Top 5 Ways to Grow Your Brand

Helen Lee Schifter, the former Conde Nast and Hearst editor and former Wall Street Arbitrage mogul knows a lot about building and growing a brand. She has put her personal stamp on several.

And Schifter firmly believes that if your brand isn’t constantly growing, then your business may be DOA, dead on arrival. Or if not completely dead, you may need an emergency operation to at least put you back on the road to profitability.

Here are Helen Lee Schifter’s Top 5 tips to resuscitate your brand.

• 1. Completely define your customer.
  
  As the great baseball philosopher Yogi Berra said, “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going because you might not get there”.
  
  If you haven’t spent literally hours defining your ideal customer then you are definitely behind the branding 8-ball.
  
  Who does your business serve? What qualities do those people possess?
  
  What are the main sources of conflict in their life? How does he or she spend his time? How much money do they make? Where does he or she live?
  
  Constructing the answers to these questions is essential for the simple reason that you can’t be everything to everyone. You need to narrow down your focus.
  
  By far this is the most essential of your tasks to grow your brand. In actuality, you should have done this from the start before you launched the brand, but it’s never too late. Narrow your focus to concentrate on one or at most three key niches and you’ll definitely grow fast.
  
• 2. Develop your brand voice.
  
  Your brand should show your personality. If you don’t you’ll never grow very far.
  
  People buy from those who have built their trust, not just from any old company. Your voice indicates to people the complete tone of your company, and if you do not sound personable and appealing, you can have the best product in the world and still fail.
  
• 3. Build a consistent social media presence.
  
  Without being active on social media, your brand may as well have one or even both hands tied behind your back.
  
  In order for people to buy from your company and have trust in you, it can’t be like a blind date. Sure, maybe one out of 50 blind dates work out perfectly and lead to another and another, but most people select a boyfriend or girlfriend by getting to know them little by little.
  
  The same with your brand. Let people get to know you little by little on social media if you want to be a top brand.
  
• 4 Be fanatical about customer service
  
  The one area of your brand you cannot afford to ignore is fanatical, over-the-top customer service. Put this in practice and watch your brand soar by leaps and bounds.
  

5. Network with other businesses

Nobody knows everything about business, and one of the ways to really get ahead is to network with other entrepreneurs. Doing so is like returning to university only on steroids. Learn from them and you have a resource to rely on when you try to do something new to grow your business.