When you think about McDonalds, Burger King or Shake Shack, what comes to your mind? Hamburgers, right? That’s branding. Every company dreams to have a brand like Pepsi, Shake Shack or McDonalds. If you can have one of those brands, you’ve created a multi-billion dollar company.

When you want to go get a credit card, you don’t Google, “Hmm, what kind of credit card should I get? Or, who should I get a credit card from?” You already know you can call up Visa, you can go to your bank and get a Visa card, or you can ask someone for Mastercard, whether you go to mastercard.com or just check with your local bank. That’s branding.

You see, the power of branding is all about anchoring yourself into a specific term. Mastercard and Visa have anchored themselves into the credit card market.

If you look at Kleenex tissues, when people are talking about tissues, a lot of times thinking about Kleenex. It’s so effective, their brand is so powerful, that most people don’t even say, “Hey, I need a tissue,” they’re like, “Hey, can I have a Kleenex?”

So, if you’re getting started here are three things you can do:

1. Anchor to a Specific Term, Feeling or Emotion
It’s how you’ve anchored yourself into a specific term or feeling or emotion, and that’s what you want to convey with your business. It’s not just about getting traffic from Google or social media, it’s all about connecting your name or your company name with a specific service. They brand themselves for being amazing products for those kind of problems. So think about what kind of industry you’re in, and figure out what kind of problem that you can solve for people.

2. Show how your brand helps
Once you’ve figured out your problem, use your branding and hammer down your solution. The moment you can keep feeding your solution down everyone’s mouth, eventually, they’ll know that, hey, your company does this one specific thing.

Want to buy anything that’s really affordable and get it delivered to you fast, you go to Amazon. It’s that simple. Why? Because they push that messaging down everywhere, and that’s how you build a big company. Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TV commercials, they’re not going to be the main source of your revenue, your brand is and that’s what lasts in the long run.

3. Measure your brand
Now, if you want to measure how big your brand is, go to Google.com/trends and type in your company name. If Google doesn’t show any results, that means your brand’s really small. If they’re starting to show some results, and it’ll be in a graph format, you can see if it’s flat, if it’s climbing or declining. That’ll tell you how good you’re doing from a brand perspective.

Your goal should be to get that graph to continually climb up and to the right. That means that your brand is continually rising. If not, that means you’re not doing enough marketing. If you feel you’re doing enough marketing, which means people aren’t connecting with it. You’re not using enough emotions. You’re not using enough storytelling. You’re not connecting with the people that are looking at your marketing or your advertisements.

I remember, I was talking to a friend of mine one day, and he was like, “Hey, did you hear about Warren Buffett’s yearly letter to all of his companies?” Because he’s invested in a ton of companies. He writes a simple one-page letter. Why? Because he knows that if he writes five or six pages, these CEOs are too busy to read them. He always mentions to these companies that when you’re in a tough position and you have to either make a choice of more money or protecting your brand, go with protecting your brand, because in the long run, that’s what will create a bigger company.

So, in conclusion, if Warren Buffett tells you that branding is really important and you should focus on that more than the dollars that you could make in the short run, than that should be enough for you to go out there and try to build an amazing and a big brand.

Have I got you thinking? What branding tools do you use? Let me know in the comments below.