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How to Use Digital Marketing for Brand Awareness

Published on 01.08.2024 by Tracey Chizoba Fletcher

As an old saying goes, “First impressions last a lifetime”. In this era, the best opportunity for brands to make a lasting first impression occurs in the digital space. Statistics indicate that the average American spends six hours online. Besides, digital marketing offers brands a cost-effective advertising solution, unlike TV and radio advertising.  

Many consumers are also using digital media to connect with their favorite brands. That means you are missing out on creating brand awareness if you aren't doing online marketing. However, since the digital world is an ever-evolving field with new advertising platforms such as TikTok marketing coming up, it can be challenging for brands to determine the best approach. Fortunately, this article will guide you on how to use digital marketing to raise brand awareness.

 

An effective digital marketing strategy involves promoting your brand through different online channels, such as websites, blogs, social media, mobile apps, and instant messaging platforms. It consists of finding the online channels in which your audience has a presence and making your presence felt.

What is Brand Awareness?

Brand awareness makes your brand known and easily recognizable among your target audience. A product is considered popular, buzzworthy, and trending when it creates brand awareness. Brand awareness is essential for marketing and promoting your products and services in the early stages of your business.

Importance of Brand Awareness

While it can be hard to measure brand awareness, as there are no metrics, it's essential for your overall marketing goal for several reasons. These include:

Increasing Trust

We live in a world where consumers extensively research and seek opinions before buying a product or service. If consumers trust your brand, they will likely buy your product again. With brand awareness, you can trust your customers, get feedback, and connect emotionally with them. This, in turn, leads to more customer trust.

Leads to Association

When you think about Coca-Cola, the first thing that comes to mind is a soft drink. When you think of Facebook, the first thing that comes to mind is social media. You can easily associate the Coca-Cola or Facebook brand with their product offering. That's the power of branding. It helps associate your brand with a particular product, service, or action. When you become a well-known brand, consumers will subconsciously associate the name of your products with your brand name. 

Increase Brand Equity

Brand equity is a combination of brand perception and a company's opinion. It indicates the brand's value resulting from consumer experience and their overall description of that brand. If the consumers have a positive experience, they get a positive brand equity. The vice versa is also true.

There are several benefits of positive brand equity. These include:

  • An increased stock price resulting from a perceived higher value.
  • Bigger social impact from the greater brand value.
  • Ability to expand the product line of the business.

Creating brand awareness and promoting a positive brand experience helps increase brand equity. This, in turn, makes consumers choose your brand over other brands.

Tips to Promote Brand Awareness

Before you start to build brand awareness, you should realize that this doesn't happen overnight. It takes more than a single advert or even a marketing campaign. Instead, it results from continuous multiple efforts beyond trying to reach paying customers. Therefore, if you think you will build brand awareness by simply running an Instagram ad, it isn’t so.

In most cases, brand awareness results from multiple simultaneous efforts that take more than one action. Therefore, brand awareness aims to appease customers, gain their trust, and turn them into loyal customers rather than just making sales. Here are measures that will enable you to do that:

Use Storytelling

Whether marketing your products or your brand, storytelling is a powerful tool. Humans tend to relate to stories more than a boring marketing message. Creating a narrative around your brand can also humanize it and add depth to the messaging.

So, what should the story be about? It could be about anything that your followers can relate to. It could be a story about the founder, how the business ideas were conceived, and your struggles to make the brand famous. When creating the story, ensure that you remain authentic, as this is another factor affecting brand loyalty. A good idea when thinking of a story is to use the four-way rotary test. This asks these four questions:

  • Is the story truthful?
  • Does it help to build friendships and goodwill?

Create Shareable Content

The online audience, mainly young people, is very wary of traditional advertising methods. With lots of content options, they aren't ready to sit down to watch an ad. Instead, they rely more on word-of-mouth advertising. Therefore, to build brand loyalty, you should focus on word-of-mouth advertising. Make it shareable when creating content, such as videos, sponsored content, blog posts, or product pages.

When people recommend your brand to their family and friends, they will likely trust it more. You should make it easier for your customers to post about your brand. They will help you raise brand awareness when they click on “share”. Remember that brand awareness is about informing your audience about your brand in a way that isn't pushy.

Digital Marketing Strategies to Raise Brand Awareness

Here are several steps to increase brand awareness using digital marketing.

SEO

Undoubtedly, Google's Search engine has reinvented how people search for information. Statistics indicate that there are 8.5 billion Google searches in a day. That means Google and other search engines provide an essential avenue for your audience to know more about your brand. 

