BOOST YOUR BRAND RECOGNITION

As a PropTech startup launching into a new market, one of the primary challenges you may face is the absence of brand awareness. Unlike companies with a recognized brand, you need to establish trust and credibility for potential clients to take a leap of faith and choose you over more established competitors. This challenge should be seen as an opportunity to create a memorable and compelling brand identity that sets you apart as an innovator in the market.

It can be easy to get caught up in your product features, specs, and your technical differentiators, but I personally believe the most important foundation of success is having clarity on what sets your brand apart as innovative.

What is that driving force that motivates your team to push boundaries? This is your "why". It's the unique combination of your mission, your values, and the promise you make to your customers that inspires them to take action.

Once you have this, you are ready to develop the key building blocks of your brand. This starts with your messaging and a distinct brand voice that speaks the language of your target market.

?? The truth is, your brand should evolve and change just as your company and product evolves to meet the demands of your customers.

?? In this article, I am going to explore how to define these core elements and build a brand that fuels your growth at every stage.

Phase One: The Minimum Viable Brand

During pre-launch or early launch stage, the essence of your “minimum viable brand” should be its problem solving ability. Your brand’s identity, at this stage, should clearly communicate the solution you offer, making it relatable and appealing to your identified market segments. Your brand's voice, imagery, and values should resonate with these segments. At this stage, as you are building out your ICPs, you should work through exercises that directly address what your future clients are saying or thinking as they're trying to move away from pain and towards the outcome they want.

It’s common for founders to lean towards brand identities that reflect their personal preferences. However, the cornerstone of a powerful brand lies in its ability to resonate with its intended audience. Instead of tailoring your brand’s image solely around personal tastes, focus on what appeals to your target market.

Implementing a variety of messaging and content types and measuring their impact allows you to gather invaluable data on what resonates the best. Testing can reveal subtle preferences in language, imagery, or calls to action that significantly affect engagement and conversion rates. This iterative process of testing and adaptation is crucial for identifying the most effective ways to communicate your value proposition and build a strong, relatable brand that connects with your intended audience.

While uniqueness is valuable, at this stage caution against crafting a brand image that might be deemed too provocative or alienating. Your brand should stand out for its clarity in solving problems, not for its capacity to provoke. Make the solution clear, make it loud, and make it something people can’t wait to be a part of!

Phase Two: Brand-Market Fit

As you mature, investing in developing a cohesive brand identity becomes crucial. This includes your logo, design elements, typography, iconography, and comprehensive brand guidelines. These components serve as the visual and stylistic pillars of your brand, ensuring consistency and professionalism across all touch points.

At this stage, you should ensure you have a high-performing website that is agile and easy to update. This platform should not only reflect your brand’s visual identity but also serve as a central hub for engaging your audience, showcasing your solutions, and establishing your authority.

Once you have customers that are using your product and are happy, you should be interviewing them and asking them about their problems, desires, dreams, frustrations, and how you helped them as well as any quantifiable results they obtained. It is important to record their exact language, as this will be used not only in the marketing messaging but also is useful throughout the sales process.

One of the challenges you may face at this stage, is the messaging constantly changing as the role of the product is changing to meet the needs of the market you are serving. This could be challenging to navigate especially with limited marketing resources or expertise, which would make it a good time to schedule a consultation call with someone who has proven experience and advice navigating this foundational stage.

For the purpose of this article, I spoke with David Angelo Chiapoco ?? ?? who was happy to share his insight with The PropTech Marketer. David was the 2nd employee at Equiem, grew it to 8-figures in 25 countries as Head of Product, Design and CMO.

"A common misconception is that you need to niche down ASAP and I would say that is not correct, it’s actually completely fine to be in that experimental phase, finding different segments, trialing different audiences. In fact, it’s better to start wide and then to narrow down. This could be anywhere from $0-$5M ARR, you are testing and catering to multiple segments, however long term you will need to focus and narrow down.” says David. "Eventually, the market will start pulling you in one direction, one customer segment that is growing the fastest and has the happiest customers, with the lowest churn. That will likely be your ICP, and the CEO will make the call to focus on that one segment moving forward, which will take you into the next phase. If you find that particular segment, and you can grow to $10M, $15M, or $20M ARR just focusing on that one segment, it will really accelerate your growth. If you don’t find it, you will stay in a state of flux where you are catering to 4-5 different segments and eventually you will strain your resources and won’t be able to deliver value fast enough to these multiple segments, customers will churn, and growth will plateau.”

Phase Three: Growth

As your company enters the growth phase, consider a strategic rebrand or “facelift” to align your brand with the evolved market position and expanded vision of your startup. This phase often involves introducing animations, promotional materials, podcasts, and diversified content development to engage your audience more deeply.

Implementing focus groups, conducting market research, and initiating advertising campaigns are key strategies during this phase. These activities not only enhance brand visibility but also provide valuable insights into your audience’s evolving needs and preferences, allowing for more targeted and effective marketing efforts.

We're curious, what's your biggest branding challenge right now? Post your answers in the comments ??

Articles we are reading this week.

Mastering Visual Content Marketing - Hubspot collected data on inbound marketing, content marketing, social media, and online behavior to give the top visual content marketing statistics to reflect on.

5 Branding Mistakes No Startup Can Afford to Make - Are you unknowingly making any of these common branding mistakes?

7 Steps to Build a Successful Brand - What steps can you take to start building a strong community around your brand?

Tips from Barbie: How Strategic Collaboration Can Improve Your Brand - Your startup doesn't have to build its reputation alone. Learn how strategic partnerships can elevate your brand.

New tools we are using.

Glimpse - track trends across social platforms

Fedica - deep community demographic analysis

Hotjar - understand user behavior on your website better with heatmaps and recordings powered by AI analysis

Unbounce - a powerful builder for both landing pages and pop-ups, uses AI to optimize conversions

Thanks so much for being a part of the community! Next issue, we'll be diving more into Strategy & Creating a Marketing Plan that Generates Demand.