Using Content Marketing to Increase Brand Awareness
According to numerous marketing researches, the increase in sales of products and services is directly related to brand recognition. Brand awareness influences a positive image of the company, evokes trust in new and loyalty in existing customers. If you want your company to stand out from the competition, and not just in Australia, you need to pay attention to your branding. How to increase brand awareness using content marketing? We share simple and effective methods.
Brand awareness through external content marketing
The era of content marketing continues, and text is still an effective tool for building brand awareness. Interact with your audience using several platforms that are suitable for your business. External content marketing includes publications in the media, as well as in third-party blogs on popular sites. Your material must have value in order to be remembered by the audience. Articles with a practical message are always in demand: instructions, cases, tool reviews.
You can write directly in the media, but it is better with ready-made topics for articles. Representatives of publications publish hundreds of requests every day: looking for heroes and expert opinions for articles. The higher the coverage of the media and the less frequent the publications, the more people will see the publication with you.
Advantages of the method: gradual build-up of blog audience, strengthening of expert positions. Disadvantages. It is important to stand out from hundreds of other blogs.
Internal Content Marketing
Start a blog on your website or social media page. Analyse the queries your audience is looking for information for. To do this, browse forums, topic discussions, relevant keywords. Publish articles that will fully disclose topics, invest in promotion: you can contact an SEO agency from Sydney, invest in banner advertising, and so on. This way, you can be sure that you weren’t just wasting your time publishing articles. For social media, viral content is the best option. Formats: video, infographics, articles, tests. To make the content go viral, we recommend publishing texts in the format of stories, as well as useful articles. Keep in mind that long posts work better.
The advantages of the method: Provides additional traffic, attracts the attention of influencers. Disadvantages: Large investments. The result may not appear immediately.
Employee Personal Brand
For example, you create cloud products for small businesses and are often rejected due to limited customer budgets. Your sales manager suggests writing an article on how to handle customer objections. The material can be seen by both a potential client and a partner. Over time, a sales manager can become an opinion leader, which in any case increases brand awareness. If your employees tell stories about working for the company, it increases trust and loyalty. This method is especially popular with startups. Publishing content on social networks, maintaining columns for the media, on blogs allows you to reach different audience segments. Advantages: Lack of cash investment. The opportunity to be always aware of the audience’s requests, the formation of brand loyalty and the image of an expert.
Disadvantages: The result may not appear immediately.
Guerilla Marketing
Social media is the home of potential customers for almost any company. If they are there, then you can draw their attention to yourself. Set a goal that you want to achieve and act based on it. For example, you want to grab the attention of your partners. Make a list of communities for entrepreneurs. On behalf of the head of the company, publish interesting posts, provoke discussions. Unobtrusively, focus on the quality of the products and the high level of your company. But do it carefully. People come to social networks, first of all, to discuss and exchange opinions. Concentrate on meaningful comments and making good contacts.
Advantages: Lack of cash investment. Impact on a wide audience.
Disadvantages: You need to constantly monitor groups for relevant discussions and write really interesting content.
Additional Recommendations
Building brand awareness is about looking ahead, so don’t expect instant results. Just go ahead, analyse the results and edit the strategy. To build awareness into sales, it’s also important to work on brand reputation. It may happen that a client becomes interested in your company, paying attention to discussions or high-quality publications, and then goes to read the reviews and a lot of them are negative. Will he trust a memorable company with his money if he saw negative reviews about the company? Of course not. Especially if the service is expensive or can have a significant impact on health or comfort. For this reason, we recommend using brand awareness in conjunction with reputation management. In combination with increasing awareness, professional reputation management will ensure a guaranteed increase in sales.
Conclusion
Let’s make a resume: The main ways to increase brand awareness: content on internal and external sites, promotion of the employee’s personal brand, active participation in social networks. To build awareness, you will need mostly time and good content. To achieve good results, you need to do the work regularly. In order for recognition to lead to sales, you need to improve the company’s reputation.