When it comes to building brand awareness, there’s one simple phrase you need to keep top of mind: repetition is recognition.
This brand awareness strategy may seem simple enough, but the reality is that most personal brands struggle with consistency in their marketing. Are they afraid of commitment or do they lack confidence in their own brand and marketing?
Not only does this growth strategy lead to more brand awareness but it will also improve the impression your audience has of your brand, leading to more sales for your business.
Keep reading and I’ll tell you everything you need to know to increase brand awareness and grow your business as a personal brand.
WHAT’S BRAND RECOGNITION
Before your brand can be known, people need to be able to recognize your brand. In other words, brand awareness comes after brand recognition.
Recognition is akin to memorability and the best way to increase brand recognition is to embrace simplicity. The simpler something is, the easier it is for us to remember. It’s just how our brains work. And let’s face it—our brains are working overtime.
So here's how you throw your future clients a lifeline as they get bombarded by endless forms of marketing.
It starts with visual consistency. Visual consistency means committing to your brand identity. To increase brand recognition, you need to keep using the same brand colours, brand fonts, and logos. No exceptions. This makes it EASY for your next big client to recognize your brand in a matter of seconds. This consistency leads to awareness and, eventually, trust.
Now this idea of embracing simplicity isn’t just reserved for your brand identity. The same is true for your brand messaging. When you keep the messaging around your brand simple, concise, and consistent, you increase memorability around how your clients benefit from hiring you.
THE UNEXPECTED BENEFIT OF BRAND RECOGNITION AND MEMORABILITY
A recent study by Siegel+Gale revealed that brand recognition and memorability often lead to an increase in positive attributes that consumers will associate with that brand. Yup! You read that right: Memorability improves audience perception.
Their study, which surveyed 3000 people across the U.S. and U.K., concluded that “consumers are more likely to ascribe a logo they recognize with positive attributes, namely Trusted, Respected, Reliable and Premium.”
This means that simply by committing to brand consistency as a strategy for building recognition, you have the opportunity to positively shift how your brand is perceived by your audience.
THE DEFINITION OF BRAND AWARENESS
There’s a small but important difference between brand awareness and brand recognition. Brand awareness is less about your audience’s ability to recognize your brand and more about their ability to recall specific details about your business.
We may recognize a logo and have no idea who or what that logo represents. But when we are brand aware, we see that logo and can identify specifics about that business.
"by committing to brand consistency as a strategy for building recognition, you have the opportunity to positively shift how your brand is perceived by your audience."
THE BRAND AWARENESS STRATEGY FOR PERSONAL BRANDS ON SOCIAL MEDIA
Consumers want to work with or buy from real humans, not anonymous brands. Personal brands rejoice!
The rise of personal brands is a direct result of solopreneurship. Oh hey, I’m also a solopreneur and personal brand. Essentially, if you are the face of your brand, then you are a personal brand.
Social media is our saving grace as personal brands. It’s the best free marketing tool that allows you to personally connect and build trust with your future clients. In order to increase brand awareness around your personal brand, your business needs CPR:
• clarity
• positioning
• repetition
1. CLARITY
The number one step to this brand awareness strategy is to have clarity around your business. Think of branding as shaping your reputation. If you don’t have clarity around what you're trying to be known for as a business, your personal brand on social media will struggle with marketing.
Decide what you want your business to be known for and how your purpose as a brand directly impacts who your ideal clients are trying to become or how they're trying to feel. This means looking to the grand vision for your business, what your mission is, and how you expect your business to evolve over time.
The clarity you gain around your goals, mission, and vision as a business, will serve as your north star. All of your content, your website copy, and your brand experience should be focused on supporting this central brand narrative to shape your reputation.
But your personal brand messaging still needs more to be effective.
2. POSITIONING
Brand positioning is how your audience thinks of you—or positions you—in relation to the competition. This means you need to know how you’re different and how to articulate that through your brand messaging.
Remember, you don’t just want to build brand recognition, you want to build brand awareness, which means your audience knows exactly who you are and what you do.
The key to success here is to work towards having a simple brand message that is not just easy to remember, but worth remembering.
This takes some time to achieve and may be in your best interest to work with a brand copywriter or brand strategist.
Your goal here is to find that connective tissue—those themes in your business—that can be translated into concise brand messaging. You want to identify keywords and develop cohesive language that will inform your offers, brand promise, social media bios, and social media content marketing.
3. REPETITION
This is where the magic happens.
When you’ve successfully positioned your personal brand, you want to keep speaking to these themes in all of your content, on your website, and in everything you do. Remember, repetition is recognition.
You’ll shape your reputation as a leader in your field when your consistently speaking to the same key areas. Those things will become synonymous with your personal brand and help grow your business.
WHAT NOT TO DO AS A PERSONAL BRAND TO INCREASE BRAND AWARENESS
Here’s what most solopreneurs and personal brands are doing wrong. They can’t commit. We get impatient in business and the reality is sales and marketing is a long-game.
Marketing experts say we'll see a brand, ad, product, etc. 7-8 times before it sticks in our minds. Which means we have to give our future clients some time to work their way through their conversion journey.
If you don’t see results right away, DON’T give up and start over. When you're quick to change your brand identity or pivot marketing tactics because you aren't seeing results fast enough, you'll lose any brand awareness that was starting to form in the mind of a possible client.
For your personal brand strategy to succeed you need to commit to your cause, your brand messaging, and your brand identity. Your audience needs time to grow familiar and build trust. If you’re not confident about your marketing or your branding, you’ll never be able to stick with them long enough for your clients to buy in.
When building brand awareness as a personal brand, you need to commit to your strategy with confidence. Memorable marketing that leads to more sales is the result of having a simplified brand strategy. Clarity, positioning and repetition are all the outcomes of having a personal brand strategy supporting your growth.
The branding journey is like therapy for your business. By having someone beyond your business ask you the questions you didn't think to ask yourself, you'll be amazed at the opportunities that arise that will lead to more growth in your business.
Simplified strategy and memorable design is how I help my clients earn more eyes on their marketing so that their next big client will have a chance to connect with their message, build that trust, and feel 100% confident that they’re the best personal brand to hire. If you want to know what that looks like for your personal brand, join me for a free Brand Realignment Call and learn how a tailored brand strategy can do all that and more!
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Jenny Henderson is a brand strategist and business mentor. She collaborates with service-based solopreneurs to design memorable brands that allow them to make a living doing what they love. Since 2020, her branding studio has become a place where small business owners come to learn to think like a brand.