Customers are spoiled for choice when it comes to spending their money. Brand awareness is there to help customer decisions by making some choices a little more obvious than others. The ultimate goal for any brand is for your product, offerings or services to stand out from the crowd.
We believe that when you start a business it is important to know who you are as a brand. Having a consistent presence and being active in communities (social or fiscal) will most definitely ensure that customers remember you!
We want to share with you some ways to increase brand awareness in 2019, some free, some paid, and some that just require you to put a different spin on your resources.
But first, what is brand awareness? Your brand awareness is based on how well customers can recognize and recall your brand.
When customers can spontaneously remember the name of your brand, your brand has a good brand recall.
Brand recognition is based on the customer’s ability to identify or tell a brand apart from others. This doesn’t necessarily mean that customers remember the name of the brand, but simply that they’re able to recognize it.
Brand recall and brand recognition are both significant aspects of brand awareness.
Pay Per Click
Put your brand name in your customers’ line of vision with search advertising. Not only will you increase brand awareness, but search advertising lets you show specific ads to particular audiences based on their needs. And the analytics behind it are rich in detail, so you can see who clicked on your ads, the types of interaction that occurred and whether these users returned later. Plus, customers find search ads to be much less disruptive than, say, pop-up ads.
Start by bidding on keywords for ad placement in Google’s sponsored links. When customers try to Google these keywords, your ads will display at the top of the page.
Even if you don’t receive a lot of clicks, this will make your company more visible and increase brand awareness.
Set up remarketing ads
Remarketing ads work best for finding audiences who have visited your website or mobile app and place your adverts in front of them. If potential customers see your brand everywhere it will create the impressing that you are "bigger" than what you are.
Embrace influencer marketing
Love it or hate it but influencer marketing plays a big roll in consumer trends. Influencer marketing works especially well on Instagram, although you should select the experts you work with carefully. Not every influencer is a good fit for every brand.
Instagram influencers are experts at marketing on this image-based platform. Whether they are doing Instagram influencer marketing for their brand, their products, or a corporate brand, they have massive followings who find their posts engaging and eagerly consume their content daily.
It’s tempting to just choose the Instagram influencer who has the largest amount of followers and generates the highest number of likes, comments, and shares to do Instagram influencer marketing for your brand.
But unless their goals & brand image are aligned with yours, this won’t be a match made in Instagram influencer marketing heaven. The right Instagram influencer marketing hero for your brand is an Instagram influencer with a similar target audience, an Instagram influencer whose image is already representative of what your brand wants to portray.
Guest blog
Write for other websites and put your content in the hands of a brand new audience. Guest post for a blog in a related industry to help new customers discover your brand and find a new source of leads.
Produce consistent content
If you want to increase brand awareness, you need to consistently produce fresh content. When your audience sees new posts from your brand pop up in their social feeds, this increases brand awareness by reminding them about your brand via news and updates. Plus, putting out new content regularly helps your audience see you as an innovative source.
"Host" a social media contest
Contests on social media create excellent opportunities for your brand to increase brand awareness, especially when they invite users to interact with their social communities or earn votes for ideas that they’ve personally contributed themselves.
Create a contest or giveaway that requires contestants to ‘like and share to enter’ or which encourages customers to share posts with their communities for votes. The user-generated content and engagement from these contests will help put your brand out there for all to see.
Engage with customers!
When your customers go to the trouble of contacting your brand, the least you can do is thank them for it. Not only will your customers appreciate the attention, but clever responses also have the potential to go viral. And don’t overlook customers who are asking questions, requesting service, and making complaints on social.
Incentivize referrals
Referral programs offer incentives to customers for getting new customers to join.
Monetary incentives often work well, however, you can offer free service for a month or partner with businesses to offer different incentives and increase brand awareness among different audiences.
Use #hashtags
When you share and distribute content, use hashtags to extend the reach of your post. Make sure you pick hashtags that are popular enough. Research has shown that brands that use hashtags on Twitter increase user engagement by 1.5X while optimal results for Instagram can be obtained with 11 or more hashtags. The numbers will, no doubt, be different for Facebook, Google+ and other platforms.
If you have any ideas that you think should be included, feel free to leave me a note in the comments section below!
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