Top 5 tips for growing your brand, so you get more business

1. SEO – This stands for Search Engine Optimisation.

1. Ok, what does that really mean? In a nutshell, it means that your website must be built or created in a certain way, so that when someone searches for your product or service, Google can easily verify that search (information) request, and return the search back to the user (the person who asked Google for information) with good results.
2. If your website is poorly built, or it doesn’t meet the minimum standards of what Google expects of a good website, then you will get a bad rating from Google, and it simply won’t put your website to the top of the searches, and that means your website isn’t viewed as often as it could be. This is Google’s way of saying “you’re making it way too hard for our algorithms to define what you are offering” or your website links don’t work, so we can’t recommend you as much as other websites. You don’t want that.
3. So it’s really important that you create a website that Google’s search engines love. Good “search engine optimisation” (SEO) is a must.

2. CRO – This stands for Conversion Rate Optimisation.

1. It’s really easy to get to the top of a Google search page. The hard part is making people stay on your page and this is where CRO comes in.
2. Good CRO means the website you are looking at gives you want you want both really quickly and easily. Let’s dig into this more, because this is equally as important as SEO. Let’s put ourselves into this situation. When we search for something on Google, and we click on a website (usually somewhere on the first page) what do we want to find? Well, we usually want to find the answer to our problem, does it have the product or service that we want? And we want the website to answer that question really quickly, because we all have things to do, and we really don’t want to have to go clicking through a whole bunch of pages to find the answer.
3. In summary ensure your website has good CRO. If it’s not super user friendly, people will leave.

3. Branding your vehicle – This is a no brainer. It’s another view of your brand or business.

1. Brand awareness is the result of people seeing your brand as often as possible, so it makes sense to get your business vehicles sign written.

4. Social media

It is clearly here to stay, but what is often not talked about is that SM works well for some sectors, but not so for others. Why is this? Can your brand benefit, and more importantly is it worth investing your time and effort to post on platforms such as Facebook, if you don’t get any return on investment for all the effort. A trap for new businesses when thinking about this, is that if you are spending 4-5 hours each week on Facebook posts, then you are probably spending about $400 – $500 a month on the time that person spent posting (based on an admin working rate per hour). That’s about $6,000 a year.

1. It comes down to this. Most people go onto social media platforms for entertainment, or more importantly to see what their friends and family are up to. They really don’t want to be bombarded with ads, and users are pretty savvy these days and have adapted to blocking out ads that don’t offer any value. They came for the entertainment, not the ads, and so any brand, product or service that doesn’t immediately offer value (and this means split second decision making), is quickly brushed over.
2. The other part to this is that a user’s feed on social media platforms such as FB, can very easily be filled up with pages and pages of posts, and before you know it you have spent half an hour scrolling through posts and you haven’t even got past the last 24hrs of posts on your feed. So your posts often get swallowed up in people’s feeds, and never get seen (even with a boosted post). This point is often lost on many businesses.
3. So who does benefit from social media? The short answer to this is brands and businesses that can post something that is both authentic, and adds value. If we can’t do that in our social media posts, then the person scrolling through their feed, will very quickly dismiss the post. After all this is their personal time (or sometimes work time 😊) so people are very selective about what they click on.
4. But there is also another more obvious factor. If your brand is exciting, cool (obviously this is subjective) or emotional, then you have a much better chance to create a social media post that is going to make people want to click on it. As an example, restaurants, fitness, and experiences tend to do quite well. Why? Because they can post images that have immediate appeal to most people. It’s pretty easy to like an image of an amazing meal at your local restaurant, because it’s pretty harmless and it entices our senses. Or an image of a luxury retreat, that is on offer for a great price, or the gym bodies that we all want (especially after that big weekend). These all have some sort of everyday appeal. The other areas that do quite well, are our favourite brands which we have become loyal to. These tend to be mainly consumer items such as clothes, personal objects and household items which have built up a following by having very strong brand awareness.
5. All is not lost for other sectors that may not have the same appeal, because there are also ways in which you can add value (even to the most boring products or services). These sectors are harder to brand, but there are a few tricks which can make you stand out and make it worthwhile.

5. Branding – Easily the most important of all.

1. When your brand is being seen every day, you are connecting with consumers and gaining trust, and this is what all good brands aim for. So when someone searches on Google for a product or service, your brand has a better chance of being the one they click on.
2. Good brands and businesses use multiple advertising mediums, so they are seen every day and as much as possible. They use a visual medium that has a wide audience reach and has a point of difference, so it and makes them stand out above their competition. Visual mediums are incredibly powerful. Why? Because we recall things much easier when we see them, and it’s easier to get someone’s attention.
3. Most mediums are crowded with the same sectors all competing for consumers. Identify mediums where you can reach people that other brands aren’t in. By doing so you will immediately gain a competitive advantage, because consumers are seeing your brand more than others.

The big questions to ask are these.

• Is your advertising and branding strategy relevant for today?
• Are you still doing the same thing as 2 years ago?
• Are you competing in a crowded space?
• What’s your advertising point of difference, and how does your brand stand out over other products and services?

When you choose the right mediums to advertise your brand or business, it has a really a powerful effect, and all of a sudden your other advertising and branding is being multiplied. Think about this, you see a car sign written during the day, or you see a brand on an “Out of Home” media screen, then that same night you see a social media post of that same brand. The combination of these things helps you to subconsciously recognise that brand a lot more, and you kind of trust that brand a bit more. This is how good branding works. It is always looking to frequently connect with you in a good way.

Having worked in successful brands like Kathmandu, Fisher & Paykel and Jockey, I learnt how important branding is to their success (hint…it’s one of their most important investments).

I would love to share with you the secrets to growing your brand, and create a strategy that guarantees you results. Let us do the hard work for you, so you can do the things you love doing. It’s free to talk, and I’ll bring the coffees. Let’s chat.

Phone Mark: 021 742 774    Email: [email protected]