How do I start promoting my brand or startup?
Building and promoting your business, as you know, begins with an idea. No doubt, the belief in that idea has taken some knocks so far and you’ve come up against some challenges: lack of office space, funding troubles, limited scope of growth, meagre investment, shortfall in resources, no decent coffee house nearby…
If you’ve been able to climb that mountain and overcome some, if not all, of those challenges in the short-term, then the next obstacle on your to-do list is promoting your idea. That’s the point when your product or brand really starts to become a reality, and solidify into a genuinely viable proposition.
If you want your business to be taken seriously though, it stands to reason that a couple of social posts a week and some hand-drawn posters around town aren’t going to make you the next hyped business on the block.
We’re going to discuss the various ways, hacks and techniques you can use to really give your brand the best chance it has of cutting through the noise and ensure your brand or business will be seen in the best light by the kind of people it’s really going to resonate with.
PEOPLE POWER
Before you start, you need to consider what you want your brand to achieve and who do you want to appeal to? No doubt you’ve thought about this already – clearly you’ve seen a gap in the market or defined a need that speaks to a particular section of society. But you also need to really drill down into the various types of people that you want to interact with.
One invaluable part of the process is to define who they are, what their day job is, where do they live, even down to the more granular details: what are their hobbies, what do they watch, what do they eat, who do they fancy (not essential, but fun all the same).
To really give some more personality to your audience, it doesn’t hurt to give these people names, ages and example job titles: Jane, 41, commercial director; Stefan, 28, web developer; Alex 19, Student, Oliver, 52, self-employed PT.
If you’re feeling creative, it might even help to visualise these people and draw them. It will also be useful for your team, and give them a quick way of identifying and referring to your target market. This helps because it also determines the content, assets and messaging that you direct towards them, and gets you thinking about them as real people. “OK, so how would Alex benefit from this? Where might Jane come into contact with us when going to work?”
It will also help to define your language and tone-of-voice. Clearly writing social posts or blogs for the kind of people who fly Business Class don’t want to be littered with memes or slang. It’s good to define what kind of language your audiences uses so you can connect on their level.
OFFLINE OR ONLINE?
Now you know who you want to target your brand at, how and where do you want to do it? There’s no doubt that social media is a relatively cheap avenue of promotion, and has been a real benefit for startups and small businesses looking to generate interest and engage with an audience.
However, it does come with varying degrees of success. Google ads and Facebook ads will certainly help, but there’s no hiding that social media platforms are something of an avaricious consumer of content, and is a woeful barometer of quality. In fact, some might say that the more outrageous or hostile a post, the more engagement it receives, such is the skewed emphasis of algorithms.
Regardless, there’s no ignoring it as a conduit to raising awareness and that means proper planning of your social posts.
It’s worth taking the time to build a content calendar in Excel or Google Slides, which maps out what you’re going to post. It’ll take some time to prepare the posts and accompanying pictures, but apps like Canva make it easy for even non-designers to whip up an interesting post.
Once you have a week’s worth of content ready to go, they’re something you can iterate on, and use software such as Hootsuite to schedule so nothing is ever too last minute and ill-conceived.
Offline advertising can be a good format to get creative with generating brand awareness. Making something interesting, funny or curious (or perhaps all three!) is a great way to capture people’s attention. It can also be a chance to make a poster or artefact that says something about your brand, and the kind of people or audience that you want to attract.
It doesn’t have to be laboured over, thought about too much or planned months in advance - sometimes the most effective brand campaigns are the simplest - Mac’s “Think different”, Nike’s “Just do it”, L’Oreal’s “Because You’re Worth It”. Humour also works. Just call to mind the Cadbury’s drumming gorilla, and you have something that is never far from being dropped into the conversation at some point.
Results and Reality
When bringing your business idea to life, it’s worth reminding yourself what your idea of success is. Website visits, sign ups, products sold, enquiries received… It can be all too easy to lose sight of what you wanted the business to achieve and how you can achieve this.
It’s worth constantly studying any of the data you can get from these ad or brand awareness campaigns that you run, as well as the metrics while it’s live. Nothing will help you understand your audience and your product as much as diving deep into what people engage and respond to, and what they don’t. Make a note of which posts or ad campaigns do well, and keep riffing on that. Success breeds success, and once you know what works, you’ll have the confidence to produce more assets that get you one step closer to achieving your goal.
Finally, once you have people reacting to your brand or product, now’s the time to start engaging with them. Reply to their comments on social posts in a way you’d like to be treated and that communicates the values of your brand. Sign up for events that are attended by the kind of people in your particular field, or by an audience you want to attract.
This way, you can give your brand a more human side, and, even more importantly, network. Establishing more connections, talking to people and taking those business cards helps your brand or product become “real”. The more people you meet, the more chances there are that they could help or interact with you. Not only that, but the more you attend, the more you’re promoting your brand and giving future customers, users or colleagues a tangible touch point and “face” – something they can remember and take away with them.
Another point to note is that these events are also a great chance to indulge in another form of promotion: merch. If there’s one thing people love, it’s free stuff, whether that’s badges, stickers, bottle openers, coasters, lighters, T-shirts or mouse mats. Your budget will dictate what you can give away at these events, but as a rule of thumb, the more outrageous, surprising and memorable the better.
Useful also goes a long way too but something unlikely and amusing will stick in people’s mind and have more of a chance of being squirreled away into their bag, left there for 2 weeks, only to be emptied out and act as a nudge or prompt of your company to remind them who you are. Then, if you were particularly charming, enthusiastic and interesting (basically, whatever is the opposite of forgettable and off-putting) at the event, then there’s a higher chance of them either looking up your company or brand, and putting you at the front of their mind once more.
And surely that is the whole idea of promotion.
