Even when there are various burger joints globally, everyone has heard about McDonald’s, right? The restaurant serves sixty-nine million people every day. Likewise, there are so many coffeehouses in the world; the names of all are unlikely to remember, but Starbucks is familiar to almost everyone.
So, what’s the magic behind brands who have carved out a niche for themselves, even though many other similar brands offer same services, products, or experiences?
The answer to this question hovering around in your mind is having a comprehensive understanding of building strong brand awareness and brand recognition, including brand building.
So, let’s find out how adopting these 3 steps of the marketing funnel can aid your brand in earning potential and loyal customers, increasing website traffic and, eventually leading to an increase in sales.
Brand Awareness vs. Brand Recognition vs. Brand Building
A brand is a set of expectations, memories, stories, and relationships that, take together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another. – Seth Godin
Brand Awareness: The initial step to build your brand is making your audience familiar with who you are, and the fact that you exist. Without building awareness about your brand, your audience will neither have an idea about your brand nor about the services, products, or experiences you have to offer.
Brand Recognition: Once your audience is aware of the brand, the next stage in the marketing funnel is to learn if they can recognize your brand based on some of your branding elements, such as colour, logo, taglines, mascot, packaging, etc.
Brand Building: This is where you give an identity to your brand and build an emotional connection with your audience, achieving lifetime loyalty and an increase in revenue. Even if there’s any new brand launched in the market offering a similar product, service, or experience, your audience won’t leave you as your brand has already created a place in their hearts.
What’s next?
Related Reading: Importance of Digital Branding for Growth of your Business
Learn about digital marketing – Its role in building a brand
Also known as online marketing, digital marketing is used by brands to reach out to their potential audience and promote their products, services, or experiences over the internet or by using any other digital communication, such as social media, email, online advertising & messages, etc.
So, how does digital marketing boost brand awareness and helps in building a brand?
Let’s unravel!
In this digital era, online marketing plays an essential role, irrespective of the size of your company. Never mind the size, industry type, and your target market, you need definite strategies to boost your business with digital marketing. These strategies guide you in achieving your brand’s marketing objectives through online channels, including various digital marketing plans, complete knowledge of what channels work best for your brand, and how much should you invest in these selected online channels.
According to a new study on Scotsman.com, the average person spends around eight and a half hours a day online. It means that the internet is the ultimate space for brands to connect directly to the customers and promote what they have to offer. And how do they do it? With the marketing strategies we’re going to discuss next.
Top 5 digital marketing strategies to boost brand building in 2022
1. Social Media Marketing
Not only can you reach out to a large potential audience in a snap with paid ads or posts across various social media sites but also engage with them and raise awareness about your brand.
So, does that mean you can upload any sort of post or ad? The answer is, NO.
There should be a thoroughly researched strategy or a strong brand awareness campaign behind every update or promotion, which the audience would love to engage with. Posting boring content will be of no help, it’s merely wasting your time. Whereas, posting content that people can connect to, will help your brand transform into household names like LG, Apple, Google, and Coca-Cola.
While some of the most popular social media platforms for brand building include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Snapchat, it is always wise to choose sites that will work best for your business.
For instance, Instagram often works best for B2C companies (like F&B, Fashion, and Skincare), whereas LinkedIn and Twitter offer the best results for B2B companies. So, it’s essential to choose sites for your business after analysing where your audience is and on what platforms are your competitors active.
Related Reading: How Social Media Has Changed The Way We Do Business?
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
You want your brand to receive the highest exposure online and to be on the top or right in front of the customer’s eyes, on search engines like Google, Yahoo, etc., and this is where SEO plays a vital role in accomplishing your objective.
Here’s how you can use SEO to boost your brand visibility:
Link building strategy – We all know by now that brand awareness increases the recognition and identity of any brand. So, when we enter into the SEO world, strategic link building comes into play. From infographics to guest posting to expert roundups, you can create content that generates links and social shares. Both informative and recreational content works in this context – and you have to figure out what type to go with.
Optimized content – Content is king and one of the best ways to educate people of your brand or company is through content marketing. To obtain high-quality content, an amalgamation of SEO and branding proves powerful. For the best results, you need to balance the quality of the content (keeping it interesting & informative at the same time) while including business-specific keywords.
Google Image search results optimization: Whenever you use an image for your content, including brand keyword as the filename and adding a keyword-rich alt text when uploading the image will help your brand grow big time.
3. YouTube Marketing
Did you know YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world?
YouTube is all about videos. Millions of people visit YouTube to not buy anything but to watch entertaining or educational content. Videos, if crafted strategically, garner a lot of attention, hence they’re a powerful medium to generate brand awareness.
Creating videos on YouTube for your brand will help you gain more potential customers, promote your blogs, and increase remarketing. Try incorporating your YouTube Videos in your blog posts; it will help increase the average time people invest in your post, leading to an increase in the overall website traffic.
4. Influencer Marketing
Contrary to the time when only celebrities and a few committed bloggers were a part of the influencer marketing community, the potential of influencer marketing has increased manifold. Influencers with a high follower count help brands promote their products across a more extensive audience.
Most social media users dedicatedly follow these influencers and their purchasing decision is based on the advice or feedback of the influencer on particular products, services, or experiences.
Brands can gain leveraging benefits from influencer marketing, such as:
- Generating engaging content
- Increasing sales
- Building trust & credibility
- Gaining new audiences
5. Paid Marketing
Paid marketing is the fastest way to reach out to potential customers and also to spread awareness about your brand to new target audiences. Consider the following when using paid marketing for brand building:
- Run brand awareness ads, however, ensure to use a wide array of targeting, including interests, locations, demographics, purchase history, search history, and frequently visited websites.
- Retarget the customer who left the website without purchasing by sending personalized messages on products and services they were interested in when they visited your website.
Choose your social media platforms based on your target audience. For instance, channels like TikTok and Instagram would be best to connect to the GenZ customers, while LinkedIn would be the best platform to reach out to professionals who have buying authority in companies. people.
Why Digital Marketing is essential for brand building?
A successful brand identity helps your brand stand out from the competitors and digital marketing is the most reliable way to achieve this objective. Right from SEO to social media management to email campaigns, digital marketing is an all-inclusive practice that suits businesses of all sizes and industries. Each of these practices helps brands build their identity and grow exponentially. With so much competition in the market and people shifting to personal devices to shop, digital marketing is the primary mode for brands to showcase what they have to offer.
Final Thoughts
Brand building requires time, effective strategies, and awareness in digital marketing. Rome was, after all, not built in one day. So, if you want your brand to be set apart from the rest, remember:
- Brand building is important because it helps create a relationship with your audience and connects with them on an emotional level.
- Guest posts, infographics, and SEO-optimized articles &blogs are excellent ways to get started with your content.
- Social media marketing is a great brand awareness digital marketing strategy, given the fact that a huge percentage of people use social media platforms on a regular basis. Not to forget influencer collaborations, that garner leveraging benefits for the brands.
If you haven’t adopted any digital marketing strategies to grow your brands’ online presence and do not want to invest in hiring an in-house digital marketing expert either, you can hire virtual assistants who have expertise in digital marketing. It’s a win-win situation for you as outsourcing your marketing requirements to these experts is cost-effective as well as your brand will be completely taken care of, by skilled professionals.
Furthermore, if you want to gain some additional perks, like free trials, quick sale-down, and a money-back guarantee, hire digital marketing experts in India.
