If you’re a dedicated entrepreneur and you keep up with marketing tips and advice, you’ve surely heard over and over about how you need to work on brand awareness. But how do you get from point A to point B and raise awareness around your brand?
There are lots of things you can do online, from targeting the right niche to learning how to successfully work with influencers. Here are 10 of the best tips to boost brand awareness.
What is Brand Awareness?
In simple terms, brand awareness is how familiar people are with your business and your brand. Do they recognize the name? Do they know the logo? Do they know what your business does? When they think about your industry, does your brand pop into their heads? The more people know your brand, the more they will turn to it when they need the products or services that you offer.
Your ultimate goal is to raise awareness around your brand so that it becomes a household name and people come to associate it with positive feelings. This can be achieved through various means, from creating a strong brand, to begin with, to make active efforts to permeate the public consciousness through marketing.
Create a strong, specific brand
Brand awareness starts in-house, with the very specific decisions you make in choosing how to represent your brand. The look of your brand (including logo, colors, and fonts), the brand “voice”, and the things you want to be associated with your brand are the very first step you need to make in your efforts to boost your brand awareness.
In an overly saturated market, you need to stand out, and you do that by having a very strong sense of your brand identity. Look at all the most famous and successful brands – Coca-Cola, Disney, Amazon – their branding is unique and specific, and that makes them instantly recognizable.
Coca-Cola’s branding is so strong, they single-handedly turned Santa Claus from blue-and-white to red-and-white in the collective consciousness. That’s the kind of effect you want to have.
Pinpoint a narrative
Along with branding, you also want to identify your brand narrative. Branding and marketing, as a whole, are about storytelling, a lot of the time. You’re telling a story with your business, and that’s going to be a relatable point that will help you engage with customers.
What is your ethos? What is your brand about? What are your goals, and how are you planning to reach them? Why should people choose you over your competitors? All of these aspects are the building blocks of your narrative. Use them to tell your story: why you started the company, what you are planning to achieve, and what you’re doing for your employees. People love the connection that a story gives them.
Make sure your branding is cohesive
Brand awareness is, in part, about brand cohesiveness. You want to make sure that you are telling the same story no matter where you are. That goes for your messaging, but also for your brand image. Focus on these aspects carrying through to all areas of your business.
If we think back to Coca-Cola, what stands out about them? Every Coca-Cola product, promotional item, post, store, display case, email – they all use the iconic red and white colors and the tagline of their current marketing campaign. It’s impossible to mistake them for someone else. Apply the same energy to your own branding. When people come across your brand, you want the name to pop into their heads automatically.
Target your niche
You will have much better luck targeting a certain subset of consumers in a certain niche than aiming your marketing at the public at large. The more specific your niche is, the better your chances of gaining the attention of your target customer. You’re wasting resources showing ads to people who have little to no interest in your product.
You want to get specific, and analytics are going to help with that. They tell you exactly who your audience is – age, occupation, location – so you can tailor your approach accordingly. A 65-year old from rural Indiana will perhaps only be online once a day on Facebook, while a Millennial living in New York City benefits from 2GB of broadband at all times, which influences the amount of time they spend online.
So, you’ll know to target ads on Facebook in the evenings if you’re selling to folks in rural areas, to catch your target customer in the small window when they’re online. But you can post across different channels and at different times for someone living in an urban setting.
Be on every platform
If you truly want the world to know your name, then you need to be present everywhere. Your efforts should be focused on creating a presence of every available platform so that you can use it to your advantage.
Don’t limit yourself to Instagram. Maintain a presence on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube, Reddit, LinkedIn, and anywhere else people may be able to find you. Set up a website, a blog, a newsletter, a podcast, and make sure you’re active everywhere. Your presence should be ubiquitous so that you’ll have as much exposure as possible.
Place ads with influencers
Advertising is by no means a secret way to boost awareness, but you do have to do it the smart way. Nowadays, that means working with influencers. No matter what industry you’re in, there will be some public, influential figures who can help you spread the word.
Consider partnering with such figures to sponsor YouTube videos, Instagram posts, or even podcasts, in addition to your regular ads on these platforms. That guarantees exposure, dedicated airtime where the influencer talks about the product, and their implicit endorsement. There are brands who’ve been able to go from 0 to 100 just based on influencer sponsorships alone, so it’s worth jumping on the bandwagon.
Use social media to your advantage
Is it a surprise to anyone that we’d advocate using social media to its full potential? It’s not enough to have an account, you also have to be active on it, and in the right way. You should be posting regularly, at specific times of day in order to maximize the number of eyeballs that get to see your posts.
You don’t have to post every single day, but you should shoot for around 3 times per week. Your maximum should be once per day. Any more than that, and you veer into over-exposure and “spamming” territory, which might cause people to unfollow. Any less, and you’re not present on people’s feeds, which means they forget about you.
Create quality content
The very first rule of SEO is to create quality content because that is going to attract traffic organically. Whether we’re talking about the content posted on your website or on social media, good, relevant, evergreen content that offers value will become popular in its own right, even without being attached to a brand or being aggressively promoted.
The result of this popularity is, of course, increased brand awareness, but also a boost in brand image. You want people to hold the brand in high regard, and quality content will do that. Bonus – readers will continue to come back for more great content, thus boosting your traffic and overall popularity.
Guest post on your favorite blogs
A great way to gain notoriety is to associate yourself with other players in your sphere who are already well-known. Remember the blog we mentioned? Use it to establish a relationship with other similar blogs and then offer to guest post for them.
Guest posting is a win-win – the blog gets free content and the traffic it generates, and the guest poster gets their content exposed to a new audience, as well as the traffic and the boost in brand awareness that goes with it.
Give back to your community
Does anything make you more popular than giving things away for free? If it works in politics, it works in marketing, and it’s a tried and true method to get people to know your name and share it with others.
Giveaways can be an inexpensive, low-commitment way to generate some buzz and drum up some traffic for your page. The only investment is the prize you choose to give away. In exchange, people will flock to your page, share your post, follow, comment, and send your engagement through the roof in the process. If you’re lucky, the post can even go viral. Everyone will know your name.
Final thoughts
In today’s oversaturated market, it can be hard to break through and become a household name. That’s why branding and brand awareness are more crucial than ever. If you play your cards right, you can become the go-to in your industry, but that takes some focused effort on really putting your brand out there.
Creating a strong brand is the first step, but then you also have to market it well. Keep your marketing cohesive and specific, target the right people, and use your tools to your advantage. From social media posts to guest posting and giveaways, every bit of exposure helps you get closer to your goal.
Author
Teresa Bennett is a passionate writer and reader. She is fascinated by all things real estate, travel, and health. She lives with her two cats and a dog in a small menagerie.
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