According to a recent Nielsen survey, brand awareness is the No. 1 objective for marketers all over the world — topping even customer acquisition and customer retention. And the allure is easy to understand. After all, for a business to truly blossom and achieve high levels of success, it’s important that its target consumers are familiar with the brand, its offerings and its distinctive qualities.
For most businesses, though, plastering marketing messages on billboards all over town, buying ad space all over the internet and otherwise paying large sums to disseminate brand messaging just isn’t financially feasible. But with the right strategy and tactics, it is possible to boost brand awareness without breaking the bank.
Looking to learn how to increase brand awareness without an inordinate ad spend? Consider these five proven tactics that can help you boost your business’s brand awareness — even on a realistic marketing budget:
1. Consistently tell a compelling story
To gain consumer attention, a brand must first clearly identify what differentiates it from the competition and how it provides value to its customers. Then, these unique aspects of the business need to be incorporated into all brand messaging — from advertising and blog articles to the brand’s website, social posts, communications and more. To achieve maximum effectiveness, the brand narrative needs to be compelling and consistent, with a recognition that consumer engagement is more important than reach.
2. Write guest blog articles for other websites
When working to generate brand awareness, it’s critical for any brand to leverage its owned media, regularly employing its website, blog, social media channels and other owned assets to distribute its messaging as broadly as possible. But by pitching and writing guest posts to be published on other industry websites, brands can demonstrate their in-field expertise and reach new, interested audiences who may currently be unfamiliar with the brand — which, of course, can help elevate brand awareness. A few of the keys to success here include choosing compelling topics to write guest blog posts about, providing useful insights when creating the content for the guest posts and performing the research needed to find industry-relevant blogs willing to accept and publish guest posts.
Brandon bonus insights:
To find blogs in your brand’s industry that accept guest posts, try performing web searches for “[your industry name here] guest blogging” or “[your industry name here] guest post guidelines,” then weeding through the results for promising leads. When you find the right fits, reach out to each site you’re interested in working with, using the blog’s guest-submission guidelines to guide your query. In many cases, guest blogging serves as a win-win — your business can boost its brand awareness, while the blog you post on gets to publish free content from a new industry voice.
3. Create interesting (and share-worthy) infographics
Infographics provide a great way to add visual appeal to data that might otherwise be a bit on the boring side, all while creating an engaging and easy-to-follow overview of a specific topic, set of statistics, etc. And when created to convey information that’s of interest in your brand’s industry, they’re often widely shared on social media and elsewhere by industry players. So when you create and share infographics with your branding clearly visible as the asset’s source, this can serve as a powerful way to increase brand awareness among the exact audience members you’re likely looking to reach.
4. Seize the social advertising opportunity
Marketers who know how to use social media to increase brand awareness are well aware that, when it comes to reaching the right consumers for your brand on a budget, social media advertising shines bright. Also known as PPC advertising, the tactic offers broad targeting capabilities that enable brands to reach just the consumers they’re aiming to attract — without wasting ad spend on consumers outside their target group. It does this by allowing advertisers to choose the ideal recipients for their ads based on wide-ranging characteristics such as age, gender, geographic location, household income, interests, online habits, search activities and more. Further, social advertisers can also choose a billing structure that enables them to pay for only the consumers who actually click through on their ads, meaning that they pay nothing for ad impressions that don’t deliver a website visit. All of these benefits work together to make PPC advertising a highly budget-friendly way to boost brand awareness.
Brandon bonus insights:
For those all-new to PPC, this Brandon blog article offers a primer on some of the top PPC-related terms to know when mounting an online advertising campaign. And providing a good resource for social-advertising experts and those just learning how to increase brand awareness on social media, this Brandon blog article spotlights a number of effective ways to increase the ROI of your PPC advertising.
5. Employ influencers in your niche
As the might and reach of social media continues to grow, the power of influencers to expose their audiences to new brands is steadily growing with it. And while micro-influencers — influencers with smaller audiences, often defined as 10,000 to 50,000 followers on social media — may not be household names, they tend to be quite well-known to their niche audiences. In addition, these smaller-scale influencers are more affordable to work with than their mega-followed counterparts, and they generally deliver much higher rates of engagement, too. As a result, harnessing influencers with large followings in your brand’s industry segment can provide a highly effective way to boost brand awareness among consumers in your field.
Brandon bonus insights:
For those who may be all-new to influencer marketing, this Brandon blog article offers a great introduction to the powerful tactic for boosting brand awareness, along with some helpful tips for doing it effectively.
Could your business use professional guidance on how to gain brand awareness? At Brandon, our team of data-driven marketing professionals has a wealth of experience building consumer recognition for brands and leading them to elevated success in the marketplace. Further, as one of only 24 certified brand strategy consultancies in the United States, we possess unique expertise in developing effective branding strategies that can make businesses stand out from the competition. Contact us today to discuss how we can help your brand and business grow.