Whenever you get flaky lips, you go to the market to buy a chapstick. Have you noticed that chapstick is a brand name for a lip balm product made by Pfizer? How did people start using the word ‘Chapstick’ instead of ‘lip balm’ then? That is called brand awareness.
Brand Awareness is the familiarity of the consumers with a brand to such an extent that the brand name becomes the Household name. Every brand owner dreams of their brand name becoming a real word; this concept is called proprietary eponym.
Brand awareness cannot be achieved merely by creating a brand and with conventional marketing techniques; one has to keep on growing higher and building deeper roots with their followers.
It is quite a challenge to gain a never-ending attention to a brand from its audience. A brand created on the foundation of a well-thought-out vision can easily expedite a sentimental value among the public.
We have gathered some of the best practices for you to expand your brand.
Related: The Ultimate Guide to Online Branding and Building Authority
Pick Your Platform
The monumental growth of social web is the result of increasing social networks every day. The basic intent of each platform is to tear down the geographical distances between people and to maximize communication between them. People use social media for multiple purposes like sharing their opinions, brand monitoring, entertainment, media sharing, political activity, news reporting, education, collaboration and spreading information etc. Nevertheless; each social platform provides a unique service.
For example; Instagram is for sharing photos telling your everyday activity, Twitter is to connect people with similar interests who can share in-the-moment updates; Pinterest is to allow users to visually share and discover new interests by creating new Boards and sharing ideas among the followers.
With that being said; it is very necessary for you to pick a platform to run your campaign.
The backbone of marketing is to target the right audience. So, it is necessary to pick the right platform to advertise your business. By doing so, you will be able to drive back the maximum traffic of those users who are actually interested in your offer and are most likely to buy your products/ services.
For instance; if you have a clothing business, you might need to focus on your Facebook, Instagram and YouTube campaigns. Know where your audiences reside and save your energies to target them as your potential customers. If you don’t know the suitable networks for your business, the best way is to start analyzing your incoming referral traffic.
Market Your Uniqueness
The community of social web comprises of humans interacting with each other; selling or acquiring services from others. It is an inbuilt necessity for humans to find an emotional value in the things they use or the people they talk to. We are attracted to charismatic personalities, kindness, authenticity, and most importantly uniqueness. A unique trait of a thing or a person makes them stand out from the rest of the crowd.
This trait can easily be exploited for marketing your businesses. Uniqueness could be attained in the form of an eye-catching tagline, highlighting a key feature of your product that no one else provides or giving your brand a fun identity.
So, create your brand voice by applying this strategy and again find the target audience which could easily get influenced by the flavor you have added to your marketing strategy.
Remarketing or Retargeting
You must have experienced visiting a website and later on getting similar ads throughout your social media browsing. Some may call it magic but we call it remarketing.
Remarketing also goes by the name of Retargeting, is capturing the attention of those users who came to your website and left. This strategy is applied by placing a cookie in the viewer’s web browser when they visit your website for the first time. So, while they are browsing you can track their browsing activity and which social platforms they use the most. That way, you can serve them with your ads on the platforms they use and drive back the lost traffic.
Remarketing saves a lot of time and energy as it only targets those people who have already shown interest in your product. If done smartly, remarketing can turn window-shoppers into actual buyers.
Social platforms like Google display Network, popular blogging websites, Quora, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and many more; allow you to run ads. You have to come up with a specific ad strategy to reclaim maximum traffic. Analyze the exact needs of the user by shrinking the horizons of possibilities.
For example, when a user visited your blog, it is important to figure out what product or service did the user showed interest in, how much time did the user spend on your blog, what is the intent of the user. Understanding the user’s need will help you qualify them by serving the ads which would hit them at the right spot.
In another example, if a user came to our blog and viewed the product, we’ll focus on the specific feature he/she viewed and float related ads in their network.
Retargeting is observed to be one of the most popular marketing strategies because of its distinctive approach.
Replug makes marketing very easy for its users. It lets you create a social media campaign for platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube or your custom platform; by creating a very simple retargeting script. All you have to do is add a retargeting pixel ID in your campaign and it does the rest of the job for you.
Biddyco is a social advertising company which claims to have achieved 1,284% ROI in just 7 days, by retargeting. Check out their Kick in the Pants Technique and how they used this strategy to get rewarding leads. A step by step demonstration is explained in this article to help you start from the beginning.
