Regardless of the size of your business, creating a stand out brand means your business becomes immediately recognizable. For most companies, that begins with promoting brand awareness. Each year, companies spend millions on creating brand awareness, with industry giants such as Omega and Amazon tapping into the power of product placement and spending 42 percent of their ad spend in this area.

Building a strong, streamlined brand is essential to creating a brand that is recognised, trusted and talked about – stimulating an ongoing marketing campaign of its own. To do this, a business must focus on building its brand across the board instead of narrowing it down to one channel. Having an integrated approach to brand awareness means promoting brand recognition on three of the most important channels today: television, social media and print.

Create A Consistent Image on Paper to Match in Person and Online

Despite the surge in digital marketing, print continues to hold its ground. According to data accessed from RAMetrics, branding is 107 percent stronger in print than it is in digital advertising. Ad recall is also 2.6 times higher for print ads than it is in digital news brands, which means it is the ideal place to build a stand out brand. Start with creating a unique brand name and colour scheme, along with designing a corporate logo for your print ads. According to NameStormers, your brand name should incorporate your target audience and the brand’s objective. This should be replicated across all marketing and communication channels, and in store if applicable. This creates a uniform brand that translates across all channels and boosts recognition across different markets.

iPad in Modern Family S04E08 (2012, ABC, screen capture)

Build A Strong Social Media Presence with Visuals and Themes

A key aspect of choosing your marketing and brand building channel is keeping in mind where it can create the largest impact. In today’s world, that is most likely to be social media. Read more about this on digitalspotlight.com.

Social media marketing channels lead the way for consumer inspiration, with 37 percent of them finding their inspiration here rather than the individual retailer and price comparison websites. To begin building brand awareness on social media, you will need a strong social media strategy that translates your business goals into a detailed outline of the image you wish to project on your chosen social platform. This means choosing several aspects for your account: tone of communication, frequency, content, a theme for your account, including a distinctive colour palette, photography style and post structure.

Speaking of photography, strong visuals can also help your brand stand out on social media, particularly photo sharing ones such as Instagram and Facebook. You’ll want to work with a skilled artistic and editing team to produce high-quality graphic images that are then fashioned to fit your theme. Finally, be sure to set up a posting schedule and e.g. implement recurring posts such as Customer Photo of The Week or Product of The Week.

iPhone in This Means War (2012, 20th Century Fox, screen capture)

This builds a constant presence and a positive association between posts and your brand. For some brands one viable option is to link them to a weekly competition, since 91 percent of posts with 1000 likes or comments are related to a contest, according to data from Tailwind.

Create A Strategic Product Placement in Television and Movie Screenings

In Nielsen’s Product Placement Valuation Study, 57.5 percent of viewers recognised a brand when viewing a product placement combined with a commercial, compared to the 47 percent of them that were just shown a commercial for the brand.

Other studies (and several posts on Brands&Films) since then have repeatedly shown the positive impact that product placement can have on brand recognition. However, it does not just help to increase awareness: it was also shown that 60 percent of views felt more positive about a brand they recognised in a placement. The trick behind it is to incorporate your product in such a discreet way that viewers find it difficult to identify it as advertising or feel forced like Audi’s placement in the Iron Man’s trilogy.

Audi R8 in Iron Man 2 (2010, Marvel Studios, screen capture)

Here’s a brief “how to start with product placement”: to begin with, identify popular shows, movies and viewing times for your target market. Choosing a show or movie that has a strong following can guarantee you will have the viewers’ attention, and so will your brand. From this list, you will be able to narrow down natural placement options for your product, whether paid or organic. Organic placements come with less control and a smaller price tag, compared to paid placements negotiated directly with the network.

Furthermore, aim to integrate your placement into other marketing channels, such as your social media account, creating an omnichannel approach. Only by creating a connected brand experience can you boost your brand recognition power in such a highly competitive world.

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