How to grow your brand?

“How to grow your brand?”

In order to know how to grow your brand, you first need to assess its current status. You may have a gut instinct, but some reflection on your marketing activities over the past couple of years will give you a true insight. The trick also is to not only review what you have been doing, but consider what you have missed.

Of course, there is also the problem that you don’t know what you don’t know, so I encourage you to gain an expert independent assessment of your brand.

Before you are ready to answer the question ‘is your brand growing or has it stagnated?’, consider whether you are measuring this in terms of sales of brand awareness. They are not the same thing and in both cases, challenging to absolutely measure. Marketing supports sales, but it is not sales. Selling involves its own separate processes.

Awareness raising will contribute to your bottom line eventually, because this is about a longer term strategy. It is often challenging to appreciate the value of marketing in this context, but this is where the secret to successfully growing you brand lies.

Consider this strategy…

Spending time energy and resources on constantly raising brand awareness is something that is very much underestimated by so many businesses and not-for-profit organisations.

You see raising brand awareness is an important integral part of marketing every single day. It’s not something you can just put your energies into for a short burst and then forget about it. You know it’s been likened very much to the idea of an escalator. Imagine you’re walking up an escalator that is going down. If you stay still, you’re gonna end up going in the wrong direction.

If you just keep pace well you’re not going to be going very far. You have to just have enough energy to keep growing. Everyday, think about brand awareness in terms of just keep walking one extra little bit of energy step at a time.

So you just keep ahead of that never-ending escalator because raising brand awareness is ultimately what builds your brand and what leads to all the other great things that you want to do with it.

The problem with looking for a quick fix to growing your brand is it can often disappear as quickly as it arises. Furthermore, without the solid foundations of your brand in place to capitalise on such opportunities, you will have wasted your time. Growing your brand requires not only that you check all the basics of your brand are in place and correctly aligned, but that the key messages which emanate from them are being distributed.

Consistency is a major problem for most brands, no matter their size. One great example is the newsletter. Far too often a business or not-for-profit will decide to send out a newsletter, and the first one or two are great. By the third it has disappeared down the priority list and 18 months in you have skipped an issue if the project has not been totally abandoned.

There is the other side of consistency – being locked into something which is not working or something which quickly becomes stale. Then I also see many businesses subscribe to service who produces their newsletters for them. The problem is they are devoid of individual brand personality – they are just consistent.