Related: 14 Crazy-Effective Ways to Boost E-commerce Sales Through Retargeting
Related: How To Optimize Your Retargeting Efforts To Win Back Online Customers
Guest Posting
Guest posting/blogging is an amazing way of reaching out towards the public. Guest posting is an exchange process of writing or posting your articles on someone else’s website or blog, someone who has a significant amount of followers. Likewise; you allow them to publish their content on your own blog.
This association helps to build strong relationships among the bloggers. Providing others with quality content also helps improve your name and credibility. In addition to it, guest posting is proven to be great for search engine optimization as well. When you’re the host blogger and you’re publishing someone else’s blog article, you’ll use a link to their article somewhere in your blog. And we know how search engine friendly these links are.
Buffer, a social media scheduling app, managed to grow its customer base from zero to 100k customers, all in 9 months. The Co-founder Leo Widrich shares his secret that he started off by approximately 150 guest posts… Sounds like a small number but it isn’t.
Later on, with experience and growing success, he wrote blogs on bigger networks which got them bigger traffic.
Tom Hunt, a TEDx speaker and founder of Virtual Valley, has written a very helpful post about guest blogging in which he shares 42 experiences and 42 lessons he learned from those.
Neil Patel, a New York Times bestselling author, has shared some statistics about guest blogging which you might want to check out.
Do the math for your own business, and start guest blogging right now.
Infographics and Gifographics
According to the Social Science Research Network, 65% of us are visual learners. It is a common observation that visual information is more likely to be ingrained and remembered among the viewers rather than textual information. In fact, if you want to grab viewers’ attention towards an extensive blog post that you’ve written, it is better to take an aid from colorful infographic images.
The best thing about an infographic is that it is equally informative but comprehensive, and also it is good to look at after reading some text-heavy information. Metaphorically speaking and stressing upon the value of an infographic, the comparison is the same as a word document vs a PowerPoint presentation.
On social media platforms, infographics are likely to be shared 40x more than other types of content. Imagine how far the name of your company could go if you share your infographics regularly.
Like Infographics, a new term Gifographics (also known as InfoGIFs) has been introduced by Neil Patel. Gifographics is a combination of two words GIF and Graphic-Visual Content. In other words, gifographic is an animated infographic. The reason for the creation of this terminology is to increase viewer’s engagement towards your content and make learning more fun.
A very sophisticated and interactive infographic was created for the New York Times to group the characters of ‘Game of Thrones’ in a graph of Good, Evil, Ugly, Beautiful. Check it out and get inspired by it.
‘Ceros’ lets you create fun infographics and gifographics for your businesses. Scroll through the following blog to check out their story of ‘Marketing Evolution’
Promotional Sales and Giveaways
Who doesn’t love seasonal sales, free stuff, gift cards, and whatnot? People are charmed by such freebies and they themselves market your product by word of mouth (WOM) or via social media platforms. Unknowingly, the user feels more special about your product when they get good results in lesser prices and they prefer your products over your competitor’s.
The most recent trend ‘Like, tag, share’; has been adopted by most of the small-scale online businesses to get famous among their users. Such contests require users to advertise the brand’s name and as a prize, they get free stuff or gift cards.
These contests could also be carried out with the help of CTAs. CTAs don’t have to necessarily be a rectangular pop up with contrastive colors, they could be anything that the user sees and feels the need to view your ad. In short, you have to give them an offer they can’t refuse. These kinds of CTA’s create a sense of urgency among the audience and drives them to participate… a win-win situation for both the parties.
Campaign Consistency
You must be familiar with the Marketing rule of 7. Back in 1930, studio bosses of the film industry noticed that its users needed to be nudged by advertisement several times to buy their movies. Today, the number has been generalized to seven; a user needs to see your advertisement at least seven times before signing business with you. If you’re consistent enough with your marketing campaign and create compelling ads, you may end up on-boarding many clients with you.
A business ought to run different campaigns on different social media platforms; nevertheless, all their content should be consistent. If you have a WordPress theme for your business, use that in your advertisement.
For example, use the same logo of your company in every advert campaign, use the same colors as that of your website theme, use the same style that you’ve set for your business. That helps the viewers recall and remember your brand name.
