When was the last time you updated your Facebook page? Are you engaging in reviews and comments? Are your business listings up-to-date?
An integrated digital marketing approach with customized messaging brings the audience the best results when building brand awareness. Given customer needs are nuanced in modern lifestyles, and many brands are competing for their attention, a comprehensive digital strategy helps grow audience outreach across diverse platforms. Consumers are easily accessible and have updated information at all times. There are different ways to adapt the digital marketing strategy depending on the nature of your business.
Remember—consumers trust a brand with a robust digital presence thus transparency and responsiveness are key.
Here are six tips to promote your brand effectively
1. Optimize Your Digital Footprint (SEO)
The best way to promote your product and services efficiently in today’s thriving digital world is by positioning your information on the first page of Google search results. Brand visibility should be one of the top priorities in the early stage to receive quick earning even though companies spend the most time implementing a perfect website design. They forget to think about improving their SEO rank first. Ensure potential customers are reassured by your rankings in the search engines improve user feedback in consecutive product cycles.
You can adequately prepare your search strategy by using keywords that are closely associated with the products or services your company offers. For example, think about if you’re a fashion retailer, then you might want your suppliers or customers to think about you when they think of “men’s fashion.” Utilize those keywords on your website to benefit from higher Google ranking but make sure that you update your keywords to include the phrases new customers are searching for to gain brand penetration.
2. Customize Your Messages (Content Marketing)
There are many reasons you shouldn’t neglect content marketing in your brand campaign as the digital landscape and user preferences are rapidly shifting. It is crucial to tailor your messages with what your customer wants, a real-world solution to their problem. The right brand messaging will build strong recognition of your product and get emotional commitment and trust, they will remember your core values. Today, businesses have to adapt user-centric channels and thus solely relying on promotional material and advertising channels will not enable effective penetration with the target audience anymore. That is why content marketing and SEO show up.
The content strategy enables you to create highly engaging campaigns that project value to the customer at various contact points, instantly making your product more familiar. In order to generate maximum ROI, you must reflect your user’s needs in the keywords you choose and optimize them continuously.
3. Optimise Social Platforms
Another way to promote awareness of your brand identity is to reach out where customers are present. Thus, social media is an excellent solution for less time-consuming and effective must-use tools for every industry worldwide. Social media is extremely popular to get your message to new audiences relatively quickly and easily. All social media platforms have features that make content sharing simple and easy, by tagging or re-post the content.
You can use interactive campaigns to generate a word-of-mouth effect amongst customers, increasing trust and brand recognition, and monitoring their interest and trends to optimize future messaging and campaigns.
4. Optimise Social Influencer Marketing
When you are considering your brand on a personal level, influencer marking should be the right strategy to borrow the impact of huge followers and give value and leadership positions to your own company. Social influencers understand the type of content that engages their audience and creates a loyal follower-base as they have worked with them. Validate where your target customers spend their time, and then reach out to make your brand more recognizable to a particular focus group.
The key to implementing social media influencer marketing for your product is choosing similar core values as the audience. They have to be aligned with your brand identity, reputation and connected with the same target audience as you.
5. Sponsor Events
Sponsoring events helps to align your brand with your target market. Your personality, interest, and character are understood by the event participants immediately. Like other digital campaigns, this strategy allows brands to benefit positively through a mutual interest that brands/entities and customers share. Sponsorship helps elevate interest in the brand and enhance public perception much more than advertising, whose sole focus is to generate commercial gains.
For example, let’s look at the case of Red Bull, an energy drink. But without any brand awareness, consumers can consider it to be an ordinary energy drink. However, by marketing creatively, Red Bull positioned itself as a drink of choice in adventure sports. Their brand thus became synonymous with energy drinks and set them apart from their competitors by positioning them as daring and adventurous.
6. Launch a PR campaign
Public relations (PR) has always been a valuable channel for generating brand awareness, Digital PR has made it easy to consistently invest in increasing brand awareness and reputation. Digital PR helps your reach your target audience by improving your digital footprint. It positively influences a website’s search engine visibility and ranking. Networking with journalists, bloggers, and influencers and sending online press releases helps gain high-quality backlinks and social media mentions that improve your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
PR should be included in your integrated marketing strategy to create brand recognition and help the audience understand how your company is different. For example, you can release a story about how your new product can solve a problem you know your customers have.
3 clever tips to boost your brand
Brands crowd the world. Some brands dominate beauty products, others houseware supply or footwear - almost everything carries a brand label. Some brands are more powerful and influential, whilst others are fighting for survival from dwindling sales.
The key to brand awareness success is creating unique tactics that differentiate you from your competitors. If you’re struggling with how to grow your business, try out these three foundation approaches before communicating with the public:
1. Buyer personas
The whole objective of all marketing is to “send the right message to the right person at the right time”. Identifying your buyer persona will help you tailor the tone and content of your communication to ensure that your brand achieves penetration and recognition with the right target audience. Generic messaging does not build brand value and equity, thus have a focused marketing plan for different buyer personas.
2. Storytelling
Storytelling is the crux of a powerful marketing strategy, helping you distinguish your product from the competition. The fact that stories naturally trigger emotional responses makes the context more memorable. On top of that, integrating your brand in a storytelling scenario makes your brand feel more human and authentic, thus building brand resonance. By putting yourself in customers’ shoes you can significantly boost brand awareness. The narrative can share your vision, or how your small business made it into this big world, as long as the story is genuine it will create brand awareness.
3. Consistency in Messaging
Finally, consistency will always be an essential aspect of both brand recognition and brand awareness. Creating exotic logos and perfect business titles is just the early stage of your company identity. It takes time to build impressions that people remember. You need to have a consistent tone of voice, a consistent colour scheme and messaging that repetitively creates impressions in the minds of your prospects. Take time to determine how you can ensure consistency in brand communication. Strategically communicating to your customers enhances the brand experience, regardless of which marketing channels you communicate via - social media, blog posts, or physical stores.
Next: Why is it important to measure brand awareness? Read on
