You need your brand to stand out online.
As more companies realize that they need to make a strong online presence, it gets easier to get lost doing the standard things.
And getting lost is something your brand can’t afford.
Provided you’ve established your online presence already, I’ve got some things that will help make sure your brand shows through in a crowd full of copies.
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Your Brand Is More Than Your Logo
Let me start with a basic truth about making your brand stand out.
You need to reach far beyond the look of your letterhead.
Your brand isn’t just an icon you use next to its name.
It’s an entity all its own with a unique way of communicating for itself.
You need to think of your brand as a person.
Make your brand come to life. Share on XIt should have a look and feel that sets it apart with a personality to match.
You should be able to envision it as someone who blends in with your target customer.
Most of all, you need it to breathe with life.
Before you try to make your brand stand out, you might want to start with that.
If you feel like you’re already there, let’s get going here.
Set Up Your Brand For Success Online
You’re going to have to do a few things different for your brand if you want it to stand out online.
You’ll have to think differently too.
Thankfully, nothing you have to do is overcomplicated.
It just involves a level of creativity your competition doesn’t have.
If you’re diligent, you’ll get your brand seen more than you ever expected.
Here are some things you need to do to get your brand seen.
Get Your Brand’s Look & Feel Together
The most basic part of making your brand stand out is the way you present it.
People will notice that before they give anything else about your brand a shot.
That’s what makes it the most important part, too.
You need to develop a look and feel that’s totally unique to your brand.
To do that right, first consider what your company does.
Then consider your audience.
Using those two guides, come up with something that the right audience can relate to.
Make sure it makes sense, too.
It would probably be a wrong move to give a hippie feel to a corporate law firm.
Think about the logo style, colors, fonts, and even the name.
They’ve all got to be memorable and easily associated with your brand.
Incorporate Your Personal Style Into Your Brand
You might be in an industry with a thousand unique brands.
There may be so much competition, in fact, that you’re finding it difficult to stand apart.
It can be that way when the market is high-competition.
But there is nobody like you in your industry, and you’ve got your own personality.
By learning to inject that personality into your brand, you create something nobody else is doing.
Sometimes it can be a change as simple as including a color and layout style on your materials that matches your personality.
Other times it takes a little more, like choosing a set of euphemisms that fit the way you think.
Whatever it is, it should always reflect you and your personal philosophies.
It should take advantage of your unique traits.
Make Your Brand’s Social Media Rock
Social media is the first and most prominent place your audience will see your brand.
It’s the space where most conversation will take place.
They’ll follow, interact with, and validate your brand.
That’s why it’s one of the best places to make sure your brand is represented.
That means you need to master the pillars of social media as well as the platforms most important to your market.
Take Wendy’s as an example…again…
Fast food chains target parents and the teenage/young adult demographic.
Groups who are looking for an easy meal or a cheap one.
Wendy’s knows that market resides in just a few places on the web.
You probably already know how they’ve mastered Twitter.
But now they’ve moved to a totally new realm: Fortnite.
Wendy’s realizes that a huge portion of their target market plays the game, so they started looking for an opportunity.
When they found a fast food restaurant in-game, they saw their chance.
Creating a character that looks like their mascot, Wendy, they went to work destroying all of the freezers in the game.
They started streaming on Twitch.
When that skyrocketed as perfect marketing, they expanded to other games, offering viewers special discount codes during streams.
This is an area you need to do similar in.
Figure out the places that matter to your audience, then master those venues.
Be it Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Twitch, learn to speak your audience’s language and get them to tune in.
Blog Consistently
This is one area that’s easy to stand out in your industry.
Most companies don’t blog at all.
The ones that do don’t do it well or consistently.
If you do both, you’re already going to stand out.
It amazes me that more companies don’t blog.
Blogging is a cost-effective marketing tactic that has a great ROI and boosts your SEO as well.
And it’s a fantastic way to showcase your brand’s knowledge and personality.
With a little bit of planning and research, it’s easy to do well.
Yes, it takes a significant time investment, as an effective blog post of over 2000 words usually takes between 3 and 6 hours to write.
But the benefits it provides significantly outweigh the cost.
By blogging at least once per week (preferably more often), your brand can reap these benefits quickly.
Just make sure you keep to the minimum of once per week.
Make Sure Your Brand’s Client Experience Is Amazing
The way your clients interact with your brand can decide everything.
It’s going to be the true definition of what your brand is.
If your client experience sucks, your customers are going to remember that.
But if it’s excellent, they’ll make sure their friends know too.
That’s why client experience is something we focus on when developing a marketing strategy for our clients.
By creating a client experience that’s seamless, pleasant, and efficient, you create happiness among your clients.
When your clients are happy, they become brand evangelists.
It’s through your clients that you’ll begin to stand out online.
From Google reviews to Facebook recommendations, your clients are going to have great things to say about working with you.
That’s going to establish your reputation online.
Make sure every interaction with your clients online goes well.
Assure that your social media team knows how to communicate in their communities, your customer service team knows how to handle customer interactions, and your website is simple to use.
Get every element of interaction on the same page to make it uniform.
Create a workflow for everything your clients should be doing with your brand online, so the process goes as smooth as possible.
