We live in a highly visual world, constantly exposed to different brands, whether it be on billboard ads, tv commercials or in our Instagram feed. Unless you remove yourself from civilisation, you can’t help but be exposed to these brands.

So the question is: How can you make your brand stand out?

Here are our top 5 tips to help you get your new business noticed:

1 – Know your brand

The first and most important way to make sure that your potential customers and clients understand your brand is to make sure you know it yourself. Know what your brand stands for, what your vision is and what makes your business unique.

2 – Know your audience

A simple way to look at this is to create a customer avatar. This is a fictitious person who would be your ideal customer. Think about their demographics: age, gender, profession, location, income etc. but also their psychographics: personality, values, interests, attitude etc. For example our business may be online step-by-step easy recipe tutorials and this may our client avatar (bear in mind I am keeping this very brief, I encourage you to take your time and come up with as much information and detail as possible then refine it):

Sue
Demographics: 43 years old, female, real-estate agent, Western Sydney, 80k p/y
Psychographics: Friendly, social, values time with the family, loves cooking and entertaining, time poor

From this avatar you can see that the demographic information is useful, but not nearly as much as the psychographic information. If we take some of the key psychographics we can see that Sue ‘loves cooking and entertaining’ but is ‘time-poor’ this shows us that in order to target Sue, one of the things we should emphasise is the fact that our recipe tutorials are a quick and easy way to cook for family and friends.

3 – Don’t try to be the best at everything

People will come to your business because it is solving a problem for them. You need to understand your ‘core value proposition’ and stick to that. If you try to advertise that your business is good at 20 different things, you are no longer viewed as an expert in your field, or a product that solves a unique problem. Your business will become lost in the crowd. Know what your business does best and channel that into your branding.

4 – Translate points 1-3 into your visual branding

You want people to be able to look at your brand and understand what it is all about.  You want them to be drawn to your brand and trust your brand. This is where working with a designer or agency specialised in branding will be of great value. They will take your brand vision, values and offerings, and turn It into a brand that resonates with your target audience. Of-course you can head online and find a basic logo for a few bucks. This approach however this will not give you a brand that is unique to your business or emulates your brand vision and values, and will definitely not help you stand out! (You can find out more about why a brand is more than a logo here)

5 – Understand that your brand is what your consumers perceive it to be

You can try as hard as you like to tell people what your brand is, but if they don’t see it or feel it they will not believe it, (and they definitely won’t buy it!) Luckily we can help control the narrative and guide consumers perceptions. This ties back in to point 4, making sure that your visual brand communicates your brand vision, values and offerings and speaks to your target audience.

If you are launching a new business or trying to get your existing business noticed, these 5 tips should help you get started. If have any questions or would like to talk about developing your brand feel free to send us an email at welcome@thedesignerbranding.com.au for a free branding consultation!