Strong brand awareness for your business means that people can recall your brand and products easily. Brand awareness is essential for consumers to remember your brand in relation to a specific product. This is important to create trust and drive conversions.
Set off your branding activities with a strong push in the new year, and you could make 2021 a success in terms of business growth. Your business needs to build brand awareness for several key reasons:
It increases visitors to your website.
It increases conversions.
It increases word-of-mouth marketing and brand referrals.
You can influence your brand's presence using different strategies. Here are several helpful ways to bring your brand into the spotlight in the coming year.
1. Start with a plan.
Having a plan makes it easier to create a successful branding strategy for 2020. During the planning phase, ask yourself the following questions:
What are your branding and marketing goals?
Who is your audience?
What channels will you use to build brand awareness?
Creating a plan will help you figure out if you're on track to achieving your goals. Understanding your audience is vital because your actions will depend on their preferences. Today, millennials make up a significant part of the global audience. Your strategies must consider their values and needs. Creating a plan will give you a solid foundation that will help launch all your other activities.
2. Create personalization.
You're more likely to make people remember you if they feel like you're paying attention to them individually. Creating personalized communication is an effective way to improve brand recall. People are so overwhelmed by impersonal marketing communication that personalized content stands out. Use CRM software and email marketing services to address users by their names in marketing communication.
Integrate analytics into your website to get data about your audience. You can use data from your CRM tools and analytics to segment your email or text marketing list. Segmenting your list based on users' preferences, queries and purchase histories is powerful. Text and email segmentation lets you send out customized offers and news that appeals to consumers. Personalization shows that you are paying attention to people and are reaching out to them as individuals. In a world where marketing messages are forced on people, this can create better brand recall.
3. Focus on content marketing.
Content Marketing is at the heart of any business's online digital marketing efforts. Without content marketing, companies need to incur high advertising expenses repeatedly.
You're also unlikely to see any benefit from advertisements if your site doesn't have great content to back them up. Creating content needs to be a priority when trying to build brand awareness. When creating content, it's important to remember that people are research-oriented. You need to produce great content to keep people on your site. Focus on offering in-depth information that gives value.
Content through blogs, guest posts and social media can build an online presence and boost your brand's SEO. There are two compelling content types that businesses should consider using in 2020:
- Video content: Video content gets a high amount of engagement and is very compelling. With the rise of internet-enabled mobile phones, more people than ever can create and watch videos on the go. It's essential to add video content as part of your content strategy because it's engaging. It also gives your brand a face and a personality, which in turn makes it more humanizing.
- Interactive content: It's important to stop thinking of your audience as people who must be fed promotional content. You can build a lasting relationship with your customers by interacting with them. Use interactive content as a way to engage customers to co-create with them and to improve brand recall. Interactive content, such as polls and contests, tells customers that you care about their opinion. It makes your brand more memorable and increases engagement.
You can harness the power of videos and interactive content using social media. Virtually all major social media platforms have "Stories" as part of their features. Stories are images or short videos that are visible for 24 hours. You can add polls, hashtags, and other features to let users interact with your brand.
4. Develop a voice and personality.
You need to humanize your brand and make it relatable to people. One way to do this is to create a personality for your business on social media and your website. Try to incorporate humor to spark emotions in people. Try to build content in 2021 that focuses on evoking emotions in people. Emotions, such as hope, joy and curiosity, can make your brand memorable.
The key to winning people over is going to depend on building relationships. Make your brand feel like a real person and generate emotions through content to become memorable.
5. Optimize for mobile.
If your site isn't optimized for mobile screens, then you are likely to lose traffic to your site Most people use their smartphones as the primary means of getting information. They also visit sites and make purchases on their phones. This means you need to ensure your site and content are suitable for mobile screens. Mobile-friendly content and mobile responsiveness allow people to consume content easily.
Make sure you use popups, chat support, and other features that work well on both smaller screens and desktops.
6. Carry out omnichannel marketing.
In order to stand out today, you need to build brand awareness on multiple channels. People are active on different channels, and you could miss out on an interested audience by relying on a single channel for traffic. Create effective marketing strategies that cover several platforms. You can use a social media management tool to post to different sites at once. Stay active and participate in discussions on forums, Q&A sites and other places. You can create content, or leverage advertising options, to create brand awareness.
7. Leverage user-generated content.
Getting people to trust you can make your brand memorable. People believe their peers more than they do marketing messages. So, using content generated by your users and audience can build social proof and create better brand recall. Leverage reviews, blog posts and social media posts as sources of user-generated content.
8. Showcase your values.
Your audience, especially the millennial segment, is conscious of ethical behavior. They care about quality and price, but they also care about a business's values. Feature your values in marketing communication and make it a key part of your corporate identity.
9. Build loyalty.
Businesses survive and grow by building long-term relationships. Creating brand loyalty means you'll get brand advocates who will create awareness for your brand. An effective way to build loyalty is to create membership sites.
Membership site platforms let you build a brand community where people can share their experiences. It creates a sense of belonging and exclusivity, which boosts brand awareness.
As the new year arrives, your business is poised to capture opportunities that can help it grow. It would help if you started now to build brand awareness. Use the strategies and ideas given here to develop brand recall in your audience. When people know your brand and share it online, you'll see a powerful impact on your business's success.