How to Start Supporting an Invisible Brand

If a brand isn’t visible, even the best product in the world isn’t going to sell. This makes brand visibility arguably the most important priority of any B2B marketing or sales strategy. 

With the right approach, you can greatly increase your brand’s visibility and support a host of different marketing tactics.

So how do you start supporting a functionally invisible brand?

The Power of Brand Awareness

Brand awareness can be considered a prerequisite for any marketing, advertising, or sales generation effort. After all, if people don’t even know you exist, how are they going to buy from you?

Increased brand awareness can help you in several different ways:

•       New customers. There are probably thousands, or even millions of people out there who could benefit from buying your products and services. But until the day they become aware of you, they won’t buy from you. Boosting brand awareness is going to introduce you to these people, allowing you to attract them as new customers.
•       Recurring purchases. Brand awareness is also about earning recurring purchases from your existing customers and past customers. Seeing an advertisement of yours, or merely seeing your brand name in print, could inspire people to remember your business and patronize it in the future.
•       Word of mouth. Brand awareness makes it easier to generate conversation about your brand and build word of mouth potential. This is especially powerful on platforms like social media, which allow people to rapidly share and discuss relevant information.
•       Customer loyalty. Finally, increasing brand awareness can build customer loyalty. If you’re consistently communicating with your audience, and promoting improvements you’ve made to the business, your existing customers will have no reason to turn to one of your rivals.

How to Start Supporting an Invisible Brand

If you have an invisible brand, one for which there is little support for brand awareness and visibility, you’ll have a hard time accomplishing these goals. You’ll also have difficulty getting started, since brand awareness is much easier to develop when you already have a base of loyal, aware customers.

These are some of the best ways to get started:

•       Create or solidify consistent brand standards. Every brand needs formalized, consistent standards to serve as the basis for all future marketing, advertising, and messaging. If you present your brand in a disjointed, chaotic way, people are going to suspect that your brand and business are incoherent – or worse, they won’t remember your brand or business at all. But with consistent brand standards in place, you’ll have a clear identity that you can use across all future channels and mediums.
•       Identify past obstacles to visibility. If your business has been around for a while, take a moment to analyze past obstacles to visibility. Why is it that people are generally unaware that your brand exists? What’s been holding you back? Is it a lack of investment in your marketing and advertising? Is it the ubiquitous presence of tough competitors? Was it the compounding effects of a few name changes? Understanding the cause can help you find an ideal solution.
•       Evaluate competitive differentiators. Next, evaluate your competitive differentiators. In other words, what are the aspects of your brand that are totally unique in this environment? You can use these as the foundation for future marketing and advertising strategies.
•       Build the foundation for your web presence. A good website and active social media profiles form a solid foundation for your web presence. All your brand promotion efforts can send people to these central hubs.
•       Promote using inbound marketing channels. Inbound marketing strategies tend to be inexpensive, highly scalable, and capable of building both brand awareness and trust. Accordingly, you should make inbound marketing a central pillar of your brand awareness campaign; strategies like SEO and content marketing are ideal.
•       Establish credibility and trust. Awareness is good, but it’s even better when your brand is associated with positive traits on a large scale. For example, building brand awareness in a way that promotes perceptions of your brand’s credibility and trust is advantageous. Become a respected thought leader in your industry.
•       Keep pushing. Effective approaches to building brand awareness require ongoing investment and effort. Don’t stop when you start seeing results!
•       Monitor key metrics. Metrics like brand mentions help you evaluate the effectiveness of all your brand awareness efforts. Gather as much objective data as you can and analyze it, so you can stop spending so much time and effort on strategies that don’t work and redirect those resources to strategies that do work.

Taking your brand from invisible to massively popular isn’t exactly easy, but with these strategies, it’s much more straightforward. As long as you’re willing to continue investing and refining your techniques, you should eventually be able to accomplish your brand awareness goals.