Top Five Ways to Increase Sales and Brand Awareness

It is important for small businesses to increase sales and brand awareness to grow their customer base. Learn more in this recap of my presentation at the Greater Des Moines Partnership’s first Top Five series event.

Define Your Brand and Connect with Your Audience

The first step to increase brand awareness is to better understand how to effectively brand. It isn’t enough to simply create a brand, you want to effectively brand. In order to accomplish this, it is important for a target audience to emotionally connect with a brand. Love is the most powerful emotion that humans experience, so a brand can evoke to a target audience to love to love your brand, hate to love your brand or love to hate your brand.

This can be scary for many business owners because it forces them to make a decision about the perception that they want to project about their company. A byproduct of effective branding is obtaining more loyal customers, and loyal customers make it much easier to grow a business. 

This is why the first step of effective branding is getting comfortable with meaning what you say and saying what you mean with confidence. 

Determine the Value You Provide Your Clients and Customers

Get specific about this! This will allow your brand to continue to evolve in alignment with the needs of your target market. This is crucial because the marketplace is ever-changing and ever-evolving. In addition to this, being specific about the value one provides allows one to better determine the demographics of a target audience. 

Research the Demographics of Your Target Audience

Who is your customer and who should be buying your products? Understanding the age, gender and profile of your customer is important to achieving this.

Determine How to Best Position Your Marketing to Attract Your Target Audience

Determine how to best position your marketing to attract your target audience. It also gives one an opportunity to better position a message in terms that will resonate with a target audience. It is important to remember to focus on the value that products or services provide, because this is what is going to entice a target audience to want to buy. “Benefits sell. Features tell.” If you are giving your target audience a laundry list of features about your products or services, it will not resonate with them as quickly as it would if you told them about the value these features will provide to them.

Follow Through on Your Commitments

This seems like such a no-brainer and yet in the busy world in which we live, it is easy to drop the ball on what you have committed to doing. This is why it is so crucial to carve out ample time for effective follow through. Your brand depends on it! 

Learn about other Marketing & Sales resources for your small business in The Partnership’s Small Business Resources Hub or sign up for the Small Business Resources newsletter and stay connected for information about upcoming events, other resources and the latest announcements in the small business community in Greater Des Moines (DSM).