• 6 Ways To Refresh Your Brand And Maintain An Identity Role
• 6 Ways To Refresh Your Brand And Maintain An Identity As A
• 6 Ways To Refresh Your Brand And Maintain An Identity Statement
• 6 Ways To Refresh Your Brand And Maintain An Identity Agent
• 6 Ways To Refresh Your Brand And Maintain An Identity Statement

Now updated from 8 to 10 ways to increase your brand awareness, so you’re all set for an even more successful year!

So you want to know how to increase brand awareness? Well, you’re in the right place, especially if you’re working with a limited budget, but need to cut through the noise and stand above your competitors.

This works in many ways: If customers enjoy your brand identity, they’ll want to befriend your personality, and will feel more loyal towards your company. Customers may also buy into the culture around your brand, wanting to make themselves more like the personality you create by associating more often with your products. Look at Chanel perfume. May 10, 2015 10 top tips for establishing and maintaining a successful brand identity 1. Be very clear on the organisation’s goals, ambitions and capabilities. Treat your brand identity like a living.

Besides traditional advertising, what can you do to help put your brand name on everybody’s lips? We’ve compiled ten ideas to get people talking (plus, there are lots more peer-generated ideas for increasing brand awareness over on events industry forum EventTribe).

1. Take to social media

Sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat and Whatsapp offer companies a great free-of-charge platform to promote themselves, build their brand and their audience.

Finding the time to feed your profiles and blog can be a challenge but if you’re going to do it you need to be active, which means posting and interacting several times a day. But what to say? Expertise in a particular area can make for a large following. Stay relevant and on-topic and you will garner a valuable and engaged audience.

Don’t forget you need to talk to others to grow your following, which means responding to comments on your social media pages in a timely manner and engaging followers in conversation. No time at all? Check out these 10 tools for automating your social media.

According to research carried out by Hootsuite in December, Starbucks is the best performing brand on social media, closely followed by Chanel, Friskies, and Urban Outfitters. So be sure to check out their activity for inspiration. Then read our guide to mastering social media for tips on how to become social champions too.

6 Ways To Refresh Your Brand And Maintain An Identity Role

2. Hold an event

Whatever type of business you’re in, holding a live event is a great way to get the attention of clients and prospects. This could be a purely social summer barbecue or Christmas party or structured around business development such as the launch of a new product or promotion. You could even run a workshop to share your professional expertise.

Holding a live event gives you valuable ‘face time’ with potential customers and offers the opportunity for them to experience the look, feel and personality of your brand. You can always adopt a theme to add interest, such as a 1920s cocktail evening or a vintage tea party. Consider raising funds for charity at your event – it’s the perfect way to give back as you get.

3. Launch a PR campaign

Gaining press coverage is essentially like getting free advertising. But it’s actually better than that because editorial has more credibility and is more likely to convince potential new customers to check you out. The hard part is coming up with a newsworthy angle, and this will depend on whether you’re targeting local or national media, print, TV or radio.

Perhaps you have a great personal story to tell about why you started your business, maybe you’ve launched a unique new product or have identified an interesting sales trend? Conducting surveys in your specialist field and publishing the results can offer a credible line for journalists or why not try a spot of responsive PR, looking out for relevant journalist requests you can respond to?

Another top tip is to search Twitter for opportunities using the following hashtags: #pressrequest or #journorequest.

4. Exhibit yourself

Exhibiting can be a highly effective way to showcase your brand to hundreds of people in your target market. However, it can be expensive, so you’ll need to prepare carefully to ensure you realise the best return on investment. It’s not always a case of ‘build it and they will come’, you need to go further to attract people to your stand – and keep them there long enough to discover your brand and absorb your message.

Organising a competition or giveaway is a great way to attract attention. Who doesn’t like getting something for nothing? Quirky or useful branded gifts such novelty items that can be passed on to the kids, or food and drink, will always be well received. A promotional tote bag is another good idea – turning your recipients into walking billboards. If you’re not sure where to start, check out this advice on how to do brand activation at events.

5. Join forces with another business

There’s power in numbers – if you can identify other businesses targeting the same kind of customer like you, but not directly competing there’s an opportunity to join forces for mutual benefit.

