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Making your Brand Visible

Creating a Recognizable Local Brand

Julie Hartwell

October 03, 2013

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Getting your brand off the ground can be difficult for a small business. It takes a lot of initial effort and investment to make people notice, especially if the goal is not to come across to the public as an annoying spammer.

Nobody likes seeing your logo splattered everywhere pounding at their senses with flashing lights and those wavy inflatable sock people. Don’t let that be you. The best way to promote your brand is to associate it with regular people that your potential customers know. So how do you do that?

The first thing you need is an appealing logo. Make it something that is either aesthetically appealing, funny, or both. The tricky part here is to keep it very simple.

Let’s assume for a minute, that you just started a business selling running shoes and exercise apparel. A quick and relatively easy way to get significant exposure would be to come up with a catchy, running related logo, and print a few thousand custom printed t-shirts, and hand them out at the finish line at the local High School Cross Country races. Road Races and collegiate races often attract people from farther away, so choosing high school will get you plugged into the heart of your local customer base, which is likely to be composed of those kids, their families, or their friends. Suddenly every potential customer of yours will recognize your sign when they drive by it.

If you sell organic produce, it might be a good idea to do a similar thing selling mugs of hot cocoa at your local farmer’s market, mugs (with your logo) gratis.

When your brand is associated with non-disposable, quality items, it makes your brand seem higher quality. Also, people will have them for a longer time, so your investment will keep on giving your brand exposure in the long term.

Make a useful website. Your website should not be primarily about creating a sales platform. It will not work effectively as a sales platform unless it is first and foremost about giving your brand exposure.

To do this, you need to have useful or interesting information and data that people will come to look at regularly and send tell their friends about. In the exercise apparel store, this would be a local event calendar that lists all local road races, has useful links to nearby yoga classes, and examples of good training programs, or maybe even software to track your weekly exercise and progress, whatever it takes to get people used to associating that part of their life with your brand.

Any niche has opportunities like this. Our organic grocery store could include a large recipe blog on their website, or useful resource pages listing the nutrition facts of locally grown vegetables, and a gun store could include maps showing the migration patterns of local birds.

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