You want to ensure that Google recommends your brand when people search for keywords in your niche. To do that, you need to use SEO. SEO ensures that your product is visible in the Google Search results. The higher your rank, the better the chances customers can click on your link. You can use various on-page and off-page SEO strategies, such as creating great content, link building, and enhancing website user experience.

With increased ranking on the SERPs, your brand will get more exposure. The more exposure you have, the more people will recognize what you do. You can read Part III of our detailed SEO guide.

Use of Branded Content

Content creation is a crucial part of online brand awareness. This is often done by creating branded content. Branded content refers to the content you create to add value to your users. It informs your customers about your business and what it represents. 

The main difference between this content and traditional advertising is that it aims to inform and entertain. It's also suitable for driving consumer engagement and catching customer’s attention. Branded content can be in the form of articles, videos, podcasts, infographics, and more.

How Branded Content Increases Brand Awareness

To create brand awareness, it should be more than the consumer remembering your brand name. They should also not forget the qualities that make the brand unique. A good and effective content strategy can help set your brand apart. When using Instagram, you need a good content plan for Instagram marketing.

You can also use great content to share your brand’s opinion, show its personality, and even give it a human face. Remember that most consumers want to do business with a brand with a human face. Here are content strategies that brands can use to increase brand awareness. 

Understand Your Audience

 A good content strategy should understand the audience you are trying to reach online. You also need to know their interests, likes, and preferences. If they are searching for a solution, you can also understand their unique pain points. After understanding your audience, you can easily create content that meets their needs.

Create Your Brand Story

It's also essential to have a brand story that includes your vision, company values, company voice, and the solutions you offer to your audience. These are the elements that will make your customers care about your brand.

Determine Your Digital Marketing Channel

Consider the type of content you want to create for your brand. There are many content formats, with articles and blog posts being the most common. You need to understand your audience well to decide the best type of content to create. 

For instance, if your audience has a short attention span, it would be advisable to use infographics as they are easy to digest and understand. On the other hand, if you want to show your brand’s personality, videos are a great tool to enable you to do that. Statistics indicate that video content is also the most popular form of content. Videos are, therefore, a great way of increasing engagement with your audience.

Content Testing

The next step is to create the content after determining the critical elements of a good content strategy. Once you have done that, keep monitoring to determine the type of content that would do well and its effectiveness. You can do that by checking the key metrics and adjusting accordingly.

Social Media Marketing

Social media is arguably the most significant invention of the 21st century. With billions of users, no brand can afford not to be on social media. Studies show that internet users spend an average of 144 minutes daily on social media. Besides, social media also offers brands a free way to advertise and connect with their customers. Even when you want to run social media ads, you can get huge returns with a small budget.

This means that with the many opportunities available for social media marketing, it's one way you can leverage and build brand awareness. You can do that by establishing a significant presence on social media sites where your audience is.

With a social media presence, you can become more visible online on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, etc. By sharing your brand story on these platforms through compelling content and by running ads, you can raise awareness of your business. You will also connect with your audience, answer their queries, and enhance brand perception.

How to Use Social Media for Brand Awareness

You need to follow several steps when using social media for brand awareness. These are:

Setting Smart Goals

You must be clear on your goals before creating social media posts to build brand awareness. It's essential to use the SMART goals framework, which stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. For example, the goal could be increasing brand awareness by increasing page views to 100,000 using Instagram ads in the next three months.

Understand Your Key Metrics

One benefit of setting a smart goal is that it helps you establish your key metrics. Depending on what you want to achieve, there are many social media metrics to track. Some metrics affecting brand awareness are reach, shares, impressions, and mentions. You can read our guide on tracking the TikTok metrics.

Choose an Excellent Social Media Platform

A critical factor in social media marketing is determining the right platform. This depends on where your target audience hangs out. For instance, a brand marketing trendy funky wear clothes should focus more on Snapchat, Instagram, or TikTok. These platforms are visually oriented and have many young people likely to show interest in funky wear.

Since each platform is unique, you must determine the best one that meets your needs. With tens of social media platforms, you don't have to join each one. Instead, select the one you believe is the most relevant for your brand.

Optimize Your Profile

After choosing the right platform, it's time to fill out your profile. Ensure it has a profile picture, bio, profile info, and cover photo. Use words that people may be using to find your business.

