Sales & Marketing Success Tips: Generating Brand Awareness
Imagine this: you’ve spent countless hours developing what you think is a perfect brand. You’ve been providing your existing customers with outstanding solutions, and now you’re ready to prioritize growth and expand to the larger market.
The only problem?
No one outside of your existing customer base knows about your awesome organization.
In your industry, there are undoubtedly tons of organizations with great product offerings. However, they can’t all be the best. No matter how great your product offering is, you will struggle to generate new business if your ideal client persona cannot find you, or doesn’t know who you are.
In the war that is winning new business, getting found is half the battle.
Let’s dive into some great ways for your organization to build its brand awareness and become a trusted leader in your industry.
Create Compelling Content
One of the most surefire ways to generate brand awareness and ensure your organization gets found is by creating and disseminating valuable content that addresses the needs of your target persona.
In the world of digital marketing, there is arguably nothing more valuable than a high-quality, highly-targeted piece of content. Creating that content, and placing it in the hands of the people who desire it is perhaps the best way to get more people talking about your brand.
However, saying it and doing it are two very different things.
One way to ensure your content reaches your target audience is by ensuring it is search engine optimized. By building your content piece around a keyword that your audience searches for, you can ensure that your piece ranks highly in organic search results, and appears when someone searches for that particular term.
Distributing your content via social media is another great way to reach your audience. Far too many organizations don’t take advantage of social media for what it truly is: a chance for your brand to speak directly to its audience. Posting compelling content on social media is a great way to ensure it gets more eyeballs, and that more people find their way to your webpage.
Consider Paid Advertising
Yes, good old-fashioned paying for eyeballs.
There are several great ways to improve your brand awareness by advertising on paid channels.
Paid Search
Let’s start with paid search. When running paid search ads, you can place your ads on particular keywords to ensure high placement on search engines for those particular search terms. If you search anything in your browser right now, you’ll notice that the top results are usually paid ads, and this is not a mistake.
Showing up in the top few results for any keyword carries tremendous influence, and is something organization’s everywhere strive for, and clearly, are willing to pay for. A study conducted by Advanced Web Ranking found that a whopping 31.2% of all search traffic goes to the result ranking first, and the slice of the pie only gets smaller as you drop beyond the top 10 rank positions.
Point blank, ranking highly in search results, whether it be organically or via a paid ad, is the best way for your organization to get found by high-intent prospects. Given the uphill battle smaller organizations face when trying to outmaneuver industry giants with entire SEO teams, paid search advertising is a great way to rank highly for your mission-critical keywords.
Display Ads
Display advertising is another great way to reach your target persona and place a visual in their minds. Display ads are remarkably affordable, and although they often aren’t a great tool for lead generation, they can place your branding in front of hundreds of thousands of people for a very affordable price point.
Additionally, you can specify your targeting and show ads to people who have viewed other websites of your choice, have viewed your own website, or have shown an affinity for certain search topics.
Given their affordable price point and wide reach, display ads should be an integral part of every organization’s brand awareness initiatives.
Paid Social
Last but certainly not least, paid social media advertising can be a tremendous way to directly reach your target persona. Platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook have considerable targeting capabilities that enable you to put your brand directly in front of certain audiences.
A huge advantage of paid social advertising is the ability to deliver content in a variety of formats. From images, to videos, to personalized messages, there are several unique ways to communicate your message, and you can tailor how exactly you communicate with your audience based on their behavior and preferences.
Build A Rock-Solid Brand Identity
Let’s take a step back. You can run all the ads in the world or create the best content on the market, but if your brand has no visual identity or coherent imagery surrounding it, you are going to struggle to generate brand awareness.
Start by taking a look at your website.
Does it communicate who your brand is?
If your website isn’t knocking it out of the park, looking at a redesign is a great place to start.
Tons of organizations are held back by underwhelming websites, and this is understandable. Building a great website is tough to accomplish. However, it is an absolute necessity in today’s world.
Your website is your first impression on prospective clients. As a matter of fact, 75% of consumers judge a business's credibility based on its website. Your website should reflect who your brand is, and what you stand for. If you can’t show the world who your brand is, how can you expect prospective clients to partner with you?
Although your website is obviously incredibly important, don’t stop there. Consider your brand’s logos, color scheme, and general aesthetic. Do they elicit the feelings you want them to?
Far too many organizations stick to the status quo and are hesitant to rebrand because of the perceived extensive overhaul, and they end up settling for average when it comes to their branding. Oftentimes, a rebrand and website overhaul can be the shot in the arm an organization needs to hyper-charge its growth and break into new markets.
The name of the game is developing a coherent, consistent narrative around your brand that permeates all of its sales and marketing activities.
Remember, to make your organization known, you need to be memorable.
Start From Square One
Let’s take another step back.
If you want to truly resonate with your target audience and build strong brand awareness, you need to have an iron-clad understanding of who exactly you are talking to, and what they value.
Oftentimes, a fresh round of target audience research can help organizations recalibrate their messaging and focus on the needs of their target audience. By focusing on consumer needs, you increase the likelihood that your message resonates with your audience, and that your brand becomes more well-known in your industry.
How about re-evaluating where you sit in comparison to your competitors? It is hard to gain a competitive foothold and become known if you have the same message as everyone else. If you are having a hard time getting your brand the recognition it deserves, see what the competition is saying.
Do you have the same message?
Is there anything you can learn from their messaging?
Reconsidering your organization’s general messaging and positioning in the market can often help you stand out from the crowd if you’re struggling to build your brand’s influence.
Starting with the basics, like what makes your solution better and different, can often help boil down complex positioning statements into their most simple parts. This messaging is what your brand should be focusing on to make itself known.
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Here at FullFunnel, we have mastered how to best support your sales and marketing program. In hundreds of successful engagements with organizations in South America, North America, and Europe, our team has a tremendous breadth of experience helping organizations get the most out of their sales and marketing functions. Request a free consultation with our team to learn more about how we can support your organization.
About The Author: Bryan Bruwer
Bryan is a Demand Generation Manager and former Digital Marketing Analyst who is passionate about driving desirable marketing outcomes via paid search advertising, search engine optimization, organic content, and more. Bryan holds a Bachelor's Degree in Management from Boston College, where he concentrated his studies in marketing and entrepreneurship, and minored in history. In his spare time, you can find Bryan playing or watching his favorite sports and spending time outdoors.
If you are interested in meeting with our team of sales and marketing experts, specifically our digital marketing team, grab some time to meet with our Director of Marketing today!
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