This article originally appeared on December 14th, 2017 in Forbes. 

Eight Creative Strategies To Build Brand Attention

No matter how great your company is, or how good the services and products it offers are, you won’t get any sales if people don’t know about it. Building a solid brand and boosting brand awareness are possibly the most important things you will have to do as a business owner if you want to get out of obscurity and capture people’s attention.

Raising brand awareness and building a strong and loyal customer base requires not only a wide range of marketing and communications strategies, but above all, creativity and the courage to do things differently.

Whether it’s by offering unusual and extraordinary experiences or by focusing on your audience’s pain points and partnering with others to get your mission across, here are several creative ways you can boost your brand’s visibility, according to nine members from Forbes Communications Council:

1. Tailor Your Messages To Audiences’ Pain Points

As a new brand, it’s critical for our company to build both an awareness of our brand and an understanding of our unique value proposition with our target audiences: in-market car buyers, car dealerships and automotive lenders. While the presentation of our brand must be consistent to all stakeholders, we’ve found great success in tailoring the specific messaging to align with the key pain points we are trying to solve for each of these three groups, making the value we offer tangible for them. – Serge Vartanov, AutoGravity

2. Offer Exceptional Experiences

A key focus is creating exceptional experiences for our clients and friends in the marketplace, where they can develop relationships with peers, share knowledge and establish meaningful connections. As a result, companies view our organization as the catalyst behind the network that continuously empowers them to add value. – Andrew Moses, MorganFranklin Consulting

3. Bring Your Customers’ Stories To The Forefront

Our brand is all about our community. Our innovative customers are the heroes. It’s great in theory, but when marketers are actually creating content, things always tend to drift from talking about them, to talking about ourselves. So I often ask my team to rewrite copy or reformat content to completely remove any mention of us. It’s a great storytelling exercise. – Brandon Ortiz, Salesforce.org

4. Publish A Relevant E-Book

Recently, we published an e-book that combined some of our best and most popular blog posts and bylines. The individual pieces came together to make a wonderfully coherent piece. It is now one of our most popular assets, and represents our brand beautifully. – Anshu Agarwal, Cedexis

5. Geo-Target Customers With Social Ads

Geo-targeting trade show attendees with social media advertisements is a great way to get your brand in front of target customers. You can easily limit your parameters to a highly relevant audience without breaking the bank. – Ryan Oistacher, 5nine

6. Educate Your Audience

Effective branding can be boiled down to two words: Help first. Help your audience learn. Give them resources and information that add value to their lives. Then do it again. The more you help them, the more they’ll see you as a trusted, valuable source of information — and the stronger your brand will be in their eyes. – Bill Sheridan, Maryland Association of CPAs

 7. Get Caught Doing Good

We have always believed in the power of “getting caught doing good.” This is shorthand for saying that transparency, authenticity and integrity have been our best strategies in building a valuable brand that can withstand lots of stress, whether internal or external. – Hans Eisenbeis, CROPP Cooperative / Organic Valley

8. Focus On Emerging Technologies

We created custom experiences that leveraged emerging technologies, like immersive virtual reality, to showcase how current business processes can be improved by the use of these technologies. This was successful because it positioned our brand as a thought leader versus just another vendor trying to sell them something. – Patrick Niersbach, InContext Solutions


About MorganFranklin Consulting

MorganFranklin Consulting (www.morganfranklin.com) is a global management and technology consulting firm that works with leading businesses and government.  The firm helps organizations solve their most pressing challenges and address critical finance, technology, and business objectives. MorganFranklin is headquartered in the Washington D.C. area with regional offices in Atlanta and San Francisco, and supports clients across the globe.

MorganFranklin Consulting is the brand name referring to the global organization of MorganFranklin, Inc. and its subsidiary MorganFranklin Consulting, LLC.