1. Winkreative - Luxury, international hospitality, finance
This most cosmopolitan and inquisitive of agencies prides itself on its “can-do” attitude and diverse client list with a distinctly international flavour. This is also reflected in the people that it employs, who hail from Switzerland, Greece, Azerbaijan and Japan. As such, this global outlook is reflected in its work for a plethora of international clients such as Lufthansa, UBS, Corriere della Sera, the BBC and Hermès. Its reach is truly impressive and, as the publisher of upmarket publications such as MONOCLE and Konfect magazines, it has built a brand that redefines what a design agency can achieve in the 21st century.
2. Show - Luxury and fashion
Few agencies are more aligned with the world of luxury than Show. Founded by two former Esquire employees, this full service creative agency has repeatedly shown how storytelling can be interwoven into, and prove to be a complementary part of, the design process. This is mainly down to having a deep network of art directors, photographers, stylists as well as talented writers and editors to call upon, who can all help shape its polished and engaging output.
Balancing standalone magazine products for discerning City readers (Brummell), it also brings its creative talents to bear on a gamut of discerning brands, with everyone from Aquascutum and Armani to Vertu and Zenith receiving the benefits of its services.
3. Northstar - Automotive
Creating a stable of regular, high-profile clients is an agency’s dream – maintaining that level of professionalism, creativity and drive to retain them is even more difficult, but Northstar have achieved it consistently. Founded 18 years ago, it has repeatedly created engaging, full service content for Audi, Bentley, Goodwood and Porsche, as well as Watches of Switzerland, Mappin & Webb and The Children’s Society. With a skill for making the most glamorous and fastest of cars look, well, even more glamorous and faster, their reputation precedes them as one of the most in-demand and forward-thinking of agencies out there.
4. We Are Social - Sports, Entertainment and FMCG
Many companies employ agencies to either make their products look good, or create a stir around the actual brand. As the name suggests, We Are Social embraces the power and reach of today’s multi-channel platforms to broadcast the message of its clients in the most engaging way possible. From must-see social posts, compelling long-form and short-form videos and impactful stories, this agency leverages the 950-strong roster of employees it has around the world to drive socially led conversations for its clients. Working with some big names in sports and entertainment, it is often able to put a face to the content it produces. Whether that’s Paul Pogba or Roger Federer, it has the capacity to generate original and captivating content that unifies audiences and drives conversation with measurable results.
5. Twelfth Man - Sports
From the Billie Jean King Cup, the Champions League Journal and the Premier League, Twelfth Man give everything to the brands and clients it works with across a whole range of disciplines from editorial, print digital, advertising, brand strategy and even ecommerce. In a similar fashion to the sports it comes into contact with, there’s a tangible feeling of excitement and flair that is prevalent throughout the content it creates. Combining the experiential with the professional, Twelfth Man are a committed and dedicated team who are willing to think outside the box to stand out in a crowded sector, whichever medium it is working with.
6. McCann Health - Healthcare and Pharma
Trying to create the compelling out of what first appears to be a relatively unexciting industry means injecting this sector with some kind of vivacity and colour. Make no mistake, McCann Health is a behemoth of an advertising agency that regularly wins awards for its output and insight. It has done so by engaging with the humanity behind the clients and brands it represents. One only has to look at the humorous babblings of toddlers in Nestlé’s milk campaign, the gritty realism showing lives of polio vaccine health workers in Pakistan and the emotive End The Cover Up campaign for those suffering from Rosacea.
7. U Studio - Various
When you’re dealing with some of the biggest brands in the world (Unilever, Google, Microsoft, Nike) you need to be able to harness that special something, and produce an outcome that’s wholly original and new, and yet simple and utterly captivating. Oliver is especially adept at doing this, having created a dedicated in-house creative team, U Studio. Widely recognised as one of THE creative agencies to work for, it is constantly reevaluating and iterating its position as the boundary-pushing interlocutor between demanding brands and discerning customers.
8. Ogilvy & Mather - Various
It’s impossible to go into how many clients Ogilvy & Mather have created outstanding designs for, and how many awards it has won. Well I could do, but you haven’t got the time, and I don’t want to be hammering at the keyboard like a mid-encore Elton John during a particularly “pumped” 70s performance. Suffice to say that Rolls-Royce, HM Government, Post Office and er, TK Maxx all rely on its creative might. It really has a knack for putting the brand and an audience at the centre of its storytelling. Stand out campaigns recently have been Trebor’s “Give Me Strength” ad campaign and its simple yet effective “Courage is beautiful” campaign by Dove.
9. Phable - Tech
The Phable team encapsulates the new Caas-type agencies that have been springing up recently, and bills itself as producing “content marketing at scale for ambitious technology”. Dynamic, flexible, agile, yet super small (the team only has six people onboard), it has consistently proved itself to generate captivating long-form and short-form multichannel content for a range of global clients across the tech sphere, which include Next DC, American Battery, Microsoft and GitHub. In the progressive and ever-changing world of tech, this is one design agency that can offer innovative solutions in a timeless fashion.
10. Kerve - various
This fast-rising agency, based in Bath, was born out of the ashes of former agency Wildcard, and specialises in brave and off-the-wall ideas and solutions to really stand out and be noticed today. From its ‘Hole in the Wall” Krispy Kreme x Nutella concept, to the extreme fun of its “Holy Broadband Batman'' concept for Sky, which consisted of Batman and Joker Lego figures, these campaigns encapsulate the spirit of its ethos, which consist of on-screen and interactive experiences with humour and enthusiasm. With other clients such as Agent Provocateur, Meantime Brewing and Universal Music, let’s just say we’re all eyes, ears and tastebuds for whatever sensation-tingling project it has coming up next.
