Building Brand Visibility with 3 Actionable Strategies
Do you ever feel like your brand goes unnoticed by your audience? You create a website, share on social, and attend networking events, but you still can’t seem to stand out from the crowd.
Strategic planning for brand visibility is essential to compellingly showcase your products, services, mission, and expertise in memorable fashion. Every brand, big and small, needs to actively build awareness and visibility to succeed, how much more for us as independents?
In this article, you will learn how to create benchmarks for your branding & marketing, best practices for building an online presence, and top ways to position your brand as a voice of authority in your niche.
1. Benchmark Your Branding & Marketing
When promoting your work, media (website, social, & content) first has to be valuable, recognizable, and branded. Every brand should have an established set of brand marks, colors, and typography along with a brand voice and style for your image, icon or illustration, and video style. This sounds like a lot, but working with a talented designer, commissioning a strategy from a brand consultant, or taking in-depth training (online, group, self-paced) on this topic is well worth the expense. This will continue to give back for years as it flows into ALL of your visual identity and marketing.
Once the branding and marketing benchmarks are established, you can quickly rebrand templates (logo, colors, fonts, imagery) without loads of expense. Drag and drop websites, content templates for social, email & sms marketing, event platforms, products- anything!
Top tip: Make sure your branding package/ course creates a visual identity and strategy (brand rules, voice, and target audience… positioning is also a big plus)
2. Online Presence Best Practices
Everything online is driven by keywords. Search engines, social, bots, and your audience- keywords are significant to each of them. Draft a list of keywords that describe your brand, products, or services with rich, vivid wording. Then salt-and-pepper keywords into everything; from website copy to social media captions to conversational topics and content tags.
Beyond sharing quality content filled with rich keywords, it is paramount that you encourage, promote, and share good reviews around the web. Potential customers first look for good reviews to validate the quality of your products/ services before they decide if your business is a good fit. Be sure you work reviews into your marketing strategy.
Top tip: Always provide a CTA (call to action) within your content. A button to learn more about services following the blurb on services on your home page, click-points in your email blasts, or a watch the full video/ episode on your teaser snippet video. Get your audience used to investing a click, an email address, or a fee rather then just handing it all over in one spot.
3. Voice Of Authority Position
Positioning your work as a voice of authority draws the line between independents that are magnetic and those that are not. Believe me, you want to be magnetic. Always. But this is no small feat. Follow this quick checklist to position for authority in your niche.
◼︎ Create a lead magnet- This can be a quiz, checklist, download, or video. Something that adds quick value to your audience to pull them in closer. It should also showcase your content style and quality within the experience.
◼︎ Build community- Actively invest in the lives of others, cheer on your network (like you wish someone would do for you), and look to introduce and interconnect your network when you think there may be a mutually beneficial synergy.
◼︎ Host, lead & attend events- There is strength in numbers. Glean insights and inspiration from others and return the favor too! Don’t just be an empty screen at online events or blank stare in person. Put yourself out there and be active, excited, and add your good vibes to the festivities.
Top tip: Whenever you truly enjoy an event, talk, book, post, or freebie. Make an effort to tell the author, host, or leader ‘thank you’ for sharing their knowledge, time, inspiration, etc. A handshake or high-five at the event, an email or LinkedIn message after you read the book or attend their talk, and a comment, reshare, or dm after a post, exhibit, or freebie. These go a long way to build your relationships, trust, and authority with colleagues, followers, and those you admire with authenticity.
I truly hope you enjoyed this article on brand visibility for creative independents. These 3 strategies will serve you well. Put them into play, today, and share this article with a like-minded peer and colleague.