The August 3rd Telarus Tuesday call welcomed Telarus VP of Marketing, Chad Dixon, and Telarus Social Media Content Manager, Sara Pina. They covered the steps behind creating a memorable brand including, message development, logo creation, and cultivating a strong social media presence. The entire recording is available here.
Definition/Meaning of Brand
At its essence, a brand really is the value proposition that you have between yourself and the customers that you serve. Your brand includes your strategy, your identity, how you market, your logo, the amount of trust that you have in the marketplace that you develop by how much people positively view your brand.
Psychology of Branding
It takes between five to seven interactions with a brand for people to start remembering it. So, when creating content for your brand, make sure you stay consistent across all platforms. On average, it takes about seven seconds to make the first impression. Make sure that everything about your brand is to secure a positive first impression.
Social Media: LinkedIn
LinkedIn has evolved from a recruiting and employment platform to more of a thought leadership and brand awareness platform. There are 15x more content impressions than job postings and nine billion content impressions.
When posting to your LinkedIn page, whether your personal or company page, you will get two times higher engagement when your post includes images. The higher the image quality (1200 x 627 pixels), the higher engagement you will see. When it comes to posting videos, don’t be scared to do it! Users are 20x more likely to re-share posts that include a video.
Five Steps to Creating Your Brand
Research
You must understand who your customers are. Everything from demographics, job level, what their typical day looks like, and where they go for information. This information can be used to put together a buyer persona, and templates can be found online for this. Once you have one buyer persona, you can start making multiple different personas for different individuals.
As for social media, research keywords your customers might be using and use them in your company posts, on your profile, and in your about section. It’s essential to make sure you’re connected to the right people and stay active and engaged in their posts.
Focus & Personality
There are three statements that you can use to really hone in on your focus and personality:
- Positioning Statement: a description of your product and target audience explains how it fills a market need.
- Mission Statement: what does your company do, how does your company do it, and why does your company do it?
- Unique Value Proposition: What your customer needs and cares about, what you do well, and what your competition does really will give you your unique value proposition.
Company Name & Voice
When thinking about your company name, you have to think about if it’s easily pronounceable, does it translate across multiple languages, and if it’s memorable.
Your company voice is just as important as the company name. The voice and message of your company need to be consistent across all platforms, but the tone of the message can be different depending on where you share it via social media.
Tag Line & Slogan
You don’t need a tagline and slogan for your company to succeed, but if you have a memorable one, it can help with your marketing strategies. If your company has a tag line/slogan, make sure to utilize it with a hashtag in social media posts. Others can follow the specific hashtag you use, and it will gain traction if you are using it in every post.
Look & Feel
There are eight steps to create the look and feel that you want to achieve.
- Start with your story.
- Brainstorm words that describe your brand.
- Sketch ideas based on those words.
- Test your top sketches with your buyer persona.
- Refine your chosen sketch.
- Pick versatile color options.
- Choose a font.
- Ensure scalability.
Grow Your Brand
There are many different ways to grow your brand in the marketplace and develop brand equity, but a few methods are through digital ads, social media, blogs, hosting webinars, referral programs, and even business cards (digital business cards are a thing as well and are great to use).
If you want help with anything mentioned above, whether that be creating a logo for your company, helping you come up with a tag line, or creating a website for you, our Telarus Marketing Team is here to help you grow your brand!
To learn more about what our Marketing Team can do for you, visit https://www.telarus.com/marketing/.
