There are lots of products that appear in the market these days. And each of these products deserves to be recognizable. However, practice shows that only a certain amount of them transform into worldwide brands.
Why does it happen?
It happens due to the absence of brand awareness.
Brand awareness is a key component. It catches people’s attention and helps business owners sell more.
But how to increase brand awareness so far?
This guide will get you familiar with six actionable brand awareness tactics.
Let’s get the ball rolling!
1. Apply a content marketing strategy that is focused on the search
When it comes to online business, your target audience should know about your brand by exploring it across all possible online channels.
The more awareness your brand has, the more potential customers you will get. This process is tied together.
The best thing about brand awareness in digital marketing is that you can control it at every stage of a marketing funnel. With the help of content. Since brand awareness is the first step of the funnel, your goal is to create content about the industry you represent.
Where to start?
Run keyword research. Use one of the SEO tools to help with this process. In this case, this tool is Keywords Explorer from Ahrefs.
Type some seed keywords that are related to your business niche.
Afterwards, click the “matching terms” report to see keyword suggestions that include one of the seed keywords in question.
Your goal is to explore keywords that would align with these SEO metrics:
- Keyword Difficulty of 40 (no higher)
- Traffic Potential 500 clicks per month (no less)
- Terms that your target audience would try to find on the search
Narrow down the results by applying the filters and choosing the most promising keyword ideas.
2. Work on a brand PR
Public relation is a powerful weapon to influence the brand’s exposure. You should build communication with the public and raise brand awareness.
How to start with PR?
First of all, it is pretty hard to attract journalists’ attention. Journalists receive tons of emails and requests to cover different topics. Thus, your goal is to deserve their attention.
Keep in mind – journalists seek niche experts who can share their experience and add information to the topic. Hence, show yourself as the expert. It will be your chance to get into the PR world.
Where to find journalists?
One of the best channels is HARO. HARO connects journalists with story sources.
Subscribe to this channel and receive requests from journalists right to your email box. And here are a few pieces of advice that will help you get more of this strategy:
- Get in touch with journalists only if you are a true expert regarding the topic
- Pay attention to the requirements journalists have and stick to them
- Send your answer to the requests ASAP
- Dig into the publications’ authority
Follow these tips and raise brand awareness with PR.
3. Use word of mouth marketing
Word-of-mouth marketing is when your existing customers spread the word about your product or brand among their friends (followers/subscribers). And these people decide to become your customers as well.
It is a sort of prospecting without your active involvement as a business owner.
Why does this type of marketing work?
It happens because 83% of people trust recommendations from their friends (research from Nielsen.) Therefore, this source of brand awareness is powerful. Plus, you can’t affect this. However, the only way to improve word-of-mouth is by making the user experience better.
Besides, word-of-mouth marketing is tightly connected with product marketing. Thus, here are four suggestions you should consider:
- Create content that mentions a product as a solution for your customer’s problem
- Produce educational content
- Use social media tools to encourage your target audience to share your content across their accounts
- Work on building a community devoted to your brand
Word-of-mouth works like a charm in terms of raising brand awareness.
4. Be a speaker across niche-related events
There is no better way to build awareness for your brand than represent it across business events. Being a speaker at conferences has tons of benefits:
- You have an opportunity to be a thought leader
- You build a direct connection with the audience
- You have a chance to meet potential customers
- It leads to getting your brand mentioned on social media channels
- etc
If you have never been a speaker, you should start with some local events. It is necessary to have a portfolio that would help you receive more speaking invitations at bigger events.
5. Use influencer marketing
Influencers are people who have prestige within the industry. As a rule, influencers have armies of followers and subscribers on their social channels.
Why do influencers help in raising brand awareness?
Influencers can make an impact on people’s decision-making process. In other words, if an influencer tells the audience that a particular brand rocks, people will listen to the opinion and decide to get familiar with the brand personally.
That’s why influencer marketing should be in your arsenal for sure.
How to find influencers?
You can do this in two ways:
- Go to Google and discover it using a search request “[your industry] influencers”
- Explore them among your existing customers
If you find influencers among customers, it will be even better. They can be brand ambassadors who promote your product (brand) by sharing their personal experiences with people.
By the way, influencer marketing can help with acquiring new customers. However, you will have to give influencers something in return.
In this case, influencer marketing turns into affiliate marketing. Where you pay some percentage for transactions or subscriptions (depending on your business model.)
6. Use paid advertising
It is a well-known fact that paid advertising is the most straightforward way to increase sales. Also, it works in terms of raising brand awareness.
Nevertheless, paid advertising bears results while you’re investing your money in this. Thus, your goal is to predict expenses beforehand.
If your purpose is to build brand awareness in international markets, you should take care of the localization of your content. It will help show your brand in different countries. Hence, don’t shy away from using localization services to globalize your brand.
When you get your content and site localized for different countries, you can go ahead and set up paid ads.
To Sum Up
Brand awareness is a part of overall brand management. As the first stage of the marketing funnel, brand awareness guarantees how well your brand will be popularized in general.
You have just got familiar with six actionable tactics that help raise brand awareness. Try and convince yourself.
If you think this post lacks more tactics, feel free to share your ideas in the comments.
