If you want to grow your business beyond your current audience, you must think strategically about boosting visibility. But with so many different strategies available – many of which are expensive and time-consuming to execute – how do you deploy the right ones?
The Importance of Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is basically a measurement of how familiar your target market is with your brand. In other words, do the right people know that you exist? And does your brand come to mind when prospective customers think about the pain points you’re trying to solve?
Brand awareness can feel like a pretty vague concept at times – and it kind of is. It’s not something you’re able to track with one clean metric. It involves both objective and subjective elements.
“But just because it isn’t a metric that can be perfectly determined doesn’t mean it doesn’t carry value,” HubSpot points out. “Brand awareness is incredibly important for business success and overall marketing goals.”
Brand awareness is crucial for a number of reasons. It fosters trust, forges association, and can fuel greater brand equity (which gives you more leverage and increases the perceived value of your products). And no matter where your brand is at the moment, there’s always room to improve brand awareness and enhance your visibility.
3 Clever Ways to Boost Visibility and Awareness
Boosting visibility and awareness at any significant level requires a proactive and disciplined approach. Here are a few ideas and strategies that work well in today’s marketplace:
- Affiliate Marketing
There’s power in numbers. And no matter how good your marketing and promotional strategies are, you’re limited by who you can reach. But there are ways to expand your reach by leveraging other existing networks.
Affiliate marketing is a great example. With affiliate marketing, you basically pay individuals commissions on any sales they bring to the table. By offering commissions, you encourage them to promote your products, create traffic-generating websites, and lead people to your pages. And the best part is that you don’t owe them a dime unless they bring you revenue.
You can learn more about getting started with affiliate marketing by checking out this resource. It’s certainly a competitive space, but with the right commission structure, you can attract good marketers.
- Car Wraps
Digital marketing might be king in today’s world, but for many brands – particularly local businesses – offline/physical marketing is an extremely integral element in the brand awareness equation. It’s also very cost-effective. Vehicle wraps are one option.
“Vehicle wraps are far more flexible than painting your car or van, as you can change your message as often as you like at a far more reasonable cost than re-painting,” Pro-Screen explains. “Our clients often change up their theme to keep their marketing fresh, while maintaining their brand image and aesthetic.”
A wrapped vehicle is essentially a moving billboard. And as long as you work with a quality provider who does good work, it can make a big impact.
- Influencer Marketing
Influencers may get a bad rap, but they’re also the trendsetters and power brokers – grabbing our attention and influencing our thoughts. From a brand’s perspective, they have the power to reach people who are otherwise unreachable and provide a certain level of objectivity that’s impossible to replicate with self-promotion.
When asked to calculate marketing ROI, 89 percent of brands who use influencer marketing say it’s “comparable to” or “better than” other channels. And when compared to paid media, influencer marketing delivers 11x better returns. (Brands using AdWords generate an average of $2 for every $1 spent, whereas influencer marketing generates $11.69 for every $1 spent.)
The key to being successful with influencer marketing is to set a budget and pick the right influencers. You want people who have an audience that overlaps with your own. Plus, the individual should be aligned with your core values and ethics.
Measuring Your Brand Awareness
These are excellent tips and techniques that have proven to be effective over and over again. But once implemented, how do you know they’re working for your brand?
While you can usually feel the qualitative impact, it’s helpful to take a quantitative look at what’s happening from time to time. You can review metrics like direct traffic, site traffic numbers, and social engagement (like retweets, comments, shares, etc.). The ultimate goal is to see a steady uptick in both interactions and meaningful engagement. In other words, you want to see both quantity and quality.
It’s important that you begin tracking and measuring brand awareness right now – even before you implement some of the aforementioned techniques. This will allow you to set a baseline measurement and then track trends over time. Only then can you get a true feel for how you’re doing in the brand awareness department.