Whether your company is a startup or a medium size Business established in the market for past few years, brand recognition is an important consideration to achieve your organization’s goals. A trustworthy brand name goes a long way in winning repeat customers who are a key element to ensure steady growth of your business. After a brand name is finally established and recognized, it helps in competing with your business rivals.
Many small business owners think that brand recognition exercise is meant for huge players like Google and Nike. This notion is self-defeating. No doubt, brand recognition takes a long time and is expensive. However, businesses of all scales can still take concrete steps to build a brand name. All the efforts that you make during the course will enable a steady growth of your business. Little steps taken towards branding your business will result in your company becoming a household name in near future.

So, here are our key tips for your small business to convert it into a brand that people recognise for trustworthy products or services.

1. Get a memorable logo

One of the first things you must determine for your company is to give it a memorable logo. Keep it in your mind that the logo will be omnipresent everywhere in your marketing material such as business cards, websites, leaflets, stationery, products, packaging, etc. Therefore, clever business people make sure that the logo design leaves a great impression. In addition, the logo design should be such that it conveys your core business message and values. This means that every time the target consumers see your logo, they are drawn to your business due to a strategic use of colors, typefaces etc elements.
Startups might find hiring professional graphic designers expensive. A solution to the problem is that you crowdsource your logo design work. Some leading crowdsourcing sites like Designhill are useful platforms. You can get many talented designers involved in your logo design project using such a site and have the logo at an affordable price.

2. Tell a story

A thumb rule of building a trustworthy brand is to connect with the audience in such a way that they take it as a friend and family. They will come to your website and business again if you can touch their hearts. This brings you to the power of storytelling. For centuries, stories have kept all of us engaged due to the excitement they generate. You can use storytelling as a tool to reach to the people.
This implies that you should treat all of your interactions with your investors, media, clients and consumers as an opportunity to make an impact. When planning your marketing campaign, bring in some story that tells something interesting and exciting related to your company, its history, how the idea came to your mind, what features your product make it stand. Avoid making your marketing efforts appear as a boring stuff for viewers. Instead, integrate some personal details such as inner thoughts of your clients, consumers and investors while selling your brand. Make sure that instead of you, the story sells your products.

3. Provide useful content

Another way to make people see some value in your business is to share relevant knowledge with them. If they get tips, advice, opinions, how-tos and experts’ comments, etc from your blog, they will receive value from your business. Your clients or consumers will visit your business and website to search products or get information after they get useful content time and again.
So, produce useful content for your clients. You can curate content from the web and show it in your website in an interesting way with the use of infographics, videos, and blogs. Moreover, by sharing such a real knowledge, you can maintain an active online presence of your business. You can use social media like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to share your wealth of knowledge to build trust in clients.

4. Take a stand

Marketers are experimenting with yet another strategy for brand recognition. They recommend that the companies should express their views pertaining to social and political issues. It looks like there are some risks involved here for the businesses as the consumers may have a different point of view. However, some brands got desirable results after discussing the current issues and so marketers use this strategy to build a brand name.
Keep in mind that while discussing social and political issues, you keep a nice tone. Abstain from saying anything offending and controversial. Instead, your opinion and advice should be convincing to the people. It would be good if you choose a non- controversial cause to express your opinion. Try to make your consumers see that yours is a socially conscious brand.

5. Include users in product-building process

A business thrives if it let users participate in its business related activities. Those businesses that built a community of users are able to attract consumers. Invite your target consumers to have a say in creating your products or services. They may have ideas that can contribute to making your products user-friendly.
Take the case of the language-learning platform DuoLingo. The company lacked in sufficient resources to meet the needs of their users who wanted language modules. So, they chose a smarter way. The company made its underlying technology available to their users. As a result, the users started adding new languages to DuoLingo.
You can create a community by encouraging your users to exchange knowledge and connect to one another. After you create such a platform for your users, they will exchange their views. A good strategy here is to that your company hosts gatherings of professionals to discuss an issue in your office space and let the discussion flow in the community you build for users.
These tips may sound as basics but many startups and other businesses ignore them and end up losing customers to their rivals. But brand recognition will take time.

The post 5 Crucial Tips to Build Brand Recognition appeared first on GroundReport.