Every entrepreneur knows that building their brand is vital to establishing a foothold and growing their client base in today's market. Yet many business operators find themselves at a loss when devising a strategy -- because the necessary knowledge is not in their wheelhouse. If you are running a dental practice and feeling this frustration, take heart! You are not alone. This insightful overview of building brand recognition will help:
There are three main tech tools companies can leverage to increase brand recognition: their website, social media outreach and customer data analysis, typically analyzed and operationalized with business intelligence (BI) tools.
A report by Lucidpress (registration required) shows that consistent brand presentation across all platforms can increase revenues by up to 23%. So, it’s no wonder top companies invest millions in cultivating their brand image. But, some companies don’t have millions to put toward this. As the leader and cofounder of a company that designs websites and apps, I’m here to tell you that whether your firm’s budget is big or small, you can build your brand image.
Building The Brand
Brand recognition is a customer’s ability to identify or recall a company, product or service. The most important part of that definition is “a customer’s ability.”
A lot of new brands believe that brand recognition is how well-known or identifiable a logo or product is. While that’s partially true, successful brands know that brand familiarity should focus on customers, not just overall public recognition.
The internet offers a wide variety of options and platforms that can be used to reach an ideal customer base. But using these effectively and maintaining brand consistency is the real key to building brand recognition. An illustration of this is clean and clear website design (across every platform: mobile, tablet and desktop/laptop, social media, email) and easy-to-read online content that builds a strong online brand presence.
Logo And Identity: Establishing An Online Brand Image
Building a brand is far more than simply throwing a logo on a newsletter and sending it out. While brand identity and logo play a key role in brand recognition, overall brand building is an involved process.
A brand book is an excellent tool to help facilitate the same brand ideas across multiple platforms. My company uses brand books as the first step for most of our web and mobile development projects. Here’s why: The brand book acts as a key document helping content creators communicate a clear and consistent message to their audience. Once a brand book is created, it can be used as a reference when developing main segments of your brand such as a website, social media and a handful of other content to support your online presence.
Website
A company’s website should be seen as the most important piece in generating brand recognition. While using social media platforms and other forms of content marketing can showcase the brand, a website is the linchpin asset for brand recognition. A website should embody everything the brand image is trying to cultivate, from its color scheme to the company’s values. When new customers visit the website, they should be able to immediately recognize the similarities shown in off-site content.
Social Media
On social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and a whole list of others, the central focus should be creating tone and voice for a brand. Customers will know what to expect when the tone is consistent across the board, which helps build familiarity. A brand should convey the values across all platforms to sincerity and authenticity, which build up a reputation.
Content SEO
Content search engine optimization (SEO) focuses on creating high-quality content that can generate backlinks from other high-authority websites. This type of content can range from blog posts to in-depth guides.
The primary focus of this content is to provide information to encourage other websites to link to that page. This is information that is going to make people really hungry to search for it — very unique content. Here’s an example. One of our clients wrote a three-page article about how to prevent upholstery from pilling. This is a pretty obscure subject area. The idea here is that there is little written about how to rescue furniture that has this problem, so this article gets a lot of views and has high SEO value.
Companies can also post their written content in article form at various publishing platforms such as Forbes and Medium. This provides a company’s brand with significant reputability as an expert voice within their field.
Using BI Tools To Monitor Branding
Many companies use business intelligence (BI) tools to monitor marketing and branding technology platforms like social media and websites. This supports them in making well-informed, data-driven business decisions. While the internet offers plenty of tools to spread brand awareness, it’s up to companies to coordinate the same message and ensure brand consistency throughout these different platforms and services.
Services like Tableau offer advanced business intelligence solutions that provide data visualization tools. They can perform forecasting, benchmarking and even cross-database analysis so that businesses understand exactly how their brand is performing. These types of tools allow companies to track branding performance and utilize back-end information to monitor branding and marketing efforts on the front-end.
Salesforce Social Studio is another popular marketing tool that gives companies the ability to look over data across sales, service and marketing. Combining this data paints a clear picture of how the brand is performing and whether marketing efforts are leading to real conversions. Companies can dial in on exactly what’s working and trim areas that aren’t benefiting sales.
These collaborative technologies work well for improving brand recognition and maximizing revenue by building company awareness and analyzing sales related to brand marketing efforts.
Branding Matters
Brand recognition is essential for companies to get ahead of their competitors. The best way to ensure brand consistency is using a brand book to draft a public image and company identity. This maintains a company’s brand across all platforms from social media to a website.
Brand awareness can generate sales if BI tools are used to monitor and adjust marketing efforts on a company’s website, across social media and content SEO. Companies can make effective business decisions based on that data. Branding is a challenging area of expertise that companies need to get right in order to remain competitive, relevant and generate long-term revenue.
The great news is that DentalMAX Solutions can help your dental practice establish robust brand recognition, including targeted, hard-hitting marketing on all social platforms and an optimized website. It is what we do! And that’s not all we can offer you! Connect with us today to learn more or find us on Facebook!
