Content marketing is the creation of information and content and how this can be shared across different formats
Brand awareness is the recognition of a brand or business by its name, logo, or any other defining features. Being able to recognise a brand or business by these features boosts a brand above its competitiors. Brand awareness can be considered the first step of the customer journey, if customers are aware of your brand or products, they are more likely to buy into them.
By elevating your brand awareness, it can enable you to learn different ways to grow your business and its success. There are 3 things you ideally want your customer to know or recognise:
- Your brand name
- The products or services you are offering
- The attribute that puts you above your competitors
To create your brand awareness campaign and achieve these three points, you need to be giving informed and consistent communication to your customers. Firstly, you need to know what kind of awareness your brand already has before you can start work on improving it. Are you a brand-new business? Or have been around a little while and have some kind of following (even if it is small)?
To give you an indication of this you can look at things like your social media accounts and any way that you communicate to your customers: –
- Your mailing list — how many people have signed up to receive communications from you
- Your social media — how many people follow you on social networks like Facebook and Instagram
- Social listening — how many people are talking about your brand online
- Your website hits — how many unique visitors you get to your site each month
- Your search data — how many people search for your brand name in Google and other search engines.
These are all measurable aspects so it doesn’t matter where you are starting from, once you have improved your brand awareness, you will be able to see the results in these figures. On your brand awareness journey, assess your starting point and think about the following methods and how you can implement these into your business, if you don’t already:
- Use guest posting sites to spread your content – guest posting is the process of writing and pitching blog posts for another publication. You can publish your content on someone’s blog and add links back to your brand. There are many sites out there that will host your content, so it is best to make a note of which platforms specialise in which industries and have the audiences that you are looking for. Sites like Neil Patel, BubbleSEO and My Blog Guest have great sites to begin your guest posting.
- Look at your social media presence – make sure you are maximising content on your social media for the following you already have. Are you making the most of these followers? It is important to post good, shareable content with good graphics. If you post incentives for them to tag a friend or share to their stories – this is an organic way of increasing your brand awareness.
- Develop a voice for your brand – whatever angle you are going to resonate whether it be, funny, emotional, smart, or sentimental, it is imperative that your stick to a particular style for your customers to trust in the brand.
- Start a podcast – podcasts are a great type of marketing and are now very popular. They can give great insight into a brand and allows the customer to see what they are buying into. The more value you can add to their lives, no matter what channel, the more likely they are to invest time and money with your brand.
- Take part in brand partnerships – collaborating with other brands can be a great way to introduce yourself to a new audience and if you have the same values as the other company, their customers are sure to be interested in you too! This is beneficial for both parties and builds trust with both customer bases.
- Give something away for free – entice your audience in by engaging with a competition. This could be encouraging them to share your website or post with friends, or even a freebie for someone. Bringing in the communication and interest of customers, will bring in more interest than the price of giving 1 product or service for free.
By investing time in your brand awareness, you will create an established brand that will meet the needs of your customers and more importantly keep them interested. By doing it in stages makes it a simple process to achieving a great brand, and remember you don’t have to do it alone – make it easier and more effective by using tools like AI Guest Posts, social media analytics, podcasts and collaborations with other brands!
