How Brand Associations Help to Promote Your Website or Business

Miami has sun, sand, good weather and beautiful people, but one poll says the first thing most Americans think of when they hear the city’s name is “Miami Vice.” (source)

Miami Vice is of course, the popular 1980s TV series about cops and crime in Miami. Did you know that the media influences the way you perceive places or things, more than you think? Repeated exposure to a brand induces involuntary associations in the mind.

These instinctive brand associations are golden for marketers because they are easy ways to make your brand persistent. They allow your proposition to stick in the mind of your audience and seep into their unconscious.

What are these associations? Keywords, phrases, ideas and images you can use to wrap around your website or business. These associations not only define your site but they are triggers for world-of-mouth and yardsticks to measure authority.

Let’s talk about word-of-mouth or what we generally call recommendations. I recently asked my Twitter friends to recommend some blogs about copywriting. I received 20 replies and half of them asked me to check out Copyblogger.

Now this is a good indication of how strongly the idea of copywriting and its keyword derivatives (‘copywriting blog’) are associated with Copyblogger, Brian Clark’s site. This association is strong because of the excellent content available on the site.

I would suggest that the key phrases in his brand (Copy-blogger) helped in some minor way to encourage a subconscious connection between the site and niche topic (copywriting), hence facilitating both audience memory and recommendations.

Here is what you should do as well: associate ideas or keywords with your brand and encourage your audience to draw connections between them and your site.

Image Credit: dive

For instance, if you own a blog about japanese food, you want your site to be mentioned or recommended whenever someone talks about ‘japanese food’ or ‘japanese recipes’. Every time the topic is brought up in a discussion, you want to be inserted into the conversation automatically.

This goes far beyond the obvious SEO benefit of utilizing keywords to get targeted search traffic. This is about growing your site through a variety of associations which trigger word of mouth. This process can involve branding/advertising with the right keyword terms and optimizing your site to narrow its visible topic focus.

Sometimes, visual devices may be used to draw up unconventional and unrelated mental associations. Have I succeeded in making you think of Dosh Dosh whenever you look at an anime cartoon or picture somewhere else? ^_^

Brand associations can also serve as a qualitative measure of your site’s position in its niche. Instead of tracking a site’s growth according to its traffic, subscriber figures or revenue, you study how much your site is associated with its concepts/keywords.

Does your film blog get mentioned whenever someone talks about movie news sites? Are you included in recommendation lists about movie blogs? Who talks about your blog and what do they say? Try using Google alerts to track your brand or site name and record down the number of mentions per month.

Paying attention to the feedback you’re getting from other bloggers or individuals allows you to get a general feel of how well your branding strategy is working. You know you’ve reached a certain level of popularity when your site is frequently cited as a resource on topics or ideas you’ve associated with your brand.

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