Create a catchy slogan for the services your company provides and use it for spreading the word. Slogan campaigning has been the most famous strategy used by many companies. Slogan becomes an identity for your company and it is a fun way of engaging your customers.
You just have to be creative. Remember, sky is the limit.
Referral
Your strategy should also be to engage your loyal customers. Referral programs help you increase brand awareness and your customer base. The basic idea is to provide a benefit to a customer if he/she refers your brand to their friends or family. It helps your customers gaining a benefit from you as well as it helps you in achieving long-lasting customers.
A study made by Social Media Software firm Lithium reveals that 92% of the people trust referrals from their friends and family rather than a random advertisement.
So, you need your customers to create hype by talking about your brand in their social circle. This can be done by several referral programs in which you offer a discount or a free service. This helps people know about your brand without you actively selling your product or showing them in-your-face ads which might annoy the public at some point.
Do you want to know how Robinhood‘s referral got 1 million potential users even before their launch? They amplified their followers by creating a competition in which the users could get ahead in the queue by referring more people. That is what got them viral.
Check out this blog to know about it in detail.
Need an even bigger number?
You must be familiar with Dropbox. Everyone uses Dropbox nowadays. Dropbox’s referral program won them around 3 million users in just 15 months.
Dropbox raised their brand awareness exponentially just by using referral marketing. Although, the idea was not entirely their own. They got inspired by PayPal’s refer-a-friend scheme. While Paypal paid its customers with cash, Dropbox provided both the referrer and referee with free storage. Read more about this in an article shared by ReferralCandy Blog.
Following the footsteps of Robinhood. Hotjar also created an ‘early access’ waiting list. Whenever someone tried to access Hotjar, they’d put them last in the line and ask them to refer Hotjar to their family and friends.
The more the merrier, right?
They incentivized this contest by
- Providing free 6 months access to the users who referred Hotjar to 5 friends.
- Free T-Shirt giveaway to the top 200 positions.
- Free lifetime access to top 20 positions.
They got a massive response from their users who wanted to overtake other contestants. Read their complete success story.
Webinar Marketing
Webinar Marketing is also trending among many service providers all across the globe. Webinars are helpful because they let you interact with your audience. You can host a webinar even remotely by arranging video or audio conferences with remote team. Many platforms allow you to multicast your webinar i.e. you can communicate with multiple receivers. This lets you save so much of your precious time which could be utilized somewhere else.
Webinars have proven to be a good medium for building the name of your brand. You could start with free webinars and later on move to the paid version to be entertained by the premium features. These videos could be used in your Video marketing as well; save your videos and upload them on Facebook or YouTube, as videos are more helpful in quick learning and a better understanding of your product.
According to Google trends quick search, the search term ‘Webinars’ has increased steadily from 2004 to this day.
The term webinar is a subtle marketing technique. You shouldn’t be ranting about the amazingness of your products or services, rather you should gain the trust of your audiences by telling something useful and hinting about the values you could add into their lives. You do that by addressing their pain points and answering their questions.
Marketo, an email marketing service, applies this rule in their webinars. Their motto is to create a value of their services throughout the webinar and give them a powerful stance to buy your services.
If your target audience is new to your brand, you could attract them by giving them discounts on each sign-up or sending an e-mail at the end of the webinar.
Webinars help you in creating a personal bond with your customers by adding a human touch to your brand.
Inc. shares Russ Ruffino’s story of how his company converted the Webinar attendees into their clients and how it helped them in increasing ROI. In his article, he has shared some tips and tricks which might come in handy for your webinar to become a success.
Jenna Soard, the founder of YouCanBrand.com, explains that Webinars are the best source for client conversion. Jenna is considered the Webinar Rockstar and you are encouraged to read her success story to get started.
Conclusion
Like oxygen is important to our lungs, marketing is important to our brand. It is not easy to compete in today’s crowded industry… but then there are no shortcuts to success. The marketing gurus suggest to innovatively apply all the standard rules of marketing. Let your audience trust you and make them feel that you care. Adopt the newest ways of engaging with your clients and remember; change is inevitable. Never stop growing!
We’d love to hear from you. Share your experiences if your business has benefited from these marketing strategies.
Enlighten us in the comment section below.