For example if you’re a florist you can offer an exclusive discount for customers of the local bridal shop. For you, it’s a great way to attract new customers. For the established business it’s a way to reward their customers at no expense and with virtually no effort.

6. Sponsor something

Sponsorship of an event or product is another proven way to reach a target audience and increase brand awareness. Sponsoring an event can entitle your company to exclusive face-to-face time with attendees as well as overt branding opportunities.

But choose wisely – what you choose to sponsor should be relevant to your target market and ‘on message’. Be sure to steer clear of any PR disasters – Nestlé’s sponsorship of a health conference in 2014 led to the event being canceled after senior NHS figures urged a boycott over the food and beverage company’s promotion of infant formula in the developing world.

To help you make the right sponsorship choice visit Sponsormonster, a free to use service which matches potential corporate sponsors with sponsorship opportunities that meet their marketing criteria.

7. Organise an experiential stunt

For companies targeting consumers, there’s no better way to raise brand awareness than getting out on the street and engaging with potential customers.

Experiential campaigns can work for both B2B and B2C companies too.

From a pop-up on the street to hiring performance artists, organising a flash mob to engaging people with VR headsets, the only limit is your imagination. And if you’re not sure where to start, why not check out these 23 examples.

8. Invest in promotional merchandise

Small corporate gifts are a great way to thank customers for their business and reinforce your brand at the same time. You can provide branded pens for pennies and it will put your company name and contact details at your customers’ fingertips for months to come.

But don’t scrimp too much, cheap and cheerful can be a false economy. There’s no point giving a really cheap pen which is going to run out of ink really quickly – not only will your brand exposure be short-lived, giving low-quality items reflects badly on your company.

The more creative you can be with your gifts the better. Something unusual or personalised will delight the recipient and may lead to them posting about the gift on social media, earning your brand extra glory.

9. Tap into the power of video

Video marketing has continued to rise in popularity, with Facebook Live video now reportedly at 8 billion daily views, outstripping even YouTube’s massive 5 billion views per day.

With stats like that, the chances are your target audience is at least occasionally watching videos online, and with social networks competing for video views, they’re giving more prominence to video as a format on their platforms.

This means if you can great video content for your brand, there’s a good chance that a) you’ll have an audience that wants to watch it and b) the social networks will be happier to show it to their users.

10. Try content marketing

The idea of content marketing has been around for a number of years now, but there are still large numbers of businesses who haven’t jumped onto the trend yet. The benefits are numerous, from increasing organic search traffic, to generating more leads, to shortening the sales cycle, to becoming a thought leader in your industry.

If you’re looking to build brand awareness, then blogging regularly could be a tactic that works as well for you as it has for thousands of other businesses who are already actively content marketing.

In conclusion

These are just 10 ways to build your brand awareness! With a little imagination and an understanding of your customer, the sky (and your budget) is the limit when it comes to getting in front of your target audience this year.

6 Ways To Refresh Your Brand And Maintain An Identity As A

For 56 years, Häagen-Dazs had a consistent message: high-quality, old-fashioned ice cream for sale. But that's changed: Thanks largely to millennials, the company recently refreshed its brand with a revised logo, more vibrant packaging, new flavors and a global advertising campaign.

Related: 9 Cool Ways You Can Uses a lesson to be learned here: To stay competitive, any entrepreneur or leader has to consider the many challenges of a constantly evolving business landscape, including his or her company's and consumer trends.

If you wait to consider how your audiences have changed and will continue to , you'll risk far more than will your competitors already investing in brand analysis and audience outreach.

Expanding your tent

Business leaders may be aware of the changing marketplace, but that doesn't mean they're eager to change. For many companies, a major brand overhaul often meets with internal resistance; and to be fair, such an overhaul is not always the right answer. For some companies, it's better to maintain a consistent brand message amidst rapid change. It's the discovery that's important, the self-assessment, the long view.

Because we live in an experience-based , whether you're designing your intentionally or not doesn't matter: You're still delivering one. Messaging plays a major role in reinforcing or diluting that experience. Here are four steps you can take to help your business appeal to new demographics.

1. Develop robust personas.

Every landing page, blog post or article you put out there should align with a distinct persona to effectively connect with a desired . A CEO, a parent and a college student all require different messaging to inspire a response.

