How to Build Brand Recognition (4 Newbie-Proof Methods)

 

Starting a business is like birthing a baby, without the hormones, stretch marks or hospital stay, of course.

Think about it…

You spend months planning for its arrival. You introduce it to the world with beaming joy. You spend sleepless nights tending to it. You nurture it, invest in it ,and worry about its future.

Like a child, unwavering love, sacrifice and dedication doesn’t guarantee a success story. When it comes to your business you have to stop searching for guarantees that don’t exist and start focusing on ways to increase your odds.

One of the most valuable ways to do that is by building brand recognition.

While brand recognition isn’t a guarantee it IS the cornerstone of entrepreneurial success. Why? Because brand recognition fosters awareness, traffic and trust, among a laundry list of other beneficial results.

The truth is, it’s vital that you invest in learning how to build brand recognition IF you want your baby business to grow up healthy, stable and thriving.

Here are 4 newbie-proof methods for establishing and increasing your brand recognition…

 

FOCUS ON 1-2 SOCIAL PLATFORMS

The quickest way to over extend yourself and reduce your ability to gain traction for your brand on social media is trying to be everywhere.

Successfully leveraging social media comes down to connecting, you know…being social! It’s virtually impossible to do that when you’re juggling too many platforms.

If you’re just starting out you should be using social media to build relationships and get to know people, NOT as a way of shamelessly promoting yourself.

Let’s get real…

If you have few to no followers who do you think is going to consume, like or share your content? Answer: No one! You have to earn your social influence.

If you don’t have followers yet you aren’t going to attract them by talking about yourself {promoting your content} all the time! You’re going to attract them by getting to know others {reading their content}, helping others {promoting their content}, and talking to others {engaging with their content}.

What you need to do is figure out what social platforms your audience is hanging out on and what platforms you resonate with most, then choose one or two of those.

Note: I’m not saying don’t create profiles on more than 2 social platforms. By all means go for it. What I’m saying is spend your time laser focused on building a presence on ONLY 1-2.

 

SIMPLIFYING YOUR SOCIAL GAME

Once you have selected the 1-2 social platforms you’re going to focus on…

1. Spend your time mastering the features, idiosyncrasies and best practices for those platforms.

2. Find the movers and shakers in your niche and become actively engaged on their profile. Share their work, comment on their posts, and interact with their fans.

3. Build a social editorial calendar and become a consistent presence (using tools like Buffer & Hootsuite are great for this)

At the foundational level, social media isn’t real different from real life. Most times it takes seeing and talking to someone a few times before you build a bond or camaraderie with them. Social is the same in that regard, but even better in the way that we’re usually coming to the table with some kind of already established commonality {hobbies, type of business, expertise, industry, etc} that we can use to quickly build on.

This is what speeds up social traction from other methods of brand building and builds real deal brand ambassadors {those that talk you up, share your work and invest in you for no other reason than they believe in you}.

The power of building brand recognition via social media is in the consistency you establish by showing up regularly. This will get you noticed, get you taken seriously and very organically lead to people wanting to explore your brand deeper.

Repetition breeds familiarity and familiarity breeds intrigue. The more you show up in the comments and the feeds of others and focus on building relationships the faster you will build brand recognition on social media.

After you’ve spent a significant amount of time building relationships you’ll start seeing people hunt you down on other platforms. Like I said, once they’ve seen and interacted with you for some time it’s very natural that they want more of you to devour.

 

DEFINE YOUR BRANDING GUIDELINES

You can’t build brand recognition on social media if people don’t recognize you!

Brand recognition really boils down to people’s ability to identify your brand by its visual characteristics, without having to see your brand name. It’s about creating a unique calling card that your audience will learn to associate with you and your brand.

In order to build brand recognition you need to develop a signature style for the visual side of your brand that is immediately recognizable to your audience.

 

The elements you need to define include your…

• Logo
• Watermark or Submark
• Color palette
• Font theme
• Brand elements (bullet points, dividers, borders, icons, etc)
• Textures and patterns

The more you stick to your defined branding guidelines the faster your audience will establish the association between you and your signature style that will help them immediately recognize your content a mile away.

Think about your own habits…

Your swiping and scrolling a mile a minute through your social feeds and then suddenly you stop. What is it that made you stop? You probably recognized content from one of your favorite brands or bloggers. Ok, along with cute animals and funny images, but let’s stay on track.

Don’t dilute your brand recognition by recreating the wheel each time you create visual content. Haphazard won’t lead to any brand building boom juice, that’s a guarantee! To squeeze every last drop of brand recognition from your content you need to define every aspect of your visual brand and stick to those guidelines in everything you create, including your website and blog.

 

TEMPLATIZE YOUR VISUAL CONTENT

Once you have your branding guidelines defined it’s time to put them to good use by templatizing your visual content.

3 reasons to create templates for your visuals are…

1. They’ll reduce the time it takes you to create your visual content
2. They’ll help you maintain a consistent look across your visuals
3. They’ll foster the visual calling card your audience needs to recognize your content

Skies the limit on the type of templates you can create. A great rule of thumb is, if it’s something you will be creating more than once it should have a template!

This includes:

• Blog post images
• Social media post images
• Presentations
• PDF report or resource guides (including the cover)
• Video thumbnails
• Quotes

When creating your templates stick to the guidelines you’ve defined. Meaning, use the font theme, color palette, brand elements, etc that you’ve already established so that each piece of your content is seamlessly streamlined with the others.

You want to do this so that after someone discovers you, whether that be via your blog, a freebie offer or on social media, they can quickly recognize your content the next time they see it. That’s brand recognition at it’s finest! The more familiar you get your audience with your signature visual style the greater the chance they will interact with you.

Templates make it that much easier for your social media fans to recognize your content no matter where they see it, not to mention it greatly reduces your visual content creation time. They’re a no brainer!

 

MAINTAIN CONSISTENCY…IN EVERYTHING YOU DO

Consistency is the real breeding ground for building brand recognition and for good reason. It’s the quickest way to build the familiarity I’ve mentioned throughout this article.

But why is familiarity so important? Simple. It fosters that ‘know, like & trust’ factor we need to court someone to ‘brand ambassador’ status. It’s only when you win someone over that the true magic happens, and you have to show up and be seen in order for that to happen.

Consistency will help you do that!

When I talk about consistency I’m not only talking about your visual brand {see #3}. I’m talking about everything you do.

This includes:

• Your brand voice
• Your writing style
• Your emails
• Your topics
• Your products, programs or services
• The time{s} of day you post on social media
• What you post on social media
• Your visual content
  Everything!

It’s important you understand that it will take time to nail down unwavering consistency in each of these elements so don’t try and tackle everything at once. Remember, overwhelm and spreading yourself thin will set you back farther than taking things slow and steady. You know what they say about who wins the race!

Focus on one or two things at a time until you get them running like a well oiled machine and then, and only then, move on to the next. It’s not a race, races have finish lines. Your brand building is a life long journey that never ends. Embrace that!

 

WRAP UP

Much like you’d set your baby up for the best life you’ve got to give your business the best fighting chance!

It needs a foundation to grow on, an identity all its own and a loyal group of supporters. Learning how to build brand recognition is the best chance you have of achieving these elements.

Make no mistake, attaining the success you so badly crave is reliant on how well you build brand recognition. Leveraging these 4 methods is the quickest path to get you there, so what are you waiting for?

Dive into to this roadmap right now and savor the brand recognition that comes from it!

ONE MORE THING before you go…