Ideas for your Brand Awareness Campaign
What is brand awareness?
Brand awareness is the extent to which consumers are familiar with a product or a brand in general. Studies show that 71% of people are more likely to buy from brands that they are familiar with.
Proactively building brand awareness is a great way to make your business stand out in a world where consumers are spoilt for choice and are constantly getting bombarded with ads.
Brand awareness, when paired with social proof, is a golden combination that can almost guarantee success in any industry. Social proof is the idea that humans are conditioned to copy each other. It’s the reason why products like iPhones have become so wildly popular despite being more expensive than their competitors.
If a consumer has a degree of familiarity with your products, and on top of it, they also see their friends using it, you will naturally become their brand of choice.
How to build brand awareness: 10 Effective Strategies
1. Get featured on popular publications
Getting your business featured on a well-known blog, magazine, or newspaper is a fantastic way of building both brand awareness and social proof.
Can you imagine if someone were to Google your name and the first thing they came across was an article about you on Forbes. How do you think that would affect their perception of your business?
There are many ways to get your business featured on authority publications. The easiest and most straightforward is through sponsored posts, although it can get quite costly (particularly if you’re targeting high DA sites). An alternative would be by signing up on HARO and responding to interview queries.
HARO is a platform used by journalists globally to find quotes to use in their stories. Whenever your quotes get featured, they’ll usually give a shoutout to your business and sometimes even link to its website, which can help with SEO. Many authority publications frequently use HARO, including Forbes and Inc. Magazine.
2. Create shareable content
Creating shareable content is one of the easier brand awareness tactics to execute. Such content may include infographics, videos, memes, e-books, “how to” articles, etc. You don’t even have to create them yourself, you can outsource the work to freelancers.
Fiverr is a great place to find unique and creative freelancing services inexpensively. For example, for just about $10 you can find people to create original memes for your social media pages.
Ensure that the content is packed with so much value, whether entertainment or educational, people cannot resist sharing them on group chats and social media.
3. Publish blog posts
Publishing blog posts is another great way of building brand awareness. Most consumers do substantial research prior to buying anything. You can get your brand in front of their eyes by publishing elaborate posts that answer their questions.
For example, if you have a graphic design business, you can publish posts such as “top 10 logo ideas for small businesses”, a topic that might catch the attention of someone looking to get a logo.
The key to a successful blog is doing comprehensive keyword research to find frequently searched queries on Google and other search engines. SEMrush is an excellent tool to use.
Come up with a list of high-volume low-competition keywords that are related to your products, and then make an effort to publish at least 1 in-depth article covering them every week. If you don’t have the time to write the articles yourself, you can outsource the work on Upwork or Fiverr.
4. Search engine optimization
Many people’s purchase journey starts on Google. Just like by publishing blog posts, SEO can help you get your brand in front of consumers right at that moment when they’re actively researching products. That’s when they’re most likely to convert.
Aim to rank your site on the first page of the Google search results for all search queries which are related to your business. If you have a graphic design business, you can target keywords like:
- “best graphic design services”
- “graphic designers near me”
- “where to get a logo”
Many small businesses purposely ignore SEO because of how laborious it can be. If you don’t have the time or expertise to do it yourself, you can also outsource the work to freelancers. Focusing on SEO will give a huge boost to your organic traffic and you may no longer even need to spend money on ads.
5. Create an online omnipresence
An online omnipresence means being in all the places where a potential customer might go searching for you.
For example, if they do a Google search, your website should come up in the results. If they go to Facebook or Instagram, your pages should also come up. Even if they go to niche directories or review sites like Yelp, you should still have a presence. That’s how you build a memorable brand.
To help build your online omnipresence, make sure that your business has the following:
- A website
- An active social media page
- A Google My Business page
- Directory listings
- A review page on Yelp (or similar sites)
- A blog covering relevant topics
- Featured articles on popular publications
Related: How to get a free website, domain, hosting, and business emails
6. Social media contests
You can do monthly contests on social media where your followers get a chance to win various prizes by sharing your posts or using your hashtags. The more lucrative your prizes, the more people are going to participate.
If you can get just 15 people with about 1,000 followers to share your posts, they could be seen by up to 15,000 people from their networks. The value of publicity and social proof you’ll get from that will be worth more than the cost of the prizes. 71% of people have made a purchase decision based on a social media recommendation.
7. Form cross-promotion partnerships
Cross-promotion is one of the most underrated brand awareness strategies. It involves partnering with other businesses that you’re not in direct competition with and then promoting each other.
For example, if you have a graphic design business, you can partner with web developers since you’re not competing with each other, but target a similar audience. Once the partnership terms have been agreed upon, the next step will be to promote each other on your social media pages, via blog posts, email, etc.
Cross-promotion is a great strategy for small businesses that have a limited marketing budget since it barely has any costs.
8. Start a referral program
A referral program leverages the power of other people’s social networks to achieve its marketing objectives. You can start a program where anyone who refers customers to you earns a small commission from the sale.
Such a program will incentive people to go all out promoting your business to their social circles since there’s something in it for them. You’ll benefit not only through an increase in sales, but by gaining social proof and brand awareness.
Companies in the SaaS space have perfected this approach and often offer ridiculously high commission rates to motivate people to work hard promoting them. For example, HubSpot pays affiliates up to $1,000 for successful referrals. As you can imagine, a large chunk of the company’s sales is driven by them.
The higher your commission rates, the more people are likely to sign up to your program and be motivated to spread your word.
9. Paid online ads
Although running an ads campaign is an effective strategy, it does come at a premium. You need a fairly large budget to sustain a campaign for an extended period, especially if your goal is just brand awareness.
Most advertising platforms including Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and Facebook Ads have a wide array of targeting options to help you reach your buyer persona with your messages. You can target users based on their location, age, gender, industry, income class, and so many other factors.
Display ads have been shown to be the most effective in creating brand awareness since they’re easier to digest at a glance. You can also use videos to create engaging ads that are more informative.
Check out this article to learn how to get over $1,000 in free advertising credit to run your campaigns on Google, LinkedIn, and several other platforms.
10. Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is the fastest-growing form of digital marketing, according to Forbes. More and more companies are abandoning traditional marketing tactics such as paid advertising in favor of it. It not only helps businesses drive sales, but also build brand awareness and increase their social proof.
Many people trust the recommendations of their favorite influencers as much as they trust their friends’ recommendations.
You can find influencers to partner with on networks like Upfluence and GRIN, or by manually searching for them on social media. Make sure to only work with influencers who represent your brand’s core values.
If you have a local business then you’ll get the best ROI by working with local influencers whose following is mostly from the same location as your business. That way their recommendation can have a direct impact on your sales.
