If you’re just starting out, building your brand may seem a gigantic task, a brand awareness strategy is vital to grow your business and it’s easy when you do it the right way.
If you run an established business, you can look back at your brand awareness strategy and revamp the necessary components in the new year.
According to this report social media and content will play the most vital roles in increasing brand awareness in 2022. “…the primary focus will remain on people rather than technology.”
Building on that, we have compiled a list of brand awareness strategies to help you gain an upper hand over your competitors and show your brand to the world.
Go back to basics – knowing your target market and audience
Whether you’re just starting out or you’re running an established business, going back to basics can prove super beneficial if things aren’t working for you.
Begin with determining your target market and the ideal audience you wish to reach with your products and services. Without this step, you may reach the wrong crowd.
Fortunately, understanding the market has become far easier now, thanks to the sheer number of tools available today. You can use Google forms to conduct a survey with your potential audience, and collect data to determine their interest in brands like yours.
Go ahead and create a form using an existing template or create one from scratch:
- What are your troubles when it comes to [primary brand keyword]?
- What current solutions do you use available in the market?
- Are you happy with them or do you think they can get better. If so, how?
- How do you define your ideal solution to [brand keyword – problem statement]?
Use your existing mailing list, social channels, and other networks (online and offline [print]) to share this survey with and get answers to.
Aim to collect around a dozen responses from your survey and use the common replies to tally up and build insights on who your ideal audience should be.
This survey will help you build your brand which people love and want in the market other than operating based on your own assumptions.
Use search to influence brand awareness and visibility
Brand awareness plays a key role in search, meaning your SEO strategy is already aiding your brand awareness. But how exactly?
Well, the word covid had been searched very rarely before the pandemic and had a low search volume. But after the pandemic hit hard people started searching for this keyword along with a few other related words.
This increased the search volume drastically and companies started building brands around these keywords. Companies have started manufacturing products around the name COVID. This gives them more traffic and customers through search engines.
With this in mind, adopting a comprehensive approach to content has the potential to increase search visibility of your brand. Your brand may not yet have recognition but you can use Google search to your advantage by driving traffic using non-branded search terms.
Say, you run an online shoe store on Shopify – selling custom shoe prints. You can use keywords like “Nike alternatives,” “best custom shoe prints,” and others.
Aim to create content that serves these organic keywords and make sure you go all in and create a landing page with that in mind. Aim to generate direct sales from those landing pages. That’s how you get people to remember your brand and come back to your website to buy more. If you’re not so heavy with creating landing pages, there are many landing page creators and website builders that can help you set one up in no time.
Leverage the power of referral
While Elon Musk often trends on Twitter for his wide-appreciated sense-of-humor, and turning the tide on breaking truck windows, he has undoubtedly been at the center of the tech world for quite some time — and his brainchild, Tesla is a no brainer when it comes to using one of the best clean energy-based products in the market.
But driving the wheel on sustainable energy might not have been as easy as a meme. Marketing sure played a vital role, including word-of-mouth and smart referral programs helped Tesla reach new heights.
Tesla is a great example of how referral programs can add value to business growth. Tesla gave your friends and family the opportunity to earn $500 for Solar Roof and $300 for Solar Panels when they ordered using your referral links. The referral program helped generate a lot of free publicity and site visits ths improving brand development & awareness along with delivering a huge number of sign-ups.
Use influencer marketing to reach a wider audience
Social media is a huge opportunity to improve brand development for any business that is looking for quick growth hacks. And influencer marketing is at the top of the list. They bring in higher conversions as compared to other marketing solutions because their audience trusts them.
They may be celebrities or really good content creators. You have to look for influencers who can bring you the maximum exposure and conversions, not just people with huge social media followings. A great number of followers don’t always bring conversions. We’d suggest you to partner with micro-influencers (less than 15,000 followers) — they may have a small following but you can bet on them to bring higher conversion and greater impact on your brand.
Also, with social media platforms’ push for in-app shopping, influencers are becoming even more relevant for your marketing and sales funnel – allowing you to leverage influencers as a brand awareness strategy and as a purchase driver.
Since influencers are such a huge part of your marketing and sales strategy – you need a CRM software to build relations and manage interactions of your influencer partners and their customers. This way you can map results with the source that brought you revenue.
Use data to drive your content and sales
You began your brand awareness strategy with audience research, and aligned your content activities with SEO using non-branded search keywords and guest posting. Now you may be driving quality and niche traffic to your website. But the goal is to generate more leads and with proper sales planning, you can create a strategy to convert those leads. To improve it you may consider a sales funnel agency for your business.
You often tend to provide an excellent experience to your audience using content and social media but fail to provide the same when any lead transitions to sales. The sales experience is often not that great!
You need analytics to inform you of your content strategy success and use the data to build a sales strategy to convert any lead that shows interest in your product or service.
Follow up
Your content lives and thrives on the web, and thanks to SEO strategies, if your content is really good, it keeps bringing you quality traffic on repeat. But your website content isn’t the only thing driving the traffic. You need to follow up repeatedly to keep your brand active in your audience’s radar.
Some ideas for following up:
- Send updates via email to your mailing list of users and readers.
- Use a marketing automation solution to automate sending personalized messages to your users and customers via email, ad campaigns, social media, support (live chat, help desk, sales automation software) and more.
- Run retargeting ads to website visitors.
- Ask your professional colleagues and contacts to share your content with their online network.
Conclusion
Brand is more than just a word, product or service – just like Nike is more than a shoe, and Starbucks is more than just coffee.
It doesn’t exist in the ether but only in our minds when we like, love, cherish and collaborate to bring the brand into existence. If you follow strategies to improve brand development and awareness you don’t need to worry about sales again.
But until then, keep writing and sharing, cause there’s never a shortage of people waiting to love and lift your brand up.
Radhika Mohan Singh Roy is the Head of Marketing at EngageBay. He was previously a Senior Marketer with Agile CRM, Manager for Communities & Social Media at Simplilearn, an AdWords Strategist with Google, and has also worked with Apple and Bank of America. He has a Masters’ degree in English and is a certified Six Sigma Green Belt.
