10 ideas to increase brand awareness

Creating brand awareness is something that every company needs to do. With increased competition due to the Internet, letting people remember your company name is becoming more difficult. As designers and developers, we should think of ways to help our clients or companies to increase their brand recognition through a better design, good SEO practices,  product feature or even a memorable interface. Presented below are ten ideas that I have come up with personally. If you have more ways that you think are useful to increasing brand awareness, I would love to hear from you in the comments section.

#1: Customized mugs as free corporate gifts

Customized mugs are a useful corporate gift that most will use daily for their coffee. If you have a memorable design that is funny or is able to start conversations, it will definitely help to increase brand awareness for the company. If you think this is a cool ideas, all you need is a great mug design and a mug producing company such as like BrandMe which helps to produce high quality customized mugs.

 #2: Humor pics/video of the week

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If you know how to do humor, try creating a youtube or facebook channel whereby you can create your humor videos or images and share them. For those that are really funny, they will probably go viral, which can win you lots of brand awareness, especially if you do so consistently.

#3: Ranking well in search engines

Many of you probably don’t think about this but a brand name that keeps on showing up in all related search of an industry tends to get remembered by the searcher.  This means if you do your SEO well, you are probably creating an authority brand image for those users who search frequently in your industry.

#4: Have a referral programme

A referral programme is a great way to reward existing customers as well as motivate them to refer your brand to others.  However, beware that a successful referral programme is hard to pull off especially if you are not selling a software product. Some good examples of companies doing successfully referral are DropBox, Amazon etc.

#5:  Sponsor a monthly column in a relevant blog

Guest posting is actually a good tactic for increasing your brand awareness. However most companies and agencies get this wrong. They used guest posting mainly for getting backlinks rather than using it as a platform to establish a voice with the readers of the blog. To do this, it is actually important for the company to published regularly on the sponsored blog, and not just be contended with 1 or 2 articles per year.

#6: Giving free design resources

An easy thing designers can help to increase brand awareness is to help the company design some digital stuff such as photos, backgrounds, wallpapers etc that the company can give away.  GQ Magazine has been doing this to help increase their brand awareness. We can also apply this other industries. A car parts dealer for example can definitely give away some cool car wallpapers on its website.

#7:  Memorable business cards

Business cards are important. A unique or memorable business card design can help companies increase brand awareness. Cards that have unique shapes or great taglines tend to be recalled more easily so this is something designers can definitely help the company to do.

#8: Sponsor a local event

Most businesses are local in nature. If that is the case, sponsoring charity events at schools or churches can help raise the brand awareness of your business. In a community setting, people do remember the businesses that are generous and contribute back to the community.

#9: Help answer questions online

Be helpful. That is one sure way of increasing your brand awareness online. There are numerous Q&A sites, support forums etc that have people asking all sorts of questions. Find some that are relevant to your industry and start answering them. Don’t ever push your product. Just be useful and provide a signature link back to your website. If the answer you provide is good and doesn’t come across as self promotional, people will start to click on your signature line and find their way to your website. This ideas needs consistency to see greater results over time.

#10: Be a journalist for your industry

Most industries are buried in their own jargons and hidden agendas. If you want to stand out, become the role of journalist in your industry. Report the latest news, uncover some unknown facts, report on unhealthy industry practices etc. All these will guarantee that you can be found online and people will remember your brand.