A seemingly obvious but often overlooked way to gain a better understanding of your current or potential customers' needs is to ask them directly. Surveys can be effective, but personal, one-on-one interviews are better, even if you can only conduct a handful. Offer a small incentive to gather eager participants, and ask questions designed to reveal what motivates them and why they chose your product or service.

At Pharos, we need to shift our messaging to highlight the parts of our business that are relevant to each specific persona we target. We use three aspects of our to position ourselves in a way that aligns with what our audience cares about most. Print management solutions lower expenses (business owners love that), improve security (CIOs and IT directors love that) and boost sustainability (which should resonate with everyone). All three messages mutually reinforce one other and are consistent across experiences.

For example, we worked with one university's leadership who wanted to reduce and manage back-office printing costs. To help get employees on board with secure print workflows, its leaders promoted the sustainability aspect of print management's value proposition and subsequently were able to save $3,000 a month while significantly reducing the university's carbon footprint.

2. Ask what your CRM data is trying to tell you.

If your data collection process includes a wide range of questions to qualify leads, you should be able to find customer information such as company type and size, contact job titles and the types of content most often consumed.

Your team should then be able to help translate those numbers into concrete characteristics and create a more complete understanding of your customers. As you find common trends, you can combine those tendencies into a general view of each customer type, and use it to fill out your personas. This will help diversify your buyer personas and, consequently, your brand's ability to connect with an expanding range of consumers.

Related: After Realizing Customers Didn't Share Her Vision, an Entrepreneur Makes a Big Change -- And Sales Grew More Than $3 Million

Evaluating your data can also help you recognize surprising audiences that like your brand. When the software company Hatchbuck was launched, its founders tried to reach as many segments as possible, from salespeople to business owners, to pitch its platform.

To zero in on its ideal customer, Hatchbuck gathered survey responses, crunched the numbers and conducted customer interviews, seeking to define its buyers' behaviors and beliefs. The company was surprised to learn that, even though it had been attracting larger companies looking for an affordable software with lots of features, smaller companies were its biggest supporters. Hatchbuck decided to focus its efforts on these small business owners -- its ideal customer. Discoveries like this can be enlightening and critical to success.

3. Showcase how your brand delivers what people want.

6 Ways To Refresh Your Brand And Maintain An Identity Statement

Proving your product's relevance to a different demographic doesn't mean abandoning the things that make it valuable to current buyers. It means adjusting your messaging to highlight the benefits that are more aligned with the new audience.

For example, Vera Bradley bags and luggage have been a popular choice for baby boomer women since the 1980s. When the brand decided to expand its target audience and appeal to younger women, it tapped into social media to gain insights into the demographic and observed a trend of complaints among millennials about the shortcomings of smartphone battery life and the annoyance of awkward battery cases.

So Vera Bradley created a bag with a built-in smartphone charger. This helped to improve its offerings and reach a new audience without introducing change that might alienate its faithful, long-time customers.

4. Leverage the granularity of marketing automation.

6 Ways To Refresh Your Brand And Maintain An Identity Agent

Many businesses see demographics as an aggregate average, but this perspective can destroy any chance of recognizing the need to change. You don't target youth through the same channels used to reach company decision-makers.

Approaching demographics using too broad of a viewpoint ignores the micro-targeting capability afforded by many marketing-automation systems today. Granular, personalized messaging is becoming the norm, not the exception.

6 Ways To Refresh Your Brand And Maintain An Identity Statement

To reach younger demographics with precision, take advantage of automation tools such as , Marketo or Hatchbuck, proven technologies that can drastically improve the reach of your ads and provide you with valuable analytics on your consumers.

These automation technologies have a long track record of producing a positive return on your investment. They can also help to improve various aspects of your digital marketing strategy. According to research by Regalix, 64 percent of marketers surveyed said they saw benefits within six months by using automation software.

Related: Content as a Service Is the Next Evolution for Marketing

The millennials in today's workforce will be the decision-makers of tomorrow -- and I mean tomorrow, not five years from now. Organizations that fail to recognize this shift, or delay the process of discovering how best to change along with new demographic opportunities, can end up fueling internal resistance to such change and, ultimately, lose their opportunity to stay relevant.

Don't be one of them.