How to get more eyes on your creative business with a brand visibility strategy

Brand Strategy

Insights

8

min read

In this article

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Do you want to grow your audience and increase your sales? Well you need more people to know who you are. That, is visibility. And to get more visibility for your creative business, you need a strategy for making it happen. Let’s talk about how.

What is Brand Visibility?

Brand visibility focuses on how often your brand gets in front of your ideal audience. It's all about showing up and being seen. The goal is to make it impossible for people to NOT know who you are!

A brand visibility strategy is a smaller strategy within your overall brand strategy that outlines your plan for how you’ll get more eyes on your creative business.

Brand visibility vs awareness, recognition & perception

While brand visibility, awareness, recognition, and perception are often used interchangeably, they’re slightly different and there are nuances to each that are important to differentiate if your goals are to move your brand forward.

Brand visibility

How many people your brand has gotten in front of

Brand awareness

How many people are familiar with your brand

Brand recognition

How many people recognise and remember you

Brand perception

How your brand is perceived

How to measure brand visibility

Before you start this process, you need to have an idea of what your brand visibility is like now. You can do this by getting an estimation of the impressions your brand currently gets over a particular time period. This will tell you how many people see your brand on average. Then you can continue to measure your brand visibility to see how it's working and how you can improve over time.

Search

Firstly you can use analytics to see how many impressions your brand is getting on Google, Pinterest or other search engines when people are searching for your business name or common search topics related to your business.

Social media

On social media, you can look at your insights on each platform to see how many impressions your content has garnered within a certain time period.

Estimated visibility

When you start working on projects with the purpose of increasing your brand visibility, such as partnering with a brand, or collaborating with another creator, you can estimate the impressions you might get from that engagement based on the audience you’ll be exposed to.

Brand visibility ideas for creatives

There are a lot of ways that you can increase your brand visibility as a creative, and we’ll talk about how to decide which ones are right for you soon, but first, let’s look at all of the options.

Social media

Social media is the first strategy that comes to most people’s minds when it comes to increasing your brand visibility. You can lean into the popular platforms, trending sounds and trends and memes to make the most of their momentum, or cultivate community by trying collaborations, cross-promotions, and competitions to get your work in front of new audiences on socials.

Sponsorships

You can use sponsorships in a couple of different ways, either as a business sponsoring people to promote your work, or as a content creator for other brands. Either option will get your work and content in front of a different group of people who may not know about you already.

Collaborations

Collaborations are one of the most powerful ways to get more eyes on your brand. If you can partner with someone who already has an established audience of people who might be interested in you and your work, your marketing work is so much easier, and they get access to your audience too – it’s a win-win! You could collaborate with other creatives on art projects, content series’, as a guest on each others’ podcasts or YouTube channels, or for a joint workshop, for example.

Referral Programs

There are a lot of different ways that you can utilise referral programs in your business that reward your audience for recommending your products, services, or content to the people they know. Some platforms have these systems set up, including Sparkloop, which allows you to have a referral program for your email newsletter, rewarding your subscribers when they refer people to your email list. Such an awesome and engaging way to get your content in front of new people and celebrate your current community at the same time!

Email

Speaking of email, you can also do things like ConvertKit’s Creator Network which allows you to recommend and be recommended by other creators. When creators recommending you gain new subscribers, your newsletter gets introduced to a whole new audience. When their audience grows, so does yours! This is such a great way to scale your newsletter growth that doesn’t involve busy work like posting more on social media, relying on an algorithm, or other time-consuming tasks. You can get your work in front of a whole new group of people, and grow your newsletter faster without working harder!

*Join the Creator Network for free here! (Affiliate link)

Shareable content

There are certain types of content that are inherently a lot more shareable. If you look on social media and check out the most viral, commonly shared or ‘successful’ content, you will see a lot of threads between them.

For example, on Instagram, a lot of common things that come up are carousels, quotes and infographics. These are really shareable kinds of content that people want to share on their stories or send to their friends. Trying these types of shareable content can increase your brand visibility if they’re successfully shared!

Packaging

The way that you package your products can make the unboxing experience super special for your customers and encourage them to share that with their friends and family on social media to show off what they’ve ordered and received!

To increase the chances of this happening, you could try improving your packaging, including freebies, adding a thank you note, or popping in a card that asks them to share their order on social media. That nudge could be just the reminder they need to realise that sharing is something small and easy they can do that makes a big difference to artists.

Think about that packaging and unboxing experience carefully and see what you can do to make it extra special and Instagram-worthy!

Public Relations

PR is a great way to get your work in front of people who may not have heard of you or your work before. You could do this yourself or hire a PR expert to help you write press releases and reach out to publications that are relevant to you and your audience to see if you can get published. You might get an interview, guest article, or even just a quote in a larger article.

SEO

A lot of people use Google or other search engines to find answers, solutions or to shop, so it's a really smart way to get your brand in front of those people as an answer, option or solution if you can.

You can look into how you can increase your search engine optimization so that your brand comes up in those results and gets in front of more people more often as they are searching. This is something that can be done through some one-off fixes, and some ongoing efforts.

Advertising

Last but not least, you can also try advertising. That can be done digitally, through Facebook, Google or Pinterest ads for example. But you could also do print advertising, maybe wrapping your car, printing flyers, putting up posters, having signage, or posting an ad in a magazine.

Obviously digital advertising can be super powerful, will get your brand in front of a whole group of new people, and can be very effective if done well, but don't just limit yourself to that. Print and in person advertising can be more effective than you might think too.

How to craft a brand visibility strategy

We’ve just talked about a bunch of ideas for increasing your brand visibility, but trying to do them all at once isn’t a good idea. Instead, you need to choose one or two that are going to work best for you and your business to focus on at a time and iterating from there.

Let's talk about how to figure out which ones you should choose and how to come up with a strategy that's going to work for you.

Where

First, you need to figure out where will be the most effective place to get in front of your ideal audience, so you need to understand them before you do anything else. You need to know what they're paying attention to because there is no point in putting an ad in the paper or trying to get published in a magazine if your ideal audience are not going to read them or not going to see them! If you haven’t already, pinpoint your people and ask yourself questions like:

Are your ideal audience spending their time online?
If so, where? Is it on social media?
Which social media platforms?
What types of content do they like the most?
What blogs are they reading?
What kind of people are they following?
What influencers are they engaging with?
What news publications do they follow?
What events do they go to in person?
What traditional media are they reading?
What print things do they pay attention to?
Do they read the paper or not?

How

Once you’ve decided where to meet your audience, you need to know how you’re going to make sure you capture their attention and encourage them to engage further with your business! This means having a clear strategy for the rest of your brand, including your:

When

It takes up to seven times for someone to recognise and remember a brand, so just getting in front of your ideal audience once isn’t going to cut it. You need a strategy for multiple ways you can increase your brand visibility and improve your chances of your dream customers seeing all of your amazing work!

So when you put your strategy together, make sure it includes multiple times when your ideal audience could come across your brand. That could be two magazine features, ten podcast interviews, four Instagram posts a week, and a monthly newsletter swap, for example.

Put your brand visibility strategy together

When you’ve gone through this process, you should have a brand visibility strategy that includes:

The multiple places you’re going to show up
How often you’re going to do that
How you’re going to show up in those places

Now you can use this strategy to plan the projects you need to work on, the content you need to create, and the actions you need to take to make your dreams come true!