Brands are very important to any business. It is an obvious statement but, especially when a brand is very successful, it’s easy to stop appreciating just how valuable it is.
Even the strongest brands are subject to fatigue. Over time, for a variety of reasons, the impact of a brand will fade, and those who remain loyal to it will begin to demand more from it or lose interest.
The following are things that will be familiar to anyone who has set up or managed a brand before. If you are dealing with a brand that you started from scratch, you will have gone through these steps to build the brand. However, they are just as important when the time comes to give your brand that little boost that will ensure its longevity and resilience.
Review Your SEO
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is an essential consideration when you are building a brand, but all too often businesses forget about it once the brand is built. If you have a brand on your hands that needs a shot in the arm, but you can’t think of how to go about it, SEO should be the first thing you look at. Remember, your SEO score is directly linked to how easy you are to find online. Needless to say, if Google can’t find you, how the heck is anyone else going to?!
There are a variety of tools and techniques out there which you can take advantage of yourself to improve your SEO score, but really this is an area where it is well worth investing in the services of a professional company. Do not underestimate just how much difference it makes having a high SEO score! And don’t fall into the trap of complacency just because you were within the first three results on Google a month ago; that’s not to say there isn’t some plucky young upstart trying to shoulder you out of the way.
Your SEO should be an ongoing concern, not something that you ‘achieve’ and then sit back and forget about. If nothing else, your brand is going to be competing against the effects of time. As time passes, people move on to new things, they discover other things they like, their tastes change. These effects will work both for you and against you. As some people move away from your brand and onto new things, so will other people be leaving their current favourite brands looking for something new. By making sure that you are always a visible option, you can pick up as many of these people for yourself as possible.
Go Outside the Box with Your Marketing
SEO is just one component of your overall marketing strategy, albeit a very important one. As well as being visible on internet search engines, you also want your brand to be visible around the internet, and in the real world as well. To make your marketing efforts as effective as possible, it helps to think beyond the usual marketing methods and to devise strategies which are novel and unique.
Sometimes, you can triumph in the competition for consumer awareness simply by approaching things a little differently. Sometimes unconventional marketing works simply because it is unconventional. Any savvy business owner should know their own brands and should understand what it is that makes their brand different, better even than those of their competitors.
When you try and direct your team to think outside the box, it rarely leads to true outside the box thinking. A much more effective way of getting out of the box is to have your marketing team think about what it is that defines your brand, what the underlying ethos and values are, and how these can best be used to inform marketing decisions.
Make Sure Your Trademarks Are in Place
After spending the requisite time, effort, and money in building your brand, it would be downright tragic to have it taken away from you. Never underestimate how unscrupulous some businesspeople are. Rest assured, if simply ripping off your brand and stealing your ideas is an option, there will be no shortage of people who are willing to do just that. Your best defence against this kind of behaviour is to ensure that you have all the necessary legal protections in place. The most important aspect of this is having your trademarks in place.
When you have a registered trademark, this prevents any other individual or business from using your intellectual property for their own financial benefit. If you haven’t done this yet stop everything and do it now! Use a service like tma.eu to make the whole process as smooth and straightforward as possible.
After you have undertaken these steps, everything else will come back to you! Good brand management means not being afraid to refresh your brand periodically and to make it feel new. It’s no coincidence that the same steps you use to refresh a brand are the ones you use when you are starting it. The crucial difference is that, as you approach the above tasks, you should have an in-depth knowledge of what your brand is and what it represents. Make sure that you keep these in mind as you begin the process of reinvigorating a flagging brand.
