Who you know, has its benefits. But maybe even more important is who knows you. Great branding helps you get known. Great branding builds a relationship between you and your audience. And for a business, a blog, or any kind of endeavor, that relationship is the key to accomplishing whatever you set out to do.
Whether you’re trying to raise awareness, foster change, or increase sales, branding is an investment in making it happen. And when done well, you can leverage your brand for as long as you take care of it and keep it alive. Your brand has a job to do. And step by step, this is how it works to get you known.
1. Get Attention
Business is a competitive sport. You can have the greatest product in the world, but if no one notices it sitting beside a hundred others on the shelf, all is lost.
And whether your arena is the store walkway, the multi-billion page internet, or the hyper-competitive corporate ladder, your brand is your flag. It’s what gets noticed. Its very first job is to turn heads.
Hey, Over Here!
Yeah! Over Here.
Getting attention is tricky. It’s not too difficult to get attention. All you have to do is be the most outrageous. But being the most outrageous doesn’t necessarily translate into what you want to happen next. Because after you start turning heads, you want people to actually stop and take notice.
So you only have one goal in getting attention, and that’s to get to the next step; sparking interest.
2. Spark Interest
Sparking interest is about getting some face time. The difference between getting attention and sparking interest is the time you get to make your pitch. You can only go straight from getting attention to the next step, building trust, once you have an established brand. That’s the power of branding.
But while you’re building your brand, and when you’re promoting new things under its flag, you need to spark interest before you build trust.
Stop. Check This Out.
This Means Something to You.
While getting attention may give you only a fraction of a second of face time, sparking interest can get you anywhere from several seconds to minutes or even hours of face time.
Interest gives your audience ownership. It gets them involved and invested in your brand. It can be interactive. Or a learning experience. It can show a way to solve a problem. You can spark interest by associating yourself with something that’s already known. Or by showing people something that’s new, different, or evolutionary. Even revolutionary. Or imperative.
Sparking interest piques curiosity. Just long enough for you to make your pitch.
3. Build Trust
This is where you make your pitch. So what do you want to say? Imagine having less than a second to say it. Aren’t you glad you sparked some interest now?
Trust takes time. You’ve sparked some interest and bought yourself some time. So how do you spend that time wisely? Deliver everything you promised, and more.
Here’s Honesty. And Integrity.
Here’s Social Proof.
And Value. Always.
But You Decide.
You must stay true to who you are. And true to what you’re trying to say. And this goes back to how you got attention and sparked interest in the first place. Nothing erodes trust like the old bait-and-switch. It’s a conversation between a brand and an audience that goes something like this:
Hey, over here! This means something to you.
Wait a minute. This isn’t what you said it was. This sucks!
Stay true to who you are. Deliver what you promise and show that you’ve delivered before. Even better, provide social proof. If you can show that other people believe in what you have to offer, you’re miles ahead in the game.
To build trust, you need to deliver everything you promised, and more than what you promised. And even if you promise the world, as long as you can deliver the sun and the moon too, you’ll start to get recognition.
Now you’re really starting to create some ZOOM.
4. Foster Recognition
The big payoff! After you’ve gotten attention, sparked interest, and built trust, you get recognition. And a widely recognized brand is a beautiful thing.
To foster recognition, you just build it and promote it. Keep getting it out there. You have to take care of your brand. Keep it fresh, keep it on-message, and make sure it gets plenty of time in the spotlight. Once you’ve gained some recognition, you just keep working to make it stronger.
Hey, I know you!
Hello Again.
Think about well known brands such as Coca-Cola, Google, Microsoft, and GE … the list goes on and on. What if these companies stopped putting their brand on their products? Would you still buy them? You might, but their sales would plummet. They’d have to start all over again from square one. How?
Get attention, spark interest, build trust and foster recognition
- The Complete book will be available in web version soon… Keep in touch
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