Brand awareness is the likelihood that consumers recognize the existence and availability of a company's product or service. Creating awareness for your brand is one of the key steps in marketing your product or service. If you are a startup or are launching a new product, it is even more important that you can stand out from competitors and quickly grow your subscribers and customers.
Content marketing is a strategy for creating and distributing relevant, timely and valuable content. The content must reflect your brand's image, get your brand's message across and be of interest to your visitors, prospects or customers. Content Marketing is vital to any type of marketing strategy and is particularly good for boosting brand awareness and will help you stand out in a sea of competition.
Repeated brand exposure builds brand awareness and that's where content marketing comes into play.
According to the Content Marketing Institute increasing brand awareness is the top organizational goal for 74% of B2C companies using content marketing strategies. So here are some of the best ways you can put content marketing to work to help you reach your target audience and increase your brand awareness:
1. Blogging
Blogs are one of the best ways to increase brand awareness and are a critical component of inbound marketing. If you create high-quality, relevant and insightful blogs you will be able to establish your company as an industry authority, get your brand message across and increase brand awareness.
Put together campaigns aimed at various stages of the marketing funnel, paying particular attention to the top of the funnel. Use your buyer personas to plan your associated content strategy and it's distribution plan, or you won’t be promoting your brand in front of the right people in the right places at the right time.
Posting high-quality, relevant blogs as often as possible will increase your success. Post a blog 2-3 times weekly to keep the momentum going and get quicker results.
Download our free checklist for running marketing campaigns to help you get organised and maximise your campaign ROI
2. Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is a fabulous way to increase brand awareness. You increase credibility by using another relevant and well-respected blog to communicate with potential prospects and customers. Here's how you do it
- Pick a blog whose content will resonate with your audience. Research potential blogs before you select one
- Pick a well-respected blog with high traffic in your industry
- Write high-quality content - make sure it speaks to your personas and is valuable
- Inject personality into your blog, so the readers get a better sense of your brand personality
- Take the opportunity to use the post to include relevant links to your site to try and drive traffic back to your site
Remember that if you manage to attract a lot of traffic with the post, the blogger will be happy and will most likely want to feature you as a guest poster in the future. It's a win-win situation!
3. Get Social
Having a voice and an active presence on social media is critical to building brand awareness. But don’t try to be everything to everybody; use your personas to figure out which social channels you should focus on and what times of the day they are on each of the relevant social media channels. You can still publish to other channels but put the bulk of your effort into the key channels that will produce the best results.
Using content marketing to increase brand awareness will require the distribution of all your content, offers etc. on your social media pages for maximum exposure. Put together a content inventory to help with your campaign planning and a social media calendar schedule. Marketing automation tools like HubSpot, Hootsuite or SproutSocial are just some of the marketing automation tools that you can use for scheduling social posts.
Participate in relevant conversations, answer people's questions, give good advice and engage with people as much as possible.
4. Share Infographics, Images and Video
Infographics are some of the most shared content on social media channels, so publishing them is a great way to get your brand into the spotlight and build brand awareness.
Given the average attention span of about 8 seconds, infographics and images are perfect for getting your message across quickly and are easy to consume. Infographics are a great way to get across information like statistics, steps to take to achieve a goal or resolve a problem, product comparisons etc. Design your Infographics to be visually appealing, colourful and make sure they're well thought out. This will help catch the attention of your audience.
So invest some effort, get the team together to brainstorm ideas for your campaigns and get creative!
5. Show Personality
Don’t be afraid to show some personality and connect with your audience on a more emotional level. Be engaging and friendly. Most successful brands show great personality and as we’ve seen many times fun and playful content regularly goes viral which can really help to get your brand noticed. Images and Videos are great for this type of content. Just make sure whatever you are doing is appropriate for the social media channel you are on e.g. What works on Twitter may not work on the likes of LinkedIn as LinkedIn is a more formal social media channel.
Some people even say that a brand's personality is what will really distinguishes them from its competitors.
6. Influencer Campaigns
Influencer marketing is becoming more and more important and is gaining a lot of momentum in B2B marketing. Influencers have already built up trust, so use this to help build awareness. Organise a sponsored post on your own blog or a guest appearance in a podcast or webinar. Just make sure the influencer you choose is the right one for helping to get your brand message across.
7. Webinars, LinkedIn Lives
Webinars are a fabulous way to increase brand awareness. They are a great way of engaging an audience and giving you a chance to
- Get your name out there in the community, increasing brand awareness
- Develop your reputation as a thought leader
- Help people solve their problems
- Help you to make a personal connection with potential buyers.
The only downside is that they take a lot of work to organise but can be very fruitful as attendees will have a genuine interest in the topic you are covering. You can also post a video of the webinar afterwards which will help build brand awareness.
Measuring the Impact
Whatever strategy you put in place, make sure you define key metrics for measuring success. Monitor these regularly and tweak your strategy accordingly to improve its effectiveness. Look at the following statistics.
Impressions
How often your content shows up in a search result or a social news feed.
This metric will give you an idea of the size of the audience that is seeing your content. You want to increase visibility so that people become familiar with your brand.
Traffic and Click Through Rates
These metrics result from impressions and provide information on how interested people are in your sharing content.
Social Shares
Social shares are very important as they will put your content in front of a broader audience. So if your content is high quality, relevant and useful you will be able to reach new prospects.
Monitoring performance and acting upon the insights by tweaking campaigns will ensure you get the maximum return on your investment.
Branded Assets
Finally, it's important to ensure everything you share on social media and other channels has professional and consistent branding. Make sure the message you are trying to portray is also consistent. This will help build trust while promoting your brand and building brand awareness.
If you need some guidance on running a successful inbound marketing campaign, download our checklist below or feel free to contact us for some further advice.
Last updated - 14 Sept 2022 (Originally published: 11 Jan 2017)
