Posted by Brand promotion in 2020 can be challenging—not only are there more people online, but there are also more brands vying for customers’ attention.
We share seven methods to reach your audience that you may not have fully explored this year but should.
1. Case Studies
Brand promotion is often used as a method to be as sales-forward as possible. But telling potential customers that they should buy your brand isn’t always effective.
Instead, marketers should take a ‘show, don’t tell’ approach to promotion by creating case studies about their products and customers.
A case study is a great tool for conveying how your brand works to add value to your customers while sharing concrete results and testimonials from existing clientele.
For marketers who aren’t used to creating case studies, you can use a case study template to build your brand or product story.
Showing potential customers how your brand works is a much more effective way of promoting your company than by selling at them all the time.
2. Chatbots and Live Chat
Source: ManyChat
Online chatbots are becoming more popular among modern businesses—it is rare to visit a website where a chatbot or live chatbox doesn’t pop up in the corner.
Chatbots are largely used for customer service needs—simple queries can be answered within seconds while complex ones are handed over to a live agent.
But these chatbots are also great tools for promoting your brand—the chatbox can present new deals or share product or service details that visitors may have had to search for otherwise.
Social media apps also include chatbots which automatically reply with product recommendations—thus decreasing the work that marketers would have to do.
Chats can be easily integrated into your content—use a WordPress plugin to create a chatbot for your website or add a third-party application to your social media for the same result.
3. Email Marketing
Source: Wishpond
If there is one takeaway that marketers need to remember in 2020, it is that email marketing still works—it consistently delivers the best ROI, well ahead of other platforms.
For brand promotion campaigns, email marketing needs to be a priority. Start by building lists of people to contact via email—to promote your products, and to spread brand awareness.
Website popups are a great way to generate and convert leads—they’re unmissable and can be customized for the brand’s needs.
Not only are popups a valuable tool for gaining emails, but you can also encourage returning users to fill in further details, thus building out your customer profiles.
With more nuanced profiles, you will better be able to segment your email lists—this will help marketers tailor their email campaigns for better conversion.
And with online tools, marketers can design email templates that can be customized for target groups, instead of creating campaigns from scratch every time.
As a method of brand promotion, email marketing holds a great deal of value—the benefits should not be discounted.
4. Guest Blogging
Blogging has been a staple of content marketing for years now—but while blogs do drive traffic to brand websites, they can’t be expected to work alone.
While social media and email marketing are all active methods to promote blog content, there is another technique that marketers are finding useful—guest posting.
The process of writing posts for websites other than yours—but which fit the niche for your brand—has been picking up pace over the last few years.
As a brand promotion method, guest blogging offers a lot of value—not only do marketers get to appear on another website, but they also link back to their brand site.
This gives the website a boost on search engines and places the marketer and brand as a thought leader within the field.
Creating content for businesses has become one of the more popular online business ideas—if done right, guest posting could promote your brand in circles you wouldn’t otherwise reach.
5. Search Engines
Blogging on your brand website or as a guest blogger has a positive effect on your SEO and SERP.
Search engines are a powerful resource for brands to promote themselves—almost everyone online is going to use search engines during their day.
This means ranking on search engines needs to be a priority when promoting your brand.
Ensure you use the right keywords for your niche in strategic locations in your blog posts—in headlines, subheadings, and image alt tags.
Use longtail keywords more often than not—people use search engines, home speakers, and YouTube to answer questions which use longtail keywords.
Try link building strategies for new blog posts to give your site and content more authority on search engines.
But also look into areas that may be impacting your SERP—check your SEO analytics regularly to see which pages are falling behind and on which keywords.
Aside from SEO statistics, you may also want to examine how else your site is being found by customers and its resulting performance on search engines.
Are you seeing regular traffic to non-blog pages? Are social media posts and email links generating traffic to your site?
Often times, a slow website can impact SERP—test out your site on different computers to find out whether this is an issue and can be rectified.
Search engines are in constant use and ensuring that customers can find your brand on them should be a priority.
6. Social Advertising
Source: SociallyInfused
Startups and small businesses rarely have huge budgets to spend—which is why social advertising is often left for a later date.
But businesses with even the smallest of budgets can create ads on social platforms and improve their reach and conversion rate.
Facebook ads aren’t as expensive as Google or LinkedIn ads, but generate engagement from followers.
For a fairly small investment, social ads can increase follower engagement by a large margin—and they are far easier to create than a billboard or TV ad.
The key to making strong social media ads is to use memorable and attractive imagery. Data visualization, such as charts and graphs, are particularly impactful, as are varied color palettes.
Social advertising has the power to make brand promotion efforts more effective—if they aren’t on marketers’ agendas yet, they will be soon.
7. Webinar Marketing
Source: LaunchSpace
Webinars are all the rage right now—with so many people spending time indoors and online, attending online meetings and talks has become a regular activity.
From a marketing perspective, webinars make for great gated content—live webinars can be recorded to be shared later behind a paywall or via subscription access.
The appeal of being able to watch an exclusive webinar acts as an incentive for people to sign up for your newsletter or to leave their details on your website.
Webinars also place the brand as an educator and thought leader—much like guest blogging does.
And webinars can be created without much investment now—there are a number of webinar platforms that make entering this arena much easier for marketers.
Conclusion
Brand promotion in 2020 can seem like a tricky proposition but these seven methods will make the process of reaching your audience easier.
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