Every entrepreneur’s journey to success starts with identifying a new or existing problem and coming up with solutions to satisfy this need. Essentially, you must have some desirable value to offer. You have to come up with a business plan, execution strategies, and a work process. However, these efforts would be wasted if people do not know you exist. Your brand has to be seen, heard, and connected with if you’re going to build a real customer base. Whether you’re offering a product or a service, people have to see you before they can make informed decisions about patronizing your band.
In the digital age, social media has become the mainstream media – nearly everyone gets their news directly off the internet these days. This is why the global digital marketing industry has evolved so remarkably from the early 2000s, peaking at an estimated $322 billion in 2020.
According to American author, digital marketing expert, and PR specialist, Rhonda Swan, bringing a brand to the limelight is all about passing the right messages – telling the right stories on the right platforms. Swan is the founder and CEO of Unstoppable Branding Agency, a digital marketing agency offering services in brand awareness, marketing strategies, logo development, content creation, increasing ROI, and general public relations. She started out as a marketing executive in a top pharmaceutical company and eventually struck out on her own to build an entrepreneurial legacy.
With over 18 years of experience in the field, Swan knows exactly how to push a brand into a steady spotlight. The first precept to understand is that no two brands are the same. Businesses could offer similar services but everyone has a different story to tell. For Swan, getting enough attention to boost sales and connections starts with the way you tell your story. Also, are you telling it to the right audience? It’s not always about the size of the crowd but the potential of people being interested in what you have to offer.
Swan has these tips for entrepreneurs looking to get their brands on the right track to long-lasting visibility:
Identify the right platforms for your brand
Especially for smaller businesses with little manpower, trying to stay abreast of every social media platform is eventually going to sink all your efforts. The first step is to understand the value of the product or service you’re marketing and the category of people you would serve. Where are you most likely to find and connect with them? Where Instagram and Facebook could work wonders for your brand, YouTube might just be a waste of time. Where social networks hold a low promise of conversions, major websites could seem like a great place to sponsor your content.
If you’re not well-versed in identifying the pros and cons of each media arm these days, that’s exactly what you need a branding agency like Swan’s for.
Identify a target audience
Again, it’s not about how large the crowd is or how well they are listening to you. How many of them could be potentially interested in what you’re offering? According to Swan, you must fully understand a social media platform and its dynamics before you’d have a real chance at targeting the right audience. You’d have to sift through demographics, age brackets, locations, interests, and so on. It’s one of the most critical processes and it determines how quickly you’d return profits.
Take a chance on influencers
You’d find lots of business owners struggling to build their business pages on social media. You can’t boast of only one hundred followers throughout the year and expect to make solid sales off that page. According to Swan, social media influencers are extremely important in the branding process these days. They champion communities that are likely to accept their recommendations and trust the brands they promote. Signing influencers to your brand or paying for advertisements would usually cost a lot of money, but if you follow the right trajectory from the start, it will be worth it in the end.
Countless brands lose real money every year by choosing the wrong influencers and brokering unfavorable deals. Contacting an expert branding agency to help you make this choice would greatly the risk of unnecessary losses.
Put out the right content
Your content is the point of contact with every potential customer. That flyer, that video, that story, that meme – they all decide how much interest anyone will take in your brand. Circulating the appropriate kind of content on the right platforms/publications is a surefire way of boosting public interest in your brand. People are attracted to quality content and consistency.
However, content creation is a more complex process than people often assume. It’s more than just writing releases and designing visuals – how much research, strategizing, and analysis are being invested in those productions? Has that story been told to coax interest and a yearning for connection?
In a nutshell, Swan believes that proper brand visibility stems from transparency and high clarity of intentions. Also, how easily can customers connect with you? How smooth are your payment options? Have you made the entire process straightforward for your customers to navigate? These are the questions that must be answered positively to drive long-lasting loyalty to any brand.
