coupon or special time-bound offer that they submit their information willingly to you. Create custom ads, targeting your ideal audience with compelling images that look like them. Create ad copy that energizes them and makes them feel something. Create a call to actions that feed into a sales funnel you created with your marketing strategy.

Thanks for reading!

I hope these ideas on how to brand your business will help you reach your end goal!

Need help with branding, social media and advertising so you can grow your visibility and business? Contact me today to take your marketing to the next level.