Posted by For most companies, achieving the same brand awareness level as giant corporations such as Apple, Nike, and Microsoft is not an attainable goal.
However, this does not mean you can not boost your brand awareness for greater recognition.
What is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness is to what extent consumers correctly associate a product or service with a company.
When potential customers are aware of your brand, they actively look for information about it. This is preferable to having them search generically for your products or services.
Between Brand Awareness Versus Brand Recognition?
Brand recognition is when users recognize your brand based on visuals such as colors and logos. For example, if you see a yellow M on a red background, you know it is McDonald’s.
Brand awareness goes a step further. Not only do consumers remember the brand name, but they also recall their experiences with the company and how the brand’s offerings helped them.
Advertising and marketing campaigns from companies whose target market has a level of brand awareness elicit emotions, feelings, and meaning.
Below are seven marketing strategies to boost your company’s brand awareness and increase your bottom line.
1. Focus on SEO and Content Marketing
Publishing valuable and relevant content demonstrates to your target audience that you are an expert in your niche and adds authority to your brand.
The content you write, promote, and share should offer value and be actionable. Focus on the right keywords to ensure that your site shows up in the search engine results pages for users looking to find what you are offering.
Neil Patel describes the relationship between content marketing and SEO as a conversation between two people.
He adds that SEO makes the demands that content marketing fulfills. Keywords are a fundamental component of SEO that are researched, utilized, and tracked.
Content marketing is the process by which keywords are applied and employed. Create quality content written for humans with the keywords and phrases you are targeting strategically placed.
Writing stellar content can attract backlinks from high-authority domains to your website.
SEO is more technical and requires on-site optimization, while content marketing needs to provide users with a great experience.
As you can see, SEO and content marketing fit together like a hand and glove. One without the other is not enough to boost your brand awareness.
They must be used to complement each other. For example, providing Google with a sitemap is a technical SEO component.
What does the sitemap do for users? It helps them easily find and access the content they are looking for on your website.
Keep up with the digital marketing trends, especially voice search. With innovative voice-enabled smart speaker technologies such as Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa, voice search is likely to become even more popular.
TechCrunch predicts that by 2022, 55% of households will own a smart speaker. Consider your keywords carefully when optimizing for voice search.
Longer, more natural-sounding phrases are better for voice search. People tend to use abbreviations when they type but use full sentences when they speak.
2. Utilize Automated Processes
Your brand’s most valuable resource is time. Use it efficiently, wisely, and strategically. As time is money, using automation:
- Reduces or eliminates time-consuming, redundant, complicated processes, and human errors.
- Maximizes your marketing outreach.
- Increases customer acquisition efforts.
Businesses of all sizes need to have a consistent presence on all the major social media platforms and perform many activities to maintain a competitive edge.
For smaller companies, it is impossible to be everywhere and do everything at the same time. Luckily, marketing automation is no longer only for large brands.
There are cost-effective automated systems available for businesses of all sizes. Any company’s success, especially in the new remote workforce era, depends upon teams of all sizes working together to solve problems and contribute ideas.
For example, automated website backup systems are more convenient than manual systems. Having backups can be the difference between a total loss and a quick recovery.
Automated backups can be set to perform backups at optimal intervals.
3. Enhance the User Experience and Improve Customer Satisfaction
Be right 99% of the time but make one mistake, and you might be surprised at the damage that error can have on your brand. Or maybe not.
Although it is nearly impossible never to get something wrong, you should strive to go above and beyond your customers’ expectations to minimize harmful damage.
Below are several ways to focus on positive user experiences with your site:
- Choose easy-to-read fonts and colors.
- Compress images and use the correct image format.
- Use clear and valuable calls-to-action.
- Ensure that your site is mobile-responsive.
Always work to keep a positive brand image in your consumers’ minds.
4. Focus on Site Speed
How fast web pages load is a ranking factor in Google because it plays a significant role in user satisfaction. Web pages that do not load quickly enough will result in high bounce rates.
The longer it takes pages to load, the less the chance of users hanging around and the more frustrated they will become.
Google prefers websites with faster loading speeds and ranks those sites higher in search. Your website performance matters.
It plays a vital role in influencing your search engine rankings. For example, Google prefers fast websites and gives those higher rankings in search results.
Below are several ways to speed up your website:
- Use the WordPress platform, the most popular content management system.
- Optimize images before uploading them.
- Implement browser caching.
- Position JavaScript at the end of CSS or HTML documents so that other content and visuals load first.
- Compress your website and reduce its overall size with the Gzip file format.
Rather than trying to make changes to speed up your site all at once, it is best to take a slower approach to improve your site’s performance.
Implementing changes over time will make it easier to identify the cause of errors than if you were to make all changes simultaneously.
To get started, test how long it takes your web pages to load. Use tools such as GTmetrix and PageSpeed Insights to measure how well your pages perform.
5. Write Guest Posts on Influential Blogs
If you want to expand your reach beyond your own readers to boost your brand’s awareness, an excellent vehicle is guest posting.
Getting published on another site with a shared audience enhances your authority as an expert in your niche.
When you write valuable and relevant content that appears on other high-profile, well-known, or popular websites, you are bringing more awareness to your brand.
Most sites that accept guest posts include an author box where your name, a short bio, and often a link back to your website are included.
The old saying “we are judged by the company we keep” holds true for guest blogging. Writing memorable, valuable, and relevant posts on others’ sites will expose new audiences to your brand.
6. Leverage the Power of Micro-Influencers
We already know that growing brand awareness is the first step of the sales funnel process. If potential customers do not know your brand exists, you will attract fewer leads and see fewer conversions.
Of the numerous digital marketing options to grow brand awareness, influencer marketing is close to the top of the food chain.
Micro-influencers are people who do not have enormous followings as celebrities and stars. However, they do generally see higher engagement levels than macro-influencers.
Users find micro-influencers more relatable and are therefore more likely to trust the products and services they promote.
Research and analyze the followers, engagement level, and authenticity of micro-influencers in your niche.
Try to find a partner who shares your target audience and can represent your brand energetically and authentically.
Are You Ready to Improve Your Brand’s Awareness?
Improving brand awareness will not happen overnight. It is an ongoing process that takes time, energy, and persistence.
Present your brand consistently across all channels, remain authentic, follow the above tips, and in time you will boost your brand awareness and attract a loyal audience.
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