Perfect your client interactions so your clients always finish happier than when they started.
Let Your Brand’s Collective Voice Drive The Conversation
If you’ve done a great job building your brand internally, your team can help make your brand stand out.
What do I mean?
Effectively building your brand internally means making the brand a part of the company culture.
Everything you do internally matches the persona you share with the public.
When you’ve done that well, your team is living your brand as much as you are.
That means they can see other ways your brand can be interacting and innovating.
Allow their creative collaboration to shine, developing the next evolution of your brand.
When your team gets involved, your brand takes on a whole new life.
It becomes its own entity instead of simply an extension of you.
Your audience begins to connect better with it.
As a bonus, your team begins to take more pride and ownership in your brand’s results.
They begin to see the brand as a reflection of them.
That’s going to improve your quality, which ultimately makes your customers happy.
Bring Your Brand Story To Life
People love a good story.
Especially one that gets them emotionally connected to the characters.
That’s what made the whole MCU so successful.
Think about what would happen if the character was your brand.
It would do some amazing things for your company.
Your brand is what it is and grew the way it grew because of beliefs and circumstances.
You got into the industry you’re in because of what you believed and went through.
Share that story with your audience.
Convey the emotions that drove your decision process.
Share the ups and downs of building your brand.
Offer them a glimpse into the mission that you set out on so many years ago.
And give it to them piece by piece.
As the story grows, they’ll slowly build that same emotional connection to the main character.
Which will transform them into loyal advocates.
They’ll start to think of your brand as an old friend.
A friend they’ll stay loyal to.
Get Focused On What You’re Best At
Many brands tend to lose their focus over time.
It’s one of the reasons so many smaller brands start to look alike over time.
Unless you want to get lost among that crowd, you need to do the opposite.
Get extremely focused on what you’re good at.
It’s time to eliminate all the other stuff your staff is getting caught up in that takes them away from your brand’s focus.
Trim down the extraneous offerings that you don’t do as well or don’t get as many customers for.
Like a beam of light, creating intense focus will light a fire for your brand.
You’ll begin to accelerate your growth through more efficient effort.
Most importantly, people will begin to take notice of how far ahead of the industry you are in your specialties.
Because as you focus more on what you’re good at, you will get better at it.
More of your time will be spent on it and less wasted on the extra.
It’s a natural way to hone your skills.
Especially think about the ways you can fine-tune what’s going on around your products or services.
Do you have talents spent on outsourceable tasks that would be better spent on the core of your business?
Look at everything you’re doing that distracts from the main thing and get your brand focused where it should be.
Make Sure Your Brand Is Consistent
Different parts of your business require different teams.
You obviously don’t want your logistics team to spend their time answering customer service calls.
However, in everything you do, your customers should expect a consistent experience.
That means you need to have a “brand guide” for your team that outlines the way your brand does each job.
When you bring a uniform experience to your brand, you show that your brand is predictable.
You help your customers know what to expect.
At the same time, you need to make sure all of your marketing materials – from press to web – are consistent both in look and vibe.
Your fonts, colors, and overall styles have to match.
In this case, a brand style guide works best.
Layout all the different ways your brand can use fonts, color combinations, and especially the logo.
Make sure all your euphemisms are well-communicated.
Emphasize the tone that all your communications should take.
When everything you do feels the same, your brand comes off cohesive instead of schizophrenic.
That sets your audience on solid ground.
Add Creative Video Content
Video is a massive gamechanger in content marketing.
Companies who use it see a huge difference.
That’s mostly because people remember creative videos.
Think about those ads you’ve been seeing on social media for the Purple Mattress.
I bet you remember how you felt when they did the egg test for the first time.
Video has that kind of power.
By adding it to your repertoire, you can capture attention and stick in people’s memory the same way.
Sure, it takes 3-4 hours to produce a great video, but the results are worth it.
And, as an added bonus, people are way more likely to buy a product after they see a video for it.
You absolutely need to focus on creativity, though.
There’s a lot of competition out there already.
But, with a great strategy and a little bit of that collaborative creativity we talked about earlier, you can get it done.
Support A Cause Dear To You
People are impacted by the charities you support.
The emotional connection people have to a cause is strong.
By supporting a cause you have that kind of attachment to, you attract others with the same attachment.
Bonus if your cause reflects your mission.
That demonstrates to your audience the makeup of your character.
It associates your brand with a set of values.
And it creates an emotional connection between the cause and your company.
When you support the things they care about, they’ll support you.
The most important part of this whole process, though, is that you support a charity that matters to you.
This, more than any other part of your brand’s communication, has to be genuine.
Yes, all your brand’s communication must be genuine, but this is so much more important.
If you’re supporting a charity as a publicity thing, your audience will smell it.
But you should always use your publicity to further the charity when you can.
Make Sure Your Audience Has Time To See Your Brand
If you follow the advice I just gave, your brand will stand out.
When your brand stands out, you’ll see more clients.
It’s a basic truth.
Thankfully, the things I suggested won’t require special skills.
You won’t have anything new to learn.
That makes it much easier to take advantage of the benefits.
Apply these tactics now and start to win big.
