Discover How to Build a Successful Brand Awareness Strategy
Have you ever stopped to question why you consider yourself to be a Pepsi person?
Do you find yourself possessing a subconscious loyalty toward Burger King over any other fast food company?
Is the coffee at Starbucks really that amazing, or are there other underlying factors that play into your acute allegiance to purchasing a Cinnamon Dolce Latte every morning?
The concept of brand awareness means more than name recognition and how much you spend on your advertising budget. It’s a combination of all the traits that play into how consumers perceive, feel, or relate to the overall message behind the products or services you’re trying to sell to them.
Building brand awareness establishes trust, confidence, and loyalty with your company. But implementing a successful brand awareness strategy requires a bit more than putting up some billboards or investing in a primetime, local television commercial spot.
Businesses that invest in a strategic digital marketing campaign can do wonders for improving brand awareness within their community while targeting relevant, ideal customers. A variety of digital marketing tactics can help emphasize your company’s culture, message, and other defining details that promote engagement, trust, and loyalty.
Remember, brand awareness is more than increasing name recognition or improving familiarity with your company’s logo – it’s about developing a notion that separates your business from competitors.
Here are some tips for building a successful brand awareness strategy!
Your Digital Home Base: Optimize Your Website
Before you can even think about organizing community events, hiring quasi-famous spokespeople, or mulling over any Hollywood product placement, the root of any successful brand awareness strategy begins with a website that’s fully functional, expertly designed, and search-engine optimized.
Think the quality of your company’s web design has nothing to do with establishing trust, loyalty, and lead generation?
These statistics suggest otherwise:
- 75% of consumers base the credibility of a business on how their website looks and operates.
- The average website visitor takes 0.05 seconds to base an opinion on your company’s website.
- 94% of website visitors report web design being the reason they mistrust a website.
- 60% of consumers state that website functionality is important.
- 44% of website visitors will immediately leave a website where contact information is missing or isn’t accessible.
What do all of these statistics emphasize about your website? That it’s the first impression many consumers will have toward your business and your brand.
A high performing and fully optimized website doesn’t just pass first impression tests with flying colors; It also works toward establishing more trust and confidence with your target audience, helping you stand out from the competition.
So let’s get to the checklist you need to optimize your company’s website!
Built-In SEO | Search engine optimization (SEO) is the digital practice of generating website leads through organic search results. By incorporating user and mobile-friendly design elements and implementing relevant and high-ranking target keywords into the content and layout, your website will appeal more to search engine crawlers that evaluate its relevance and functionality. This determines how your website ranks in organic search results!
Responsive Design | Your website’s appearance and performance are big factors that determine where it shows up in Google. The better your website looks and functions, the more time visitors will spend on it. And when your responsive website is specifically designed to inform and compel visitors into utilizing your company’s products or services, your business will experience better brand awareness and lead generation.
Branded Web Design | In addition to your website looking and performing at its best, you also want your web design to distinguish and emphasize your brand identity. Branded web design is what makes a beautiful, top quality website feel synonymous with your brand in the eyes of website visitors. When the design and content of your website reflect your company’s message, personality, and values, your company’s identity will be strongly embedded into the minds and decisions of your target audience.
Scheduled Maintenance | Once your SEO-focused website is up and running, you’ll need to ensure that routine website design maintenance is performed on a strict schedule to guarantee optimal functionality. From monitoring web traffic numbers to tracking your search result rankings, professional website maintenance will help you keep tabs on your brand awareness progress and overall user experience.
Content Is King: Creative, Original, & Engaging Content
Let’s think of your brand awareness strategy as meeting people at a party. If web design and optimization are how you’re dressed and presenting yourself to others, then content is the substance of whatever conversations you share with attendees. And if you’ve ever attended a party, you know there’s no quicker way to lose interest in someone if whatever they’re talking about is, at the least, boring or uninspiring.
Content marketing is an effective component of any successful brand awareness strategy, providing an opportunity to distinguish yourself from the rest of the pack in the eyes of prospects and target audiences.
Creative, compelling, and original content personifies your business, making consumers empathize with your company’s cause, values, and goals, driving them to work with you if those characteristics align with their own. And you don’t have to be Shakespeare or Speilberg to produce creative and engaging content that emphasizes your brand.
In addition to effectively demonstrating and explaining your brand through the writing and design of your official website, original, brand-reinforcing content can come in a variety of forms and mediums, including:
- Writing blog articles involving topics relevant to your industry, services, or products
- Hire a professional photography or videography provider to showcase any behind-the-scenes looks of your business, such as on-site or in-store images, before-and-after photo galleries, staff or team pictures, etc.
- Produce resourceful how-to or any tutorial videos relevant to your industry that can be shared on your social media profiles or YouTube channel
- Launch a podcast that focuses on industry-relevant topics that will pique the interest of your target audience
- Create compelling infographics or downloadable guides that can inform or educate your consumers on any interesting topics or statistics relevant to the services you provide
Get Yourself Out There: Paid Ads, Social Media, & Email Marketing
You’ve got the immaculate-looking website and the overly intriguing content. Now all you need to do is continue to spread the word about your brand!
Driving more traffic to your website and ultimately increasing brand awareness often requires active pursuits on your company’s end to reach the eyes and attention of those who would’ve otherwise never known about your business.
Getting your company more out there can be achieved through a variety of strategies, including paid ads, social media, email marketing, and traditional branding.
Paid Ads | Paid digital advertising can help get your website straight to the top of local, relevant search engine results and show up on the social media feeds of your target audience. Paid ads also offer the ability to retarget website visitors or other potential customers who were previously interested in utilizing your services in the past.
Social Media | Marketing your company through social media campaigns allows you to focus and target key demographics that identify with your brand. However, with the amount of competition on social combined with algorithms that make it difficult for businesses to get their content seen, you have to be willing to invest either a lot of time engaging or at least a little money to grab attention on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Social media advertising can draw more attention to your company in the eyes of specific target audiences. Ad campaigns allow you to place content in front of an audience with your chosen demographics, ranging from location, income, interests, age, status, and a number of other characteristics.
Email Marketing | Establishing direct lines of communication is imperative to any successful brand awareness campaign. Email marketing provides you with exactly that! Utilizing email lists can do wonders for converting new customers, and remarketing to previous ones keeps them informed on your company’s latest updates and promotions.
Physical Branding | Of course, you should always focus on spreading the word about your company in the real world as much as you do in the virtual one. Branded vehicles, yard flags, in-person events, charitable efforts – all of these elements of physical branding will only benefit your brand awareness strategy, especially on a local level.
Increase Your Brand Awareness With Triton Commerce!
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and establishing your company as the premiere, local resource of whatever industry your business resides in will take plenty of time and effort.
At Triton Commerce, we specialize in helping businesses of all sizes increase their brand awareness, providing them with custom digital marketing solutions that will cater to their specific needs.
If you’re looking to expand your brand and improve your lead generation, contact Triton Commerce today to receive a free Digital Marketing Plan demonstrating how our services will boost your brand awareness!