When you run a small business, one thing that you really need to focus on is brand exposure and raising brand awareness. You want your brand to fall into the spotlight. You want everyone to notice it. After all, the more people who notice your brand, the more sales you will make in the long run. But nowadays, we are operating in an increasingly saturated market. It feels like almost everybody is trying their hand at creating products and selling them to the consumer market in a bid to escape from the rat race and employed positions building someone else’s dreams on their behalf. Who can blame them? There’s no need to be intimidated or put off by this competition if your products are actually good. It’s just a matter of getting your brand to stick in consumers minds, so that they come to you time and time again. How can you achieve this? Read on to find out!
Apps
Think of how much time the average person spends on their smartphone a day. We tend to take them everywhere with us. We’ll pick them up at any opportune moment. Whether we’re keeping ourselves occupied by watching a video on the way to work while we’re sat on public transport. Whether we’re replying to messages from friends while we’re walking down the street. We’ll probably give someone a call when we’re sat with little else to do. Then there’s the hours the majority of us spend aimlessly scrolling through social media feeds. Now, whether this is all healthy and productive or not, it’s what most people do. So, if you’re looking to grab people’s attention, it’s probably a good idea to set yourself up as a permanent feature on their phone’s home screen. This way, every time they unlock their phone, you’ll be in the back of their mind or they’ll be reminded of your brand’s existence. Now, very few people are so dedicated to any given brand that they’ll set its logo as their lock screen. So, how can you get into this space? The answer is to develop a custom, branded app that customers and potential customers can download to their phone. Your logo will appear as an app icon on their home screen and they’ll see it on a daily basis. The actual purpose of the app can also benefit you and you have a lot of choice when it comes to deciding what your app will provide consumers with. They could purchase products through it, it could serve as a digital loyalty card, or it could simply be a form of catalogue or look book that lets people browse your products. The main focus for now, however, is simply getting your logo in a space that customers will look at multiple times a day!
Free Gifts and Promotional Merchandise
You’ll have definitely come across branded free gifts or promotional merchandise at some point in your life. The majority of small businesses will engage with this tactic at some point or another. Essentially, by giving customers something free with your name on it, you’re making a loss in that you’re giving something away for nothing (despite not getting it made for free yourself). However, when you hand this item over, customers are likely to use it or keep it in their homes and are going to be exposed to your brand name and logo every time they use or look at the item. So, if this sounds like something you’re into, choose your items wisely. Think of things that many of us inadvertently look at on a daily basis. Something like custom car air fresheners would be a great example. We see a car air freshener every single time we get in our vehicle. It’s there for the duration of every trip we take. We glance at it every time we look in the rear view mirror. So, if it has your brand on it, people are going to look at it multiple times a day – during their commute, when they head out to get groceries, when they do the school run, when they head out to see friends… the list goes on and on. Other items that are useful are items that will also be seen by other people. Think of tote bags. People are much more likely to use tote bags nowadays in a bid to reduce their plastic consumption. They’ll take tote bags with them to the store and they may simply use them on a day to day basis to cart their belongings about. But when they are using a tote bag, they are generally taking it outside of their house. They are carrying it along on their shoulder, outside of their outerwear like a coat. So, everyone they pass sees it. If your logo or brand name is on it, this person becomes a walking form of advertisement for your brand!
Jingles
Jingles are one of the oldest tricks in the book when it comes to getting something to stick in consumers’ minds. It is a short and extremely catchy song or tune that is played at the same time as an advertisement, encouraging listeners to associate the sound with a particular company or brand. As you can imagine, they are most commonly used in either television commercials or radio commercials. So, if you have a little larger budget, this could definitely be an area worth investing in. While many of us automatically assume that jingles are a little old fashioned, they really do work to the same extent today. If someone says or whistles to the tune of “bada ba ba ba”, others will automatically say “I’m lovin’ it” and all involved will think of McDonalds. Some companies have even managed to rework classic songs to be associated with their brand. Cornetto managed to rework traditional Neapolitan song “O Sole Mio” so that many people now sing along “Just One Cornetto” rather than “O Sole Mio”. Many people can no longer hear the Rocky training theme song “Gonna Fly Now” without singing “118, 118” and thinking of two branded characters running around in training gear promoting a directory enquiries provider. In fact, studies suggest that the average person spends around fifty hours a year with a jingle stuck in their head. They are specially designed to infiltrate your memory and stay in your mind for years to come!
These are just a few different areas where you can really take control and imprint your brand on consumer minds. Each will entail a fair amount of work. You will have to invest time, effort, and money into these ventures to bring them to light. But collaborating with web developers for apps, designers and manufactures for merchandise, and musicians for jingles will prove all more than worth it in the end! Consumers really will begin to associate your brand with more than the products you sell alone. They will associate it with their smartphones. They will associate it with a lovely smell when they get in the car or saving money and the environment with an eco-friendly tote. They will associate it with certain musical notes that they hear. When it comes down to it, you really can use all of these things to create positive associations with your brand and to help your brand to maintain a regular presence in consumers lives. This can all help towards raising brand awareness, establishing yourself as a major player in your specialist field, and even making more sales!
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