7 Tips for Building a Brand Awareness Strategy

Building a brand awareness strategy is essential to growing your business. But how do you do it? Read on to find out.

We are living in the Age Of Brands. Brands are greater the sum of their parts. They deliver a consistent, reliable experience.

Brands offer an identifiable, memorable product or service. It’s brand awareness that inspired Kraft to buy Cadbury for $19.5 billion. To truly capitalize on the power and recognizability of the brand, a brand awareness strategy must be implemented.

A brand awareness strategy ensures your efforts are as efficient as possible. It’s hard to measure success when you don’t know your goal.

Whether you’re launching your first startup or taking your brand to the next level, here are some tips on how to create a successful, actionable brand awareness strategy.

How To Implement A Successful Brand Awareness Strategy

Increasing brand awareness is not as easy as it used to be in the early days of the internet and eCommerce. There were far fewer brands and business owners on social media. There were far fewer content creators scrambling for the top page in SERPs.

There are more opportunities for business owners and marketers now than any other time in history, luckily. Follow these tips for generating brand awareness, and you’ll be raking in leads, conversions, and inbound links before you know it.

Decide on Your Goals

An effective brand awareness strategy begins by defining what you’re hoping to accomplish. Your goals will help determine the rest of your brand building campaign.

If you’re hoping to be known as a thought-leader in your industry, guest posts and inbound marketing are your best bet.

If you’re simply trying to be seen by a wider audience, social media marketing might be a better use of your time.

If you’re trying to cast your brand in a certain light, perhaps original artwork and content creation can showcase your brand the way you want to be seen.

Setup a Schedule

Business owners and marketers have too much to do at the best of times. Attempting to build brand awareness without a strategy runs the risk of your efforts becoming just one more activity in an already crowded workday.

Instead, make building brand awareness part of your daily or weekly routine.

An example of a schedule for brand awareness strategy might look like:

• Monday: Send a message to your mailing list.
• Tuesday: Write a blog post.
• Wednesday: Engage with your niche on social media.
• Thursday: Write a guest post on another blog or website.
• Friday: Post thought-leadership to networking sites like LinkedIn.

These brand awareness strategy steps can be rearranged or modified depending on what your goals are.

Segment Your Audience

Digital marketing offers unparalleled possibilities for segmenting our audiences. This is one of the most powerful brand-building tools at our disposal. After all, the words and images that will move a 32-year old housewife from New Jersey are very different from the problems plaguing a Fortune 500 CEO.

To segment your audience effectively, make sure your buyer personas are up-to-date. Then you can create a brand awareness strategy to meet each of your potential demographics you’re trying to reach.

If you’re running an online discount business, consider creating content that will appeal to working Moms. Own an auto parts manufacturer? Create branded content appealing to women mechanics.

Post Guest Content

Guest-posting on blogs is one of the best ways to build brand awareness, on both sides of the equation.

One way to incorporate guest-posting into your brand awareness strategy is to invite experts and thought leaders to post on your blog or website. This strategy enhances the authority and thought leadership of your brand, increasing audience loyalty and brand trust.

Guest posts open up the possibility of viral posts, as well. Your guests will be excited about the exposure, and will likely spread the link through their network as well.

Guest posting can act as free word-of-mouth advertising.

Writing authoritative content for popular blogs and websites is another way guest posting can be worked into your brand awareness strategy. Guest-posting on blogs and websites is an easy way to generate quality inbound links, as well as increasing name recognition and brand trust.

Integrate Infographics

We are all inundated with information overload. Infographics help us make sense of all of the noise, which is why they’re shared 3x more regularly on social media than other content.

Each time an infographic is shared with your unique visual branding, it acts as subtle advertising for your brand. It’s the kind of advertising money can’t buy, however, as it brings real value to the audience’s lives and fosters a trusting relationship that conventional marketing can only dream of.

Get Involved Locally

Local search is becoming more and more of a hot topic with each year, as eCommerce and brick-and-mortar businesses continue to intersect in interesting ways.

From sponsoring local events to guest posting on local blogs, focusing on particular communities or geographic regions will help foster good feelings in your geographic area.

When the time comes to search ‘Your Industry’ in ‘Your Area’ (like ‘pro-bono lawyers in Los Angeles,’ for instance) your name will spring to mind. That’s what brand awareness is all about.

Social Media Promotions

Everybody loves free things. People also love attention and exposure.

To truly generate a buzz around your brand, run a contest on your social media channels. Have your audience post original photos or artwork with your brand name or a custom #hashtag campaign. Have them post their creations to their own social media networks, becoming de facto brand ambassadors in the process.

You’ll notice none of these methods are manipulative or exploitative. None require extensive, expensive PPC campaigns that dry up when you stop pumping money in.

True, writing guest posts and constructing buyer personas requires a time investment and knowing your audience. Most things that have real, lasting value require time and effort, however. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something.

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