The hardest part of starting a new business is getting your business known. You are trying to compete with hundreds of thousands of other businesses out there. Whether or not those businesses are successful or not is not necessarily your concern. What your focus needs to be is getting your business to be successful in the sea of choices available to your target audience. Think about how your business is unique to the rest, and build your brand around that.
Your brand is what will keep you on the short list of choices for your target audiences. We all know the differences between national brand and store brand products. The biggest of those differences is usually the cost of the product. While the national brand may not be the best choice, they are often priced higher simply because they are nationally known brands. In short, you are paying a higher price for notoriety. Store brands, while usually specific to a region, are often better quality products, and of course they almost always cost less.
The first task to consider is the name of your business (brand). It should be relevant to what you are doing, and catchy enough for people to remember. It is often a popular choice for a business name to include a reference to the area you are doing business in, as well as a reference to the product you are selling or producing. For example, an investment firm based on San Francisco may choose to call themselves, ” Bay Area Investments.” This type of name is not only relevant to the business operations, but very easy for the consumer to remember in a pinch. If they were to advertise on the radio, while the consumer may not remember all of the ad, they would most likely be able to remember that they heard an ad about an investment firm in the San Francisco Bay area. Googling that would most likely provide them with a list of relevant businesses, and they would be able to easily discern which firm they heard the ad about.
Another important task to complete, is your logo. This is the visual for your business, and again needs to be relevant to the business, as well as eye catching. You wouldn’t put a photo of a plumbing fixture on the Bay Area Investments business card, would you? No, you’d put something related to a stock portfolio, and possibly an image of the Golden Gate Bridge to represent the company name. Your logo should be able to depict the written name of your business. Just like in the cave man days, they drew pictures to describe what has happened, your logo should do the same. This will provide a cohesiveness with your name, and again will allow the consumer to easily remember the company. As your business grows, you can even use just your logo as your advertisement, and people would be able to recognize your business from it.
Tag lines are also very important. If you put just your name, and logo on a business card, and hand it out to your contacts, that is surely an effective way to get yourself out there, but not overly compelling. You need to be able to sum up your business’s intention in just a few short words or phrases. Bay Area Investments may aim to provide exceptional service on a smaller personal level than what you would find from a national company, such as Bank of America. Their tag line may say something to the effect of “small town service with big city results.” This of course would inform the consumer that they will not sacrifice service for results, or vice versa. Anyone who has ever experienced less than stellar service from their investment firm, would more than likely be open to speaking with a firm that truly cared about their customers’ investment success.
The last, but most important aspect to getting your brand recognized is getting your brand recognized! Your challenge when just beginning, is to get your target audience to at least try what you are offering. When you first begin, often free trials or giveaways are the best way to get this to happen. Once someone tries something and likes it, their rate of return for a paid service is around 85%. So don’t be afraid to offer coupons, discounts, freebies, etc. Bay Area Investments may offer a free initial review of their potential new customers’ current portfolios. From there, they can make the needed recommendations, and attempt to close the sale of their product with their prospective client. Happy clients will usually tell their friends about great products they’ve tried, and in turn word of mouth advertising often is the most lucrative for your business. And of course, it is always the most flattering, because it tells you that your customers are happy with your product! That in and of itself is the most successful way to build your brand.
Your success is only limited to your imagination, and drive. Get creative with your brand, it is yours!
May 8th, 2012 
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