5 of the most powerful ways to let your potential consumers know you exist
With the gathering, analysis and interpretation of data sitting at the top of the totem pole of modern marketing priorities, a hard-to-define concept like “brand awareness” can end up sounding like so much esoteric vagueness in the ears of those coming up with budgeting priorities.
The relative subjectivity of the concept of brand awareness and the resultant imprecision of the parameters used to track it have led to brand awareness often taking a backseat to campaign goals that provide more measurable metrics.
The thing is though, brand awareness has possibly never been more important than in the modern world, crowded as it is with competition for attention and engagement. With your potential consumers on the receiving end of bumper-to-bumper branding messages – all day, every day – your brand has to be an ever-present and memorable force to get its share of the market’s focus.
This is why we always recommend keeping brand awareness in mind, even as you’re focusing on brand engagement. Luckily, many of the tactics proven to encourage the latter are also known to promote the former.
Tactics like…
Blogging
Content marketing has quickly become the go-to buzzword defining our industry, and some experts have even gone so far as to state that all marketing is content marketing.
As one of the powerhouse pioneers of content marketing in the digital age, the importance of the blog in a modern, online marketing strategy cannot be overstated. The blog is a multi-purpose tool in the prepared marketer’s belt. Able to encourage engagement, build thought leadership and establish authority, it also provides a convenient contact point for your target market and, if regularly updated, keeps your brand current in the eyes of its audience.
Build a popular enough blog that keeps visitors’ returning for another dose of your brand’s character, charms or industry insights, and you could find it carrying the weight of your brand awareness strategy on its own, very capable shoulders.
Social Media Contests
People like their friends. They like games. They like getting free stuff.
They’re also quite fond of enjoying their fifteen minutes of fame.
Combine all four and get some use out of those social media accounts that far too many brands leave in the limbo of indecision.
Holding contests on social media is a tried and true method of both building your social media fan base as well as encouraging fan engagement. Keep your branding and your messaging consistent (and thus, more memorable) and ask your fans to post selfies of them using or displaying your products in unique ways.
Everyone will have fun, you’ll be turning your fans into brand advocates and you’ll be giving yourself the exposure that leads to increased awareness.
It’s a win-win-win situation.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising
Over and above being a great way to attract leads and get traffic to your website, PPC advertising is also a strong awareness-building tool. Putting your brand’s name in front of consumers, as a potential solution to their immediate problems, is a rarely mentioned side-effect of running PPC campaigns with well-targeted keywords.
Tweak your AdWords groups to ensure that your brand name is visibly obvious to searchers and, even if they don’t click, you’ll have planted a seed in their solution-seeking minds.
Remarketing Campaigns
Building awareness isn’t a one-and-done activity. Awareness has to be established and then maintained.
With the entire world seemingly simultaneously seeking the consumer’s attention, it’s too easy to lose your consumers if you forget to remind them that you are there.
Remarketing is a tactic whereby visitors to your website will continue to be exposed to your brand’s online banners and other advertising, even after they have left your site. That they visited your site means that they’re obviously at least aware of your brand. The continued exposure keeps you top-of-mind and ensures that you won’t quickly be forgotten.
Paid Social Advertising
If you’ve been paying attention to international politics, you’d have heard about the recent stink made of Russia purchasing $100,000 worth of Facebook and Twitter advertising. They then used the platform to promote messages that sewed discord throughout America’s 2016 election season and beyond.
Russia utilised a bit of a shotgun approach, building awareness on behalf of a number of divisive characters that allegedly aided them in polarising the electorate.
The point is that as the impact of an organic social presence has dulled over the years, paid social advertising has become far more effective at communicating with a specific and highly targeted audience.
With 30% of South Africa active on Facebook (that’s about 16 million people) and more than 2 billion across the world, your brand has an enormous pool of consumers to tap into on social media.
Use compelling imagery, clear calls to action, and make sure to avoid getting too heavy-handed with hard selling, and social media platforms are perfect for building brand among a receptive audience.
Conclusion
It may be hard to measure, but as long as brand awareness is kept in mind as a goal, you need only slightly modify existing campaign tactics in order to accommodate the growth strategies for your brand awareness.
Most tactics that encourage engagement can also encourage awareness.
This list is by no means an exhaustive one, so if you want to discover more about brand awareness, its importance and the strategies best able to achieve it, contact Wetpaint Advertising today!