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8 Tips for Building Brand Awareness

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Inkbot Design

7 min readMar 28, 2017

When it comes to marketing brands, there is one fundamental truth that explains the whole deal: if I don’t know you, I won’t buy from you.

To get sales going, one must expose the brand to a broad audience in the right way.

What is the correct way to build brand awareness?

Well, there are lots of practical strategies that modern brands use to put their name on everybody’s lips.

In this article, I’ve collected 8 top tips for building brand awareness in today’s saturated market.

1. Only Target Specific Audiences

It is one of the essential rules in marketing.

Brand awareness campaigns should focus on getting the attention of specific groups of people.

For example, they might be those who visited the website and left their contact data using the landing page or those who were identified as the ideal target audience.

For example, let’s suppose that you sell shoes for running.

In this case, the target audience is pretty much evident: athletes, people who live an active lifestyle, and those who perform runs in the mornings or evenings.

By identifying this audience, the company can adjust the marketing campaign to provide content that encourages to relate to active lifestyles.

Key Takeaway: Identify your target audience and stick to marketing your products to it. Relate to them on a personal level, and they will follow you.

2. Build Social Media Presence

In modern online business, no one can be successful without cultivating the power of social media.

Your brand needs to have a solid presence on those platforms because they enable you to speak directly to your audience.

By connecting with the potential customers directly, one can start relationships and gain insights into what they are looking for in the products.

There are some considerations one must take into account before launching a brand on social media.

First, an appropriate platform must be chosen to resemble the target audience.

Second, a strategy must be developed to incorporate the values of the brand and ensure that you provide customer-centered content.

Third, the success of the marketing campaign must be adequately measured, so one needs to use measurement tools as well.

Key Takeaway: social media presence is vital for a brand to be recognisable and engage in a direct conversation with leads and customers.

3. Referrals

Referrals are one of the most powerful tools for getting the word out there.

According to a survey completed by Ogilvy, Google and TNS, 74% of customers said they viewed word of mouth as an important influencer in their purchasing decisions.

This strategy works perfectly on the Internet as well, as people share knowledge very quickly due to the popularity of social media and online video reviews.

For you, this means an incredible opportunity for building brand awareness.

There are several ways to get the sharing going, with influencers being the most important one.

These people have the power to influence buying decisions of others, so it can be used to spread the word about your great products (here is a Kissmetrics guide for targeting influencers for you to start).

Also, video testimonials can be used to increase transparency and trust.

Key Takeaway: Word of mouth is still an impactful strategy. Tools like video testimonials and influencers build confidence and contribute to a positive perception of your brand, so should be used for building brand awareness.

4. Optimise Your Website

Having a professional, user-friendly, and impressive website is an excellent way to stand out and help keep traffic going.

That’s why your company website should be optimised for the target audience and search engines to be a lead-generation machine.

There are many things to consider when optimising the site, including design, landing pages, and SEO.

The overall design of the brand’s website should be responsible, optimised for mobile use, have social media buttons, and use vibrant colours and fonts.

Remember, there are tonnes of other sites out there, so it is essential to stand out and make your website an online business card.

Next, the landing page should use particular types of colours, fonts, and other elements that increase the chance of having high conversion rates.

There are many great examples of effective landing pages, so you might want to see them as well before you get to designing your own.

Finally, SEO. The website should be optimised for metadata, keywords, title tags, and other techniques to improve the position in the search engines’ results.

Key Takeaway: Use the latest design techniques and marketing knowledge to create a lead-generating website for the brand.

5. Make Your Brand Easily Identifiable

A strong brand identity means that the customers will quickly and easily recognise it.

To ensure this, one must create a logo design that is consistent with other branding elements (inconsistency will create confusion).

Also, it is increasingly popular nowadays to tell the story of the brand to the customers to make them relate to it.

There are many examples of great brand story examples, so check them out to see how you can make your own attractive and engaging.

Key Takeaway: make it easy for the customers to recognise your brand by being consistent and using effective marketing techniques such as brand history.

6. Hold an event

Regardless of the industry you’re operating in, holding an event designed for raising awareness of your brand is an effective way to get people talking about you.

For example, you can host something as simple as Christmas party or as sophisticated as a workshop or contest.

Whatever type of the event you select, it needs to be based on your brand (you can even adopt a theme for the party to make it more interesting as well).

One of the main benefits of holding these events is the opportunity to speak with the customers face-to-face.

This is not to say that social media is ineffective but rather acknowledge that real communication is better for customers to “feel” the personality of your brand.

For example, you can arrange a fundraiser to show that the brand cares about the community and is ready to give back.

Key Takeaway: Live events can be used for some “face to face” communication with customers and letting them see the essence of the business.

7. Focus on Content

Let me say it once again: content is a king of contemporary online marketing because it represents your brand in front of thousands of prospects.

It is, therefore, essential to make it engaging, interesting, and useful in generating leads.

There are many other critical roles performed by the content in marketing that you can take advantage of, including:

• Enhancing opportunities for visitor engagement
• Providing viewers with a reason to come back
• Improving searchability of the brand by engaging search engine crawlers
• Building expertise, trust and credibility in the brand among the viewers

There are many additional benefits for raising brand awareness delivered by content marketing.

As described by ProofHQ, it can have a phenomenal return on investment, supports other digital marketing channels, contributes to SEO, and draws attention.

Just don’t forget to follow the golden rule: every piece of content you post out there should be helpful for prospects and existing customers.

Key Takeaway: because of a broad range of benefits provided by content for marketing, a brand must take advantage of content to build awareness.

8. Give away Stuff

People love receiving free things, and marketers are well aware of that (there is even a term Giveaway Marketing).

This means that your brand might benefit from giving away some stuff that could be useful for your target audience.

For example, if you launch a free giveaway that costs around $100 or even less, hundreds and potentially thousands of people could show an interest.

To increase your chances of success with this strategy, you must remember that the stuff you’re about to give away must be useful for the people you target; something that could help them in their business, maybe?

This Rignite article that describes examples of successful giveaway campaigns showed that it could be discounts, gift cards, and even t-shirts of the favourite sports franchise.

Although one cannot rely on this strategy to bring a long-term success, it still can be used to get people talking about the brand.

Key Takeaway: launching a campaign with free giveaways is a great strategy to build an email list and boost engagement.

The Bottom Line

If you’re looking to boost brand awareness to improve sales and advance your business, feel free to use these strategies to help you stay ahead of the competition.

Just don’t forget to track everything you do to know what’s working and what needs improvement.

As you can see, building brand awareness is sometimes as much as science as it is art, but you can get all required benefits if you work hard enough to build a significant presence.

Author Bio: Lucy Benton is the high skilled editor, the proofreader who currently works at BestEssayTips. She enjoys sharing tips and stories. She studied Creative and Professional Writing at the Maharishi University of Management. Now she is writing for marketing and business resources. If you’re interested in working with Lucy, you can email her at lucy.m.benton@gmail[dot]com.

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