Consider Influencer Marketing

One fantastic way of building an audience is through influencer marketing. This involves working with another household name or personality to improve your engagement. It can be especially useful in the early stages of social media when trying to build awareness around your brand. 

When using influencer marketing for brand awareness, ensure the influencer has a matching target audience. This can help you increase brand trust and sales and reach your short-term audience engagement goals.

Have a Social Media Calendar

You will also need to determine how often you will post, including the best time for posting. With a social media calendar, you can easily keep your content organized. A social media calendar will help you have a marketing strategy for the different channels. 

Ensure that the content strategy consists of your original posts and posts curated from other sources. You can then experiment with the type of content that will work for you, such as videos, images, links, quotes, shares, etc. A good idea would be to use the 80-20 rule, which requires 80% of your posts to inform, entertain, or educate. The other 20% can be promotional posts.

Keep Testing and Analyzing

No matter how well you plan your social media strategy, it will still not be perfect. That’s why you must keep testing and analyzing to find the working content, the proper schedule, and the posting frequency. The good news is that some social media analytics tools, such as Sprout Social and Buffer, can help you test and analyze your posts. You can use such tools to test different kinds of posts, marketing strategies, and campaigns. You can even A/B test different campaign versions to see which works best.

After determining the best tools, you should keep adjusting your strategy. Make sure you use proven methods and refine them to maximize the brand awareness campaign's results.

Engage with Your Audience.

Remember that posting without engaging with your audience will not do you good. The engagement level of a post is a critical consideration that social media sites consider when recommending content to users. Therefore, reply to your followers, follow conversations, check out mentions, and get feedback about your brand, its products, and services.

Remarketing

This digital marketing method involves using targeted ads to show ads to people who visited your site in the past. These forms of ads follow people across the internet. They are shown the ads when browsing the internet, scrolling through social media, or watching videos. 

Remarketing aims to help you tap into an audience already interested in your brand. When they click on your site, they are shown your ads in other parts of the internet, giving your brand more exposure. Remember that the more exposure your brand gets, the more recognizable it will be in people's eyes.

Remarketing can increase brand awareness and conversion chances. This can be particularly important as 70% to 96% of site visitors usually leave before they can convert and don't return.

How to Use Remarketing for Brand Awareness 

For the best results, you can consider one of these remarketing strategies:

  • Display ads. These are usually shown to previous site visitors, often on social media or Google Display Network. Both channels offer significant viewership and increase brand awareness.
  • Email remarketing. This remarketing campaign targets people who either open your email or take another specific action. The idea is that these people are already interested in the brand, and you can use email remarketing to reinforce that interest.
  • Publishing content in other channels is required for your brand to be recognized.
  • Search ads. These remarketing ads are displayed on search engines, again targeting people who have visited your sites. 
  • Video remarketing. This is the correct retargeting method if people previously visited your site or watched your video. The ads in this form of remarketing are shown on the Google display network and YouTube.

Content Syndication

Another form of brand awareness is brand recognition, which measures how easily people can recognize your brand by considering its attributes. Content syndication aims to publish content on other sites to reach a larger audience. Syndicating content is, therefore, a better way of building brand awareness and driving links to a site. That is especially so when your work is published on authority sites.

However, when using content syndication, you should remember that duplicate content can affect your SEO and penalize your content. To avoid that, you can:

  • Request indexing of your content through the Google Search Console.
  • Share the content on your branded social media sites.
  • Use a real canonical tag. This informs the search engines that your page's URL is the master copy that needs to appear in the search engines.

How to Use Content Syndication to Build Brand Awareness

If you are getting started with syndication content, you can share content on:

  • Social network. Platforms like Quora and Linkedin have a built-in tool that enables you to publish your content. You can publish your articles on Linkedin, as it will keep your connections informed every time you post an article.
  • Blogging sites. There are sites like Tumblr and Medium where you can publish your work. These have a loyal following, which can help you gain new brand exposure.  Besides, a platform like Medium has essential tools to enable you to import content from any location.
  • Multi-Author blogs. Platforms such as Social Media Today are great for digital marketing content.

Conclusion

Using digital marketing to build brand awareness can have tremendous results. However, with so many options and strategies out there, there is a need for an organized approach. Remember that brand awareness doesn't happen overnight. It requires constant action, continuous monitoring, and adjustment before you can get it right. However, using the steps outlined above, it should be easy to start using digital marketing for brand awareness. We recommend reading our guide on using Twitch for digital marketing.