A brand is always trying to find ways to meet new customers and gain additional business for revenue. For most startups, they know that the first thing they need to do is to build brand awareness. That is true: it helps reach customers. But what most businesses fail to realize is that brand awareness is not just a startup’s concern.
All businesses should always be proactive in increasing their brand awareness. Though especially important in the early stages of a business, brand awareness benefits any business in marketing and promoting its product or service. Combined with a great product and excellent customer service, it can also help build your brand equity. The more buyers know about you, what you offer, and how you do business, the more you establish customer trust and confidence.
But how do you build and/or continually increase brand awareness? In this post, we’ll focus on increasing your brand perception and appreciation online, which is where most people are nowadays anyway.
5 Online Best Practices for Increasing Brand Awareness
1. Create valuable content
Content creation should be at the forefront of your digital marketing campaign. And we don’t just mean your blog content. Content marketing includes every kind of content you produce for your website, social media, direct marketing tools, presentations, case studies, infographics, podcasts, videos, and also the additional content you produce to act as lead magnets: e-books, white papers, and more.
But for your content to matter and to do its part in increasing brand awareness, it has to be relevant, informative/educational, thoughtful, and helpful. Every time you create content that’s valuable, you increase the chances of people becoming more aware of your brand. But you also do more: valuable content is shareable content, and the more times your content is shared, the wider the audience you reach.
Content also helps build backlinks—these are links found in another website that link back to your content/site. But again, other websites will only be linking back to your content if it’s content that’s worth sharing with their readers.
2. Perform SEO research
Great content can also help improve your search engine results, but you should supplement this with SEO research. If your potential buyer doesn’t see you in the first two pages of the search engine results (some don’t even go past the first page), you have less chances of being “found” or considered relevant to their query or concern.
Research SEO strategies connected to your product or service, business, industry, and market. You must remember that Google now also rates based on the effectiveness of your content. Gone are the days of keyword stuffing.
You must know the SEO strategies that work today. And if you’d like to know more, why not read up on what the experts say will work in 2020? (Incidentally, I just created examples for my first two points right there. I created backlinks for two websites, and each one was the top search result for “SEO strategies for 2019” and “SEO strategies for 2020,” respectively.)
3. Activate your social media
If for some reason you still doubt the power of social media, consider these stats:
• 48 billion people now use social media. That’s an increase of 9% from last year. Put another way: 45% of the total world population are using social networks.
• 366 million new people started using social media in the past year. That’s more than a million new people joining social media every single day.
Wouldn’t you want a slice of that 3.48 billion audience?
There are four social media platforms you would want to focus on: LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. But there’s also YouTube, Snapchat, and Pinterest. A lot of B2B companies find success in LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. In fact, social selling has become a key sales strategy: Studies show that sales reps with high social network activity achieve 45% more sales opportunities, and are 51% more likely to hit their sales quotas.
So social media doesn’t just help raise awareness for your brand, it’s also a viable venue to do sales.
4. Offer freebies
People like anything free. It’s been our experience that people like to spread the word when there’s free stuff going around. So why not have people spread the word around about your brand for you?
Offer something of value for free on your website or in your social media page(s). This can be a free trial or demo, a free e-book, a free month in a subscription, and so on.
5. Advertise
Brand awareness also requires investment from your end—time, resources, and money. Advertising online is still a very viable way to increase more awareness for your brand. You can advertise in digital pop-ups and search engine ads, social media ads, and even by sponsoring web content.
There are many kinds of online advertising that you should know about. But what’s clear is that online advertising is a growing business—and that’s probably for good reason.
To increase brand awareness and gain new business, you must put in the work in implementing these five best practices. The results may not be immediate, but the growth will be sure and steady.
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