Branding is crucial for any business and this is just as important when your business operates largely online. The objective of any brand is to tie together all your various products and services under one umbrella, such that your customers and clients associate your logo with a certain quality and a certain experience. It’s via a recognizable brand that you can turn a customer into a lifelong fan of your business and thereby gain repeat custom from them. At the same time, it’s through a recognizable brand that you will be able to create more marketing opportunities and drive more traffic to your site.

To do all this though, it is not enough to simply have a brand. Rather, you need to know how to build the prominence of your brand to increase awareness and to increase the positive emotion attached to it. Read on for five effective ways to do this and to improve your recognition and authority.

Improve Your Logo

Perhaps you already have an amazing logo that you’re happy with. Then again though, if you designed your logo years ago, or if it just isn’t as instantly memorable or as simple and elegant as the competition, you might want to consider upgrading it or redesigning it.

One way to do this is by hiring a company like ColorWhistle. We offer affordable logo design and will craft something for you that is highly professional and memorable.

A few pointers though if you decide to go it alone. Firstly, make sure that you are avoiding clichés and don’t have any planets, ticks, speech bubbles or lightbulbs. These have all been overdone and will make your site seem contrived.

Keep your design simple and ensure that it will be versatile to work in lots of different circumstances. Finally, ensure that you have designed your logo in vector software using a program like Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw. These programs result in images that have much higher definition, that are much easier to customer and which you can shrink or enlarge with no loss of quality.

Change Your Web Design

If it isn’t already, then you should strongly consider integrating your logo design only from top logo design company into your web design. This means that your logo’s colors should be placed throughout your website, that you should include images that recall the design of the logo and generally that any part of your site should make it obvious that the page belongs to your company.

This is important because it means that even when someone scrolls straight down and never reads the name of the website they’re on, they’ll still be more likely to recognize your logo in subsequent marketing or returns to your site.

Add a Personal Touch

Some of the biggest brands on the web are the names of individuals. People like Pat Flynn, Steve Pavlina, Tim Ferriss, Mike Chung and Elliot Hulse are practically household names and are raking in a lot of money for their site. Of course they also have separate business/website names but the fact that they’re so closely linked to their brands personally makes them much more relatable and much more memorable.

If you run a very professional B2B company, then featuring yourself front and center may not be appropriate. Even in a corporate setting though, this can be effective – just look at Richard Branson or Steve Jobs!

It takes guts to put yourself out there, but you may just find that doing so makes it that much easier to build trust in your brand and to bring more people back to your site.

Be Everywhere

To strengthen your brand, you need to make sure that you take advantage of every opportunity to promote yourself through social media and other means. That means having a presence on Twitter, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on YouTube and everywhere else. And on all these sites you should have the same logo, the same username and the same ‘tone’ and message. This way, you create multiple inroads for people to discover you and you consistently reinforce your brand each time someone uses a different social media account.

Take a look at ColorWhistle’s Twitter account for instance to see how we have taken full advantage of the cover image and profile picture to reinforce the brand and the logo!

Print Everywhere!

And finally, make sure you make full use of your logo. It shouldn’t just be on your website: it should be on your business cards, on your invoices, on your newsletters and in your office. You can even look into giving away/selling corporate gifts such as mugs, lanyards, caps and t-shirts with your logo printed on them! And if you create a video promoting your company, make sure that everyone featured in it is drinking out of one of your branded mugs!