5 Things You Can Do to Build Brand Familiarity with Your Audience Today

I think you’ll agree with me when I say: We all want our company to be known in our industry. While it requires effort, there are steps you can follow today to build brand familiarity with your audience. What is a brand, anyway? It’s not your logo. It’s not something you can see or touch. It’s what people feel when they see your name, logo, or marketing materials. Your brand is a set of beliefs and experiences people associate with your company. On another note, your brand is not the same as branding. Branding is the specific action you take to strengthen your company’s image.

Now that you have a basic understanding between brand and branding, you’re probably wondering how this applies to building brand familiarity with your audience. These five simple actions strengthen your branding efforts as it relates to design.

1) Clear a table and roll up your sleeves – it’s time for a design audit.

It may sound like a bore, but a design audit is the first step in evaluating your branding efforts. It starts by examining your branding efforts across your company, from your business card to your website and social media to your printed promotional items. A design audit helps you recognize your strengths and weaknesses as it relates to your brand identity. The benefit of reviewing your current designs is that you can determine ways to sharpen your image so that you stand out among your competitors.

Ask yourself:

● Do all elements of your branding look similar?

● Are we using consistent fonts and colors throughout our marketing materials?

● Does your design help make the content easy to understand or does it make it more difficult to understand?

● Are printed pieces high quality and professional?

● Are we utilizing a brand style guide?

● Does the look of your brand match the way you want customers to perceive your business?

With this knowledge, you can determine what steps you need to take to solidify your brand.

2) Solidify Your Brand Elements with a Style Guide

No matter the size of your company, you need a brand style guide. A brand style guide is essential in keeping your brand identity consistent and recognizable. Your company style guide should include all the important guidelines for your brand’s identity: logos and usage, typographic direction and color palette are high-level items to include in your style guide. Your style guide acts as an asset for creating consistent, branded content. It can be as simple as one page (seen in the example below), or an extensive guide outlining each unique piece of your branding efforts.

This is an example of the one-page Threaded Marketing Group brand style guide.

3) Sharpen Your Image with Consistent Brand Style Usage

You’ve got your brand style guide in place, now put it in action! Ensure you are consistently using the colors, fonts, and graphic elements outlined in your brand style guide. Your audience should be able to tell who you are across all your marketing efforts. In every application, the use of a consistent brand identity is key to building brand familiarity with your audience.

4) Let Your Voice Be Heard

We’ve been discussing what you see visually, but let’s not forget another central component in your branding efforts: your brand voice. Your voice, or also known as tone, describes how your brand communicates with your audience. Is your company formal or casual? Serious or funny? Your company’s tone of voice represents your brand personality and influences how your messages are perceived. Ensure your tone is consistent and it will shape how your customers experience your brand. Do you know your brand’s voice and tone?

5) Get Your Employees On-Board

Without employee buy-in, everything above is a wash. Why build a brand style guide if it collects dust in an unknown folder in your company archives? Believe it or not, how the actions you take to build a strong image of your company is one of the most important things you can teach your employees. Organize a discussion and overview with your employees to stress the importance of using the brand style guide. Giving your employees a “why” for staying consistent with the brand guidelines will bring buy-in, lead to consistent and on-brand usage of your brand identity, and ultimately achieve brand familiarity with your audience.

Well, that’s all there is to it. Follow these five steps and you will be on the path to building brand familiarity with your audience in no time. If you want a deep dive into your current branding efforts, reach out to us for a consultation on how we can help you today.

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Ashley Dailey is the Senior Graphic Designer on the Threaded Marketing Group team. She has over 15 years of graphic design experience and is known as a branding expert in the service industry. She has a relationship working with Kelly Jo Jefferis for over 10 years. She has worked on the branding efforts for over 15 companies, including Rite Lite Signs and Ramski & Company.

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