5 Ways to Increase Brand Awareness Online
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It used to be the case that having an online presence was sufficient to build brand awareness. By simply having social media profiles and a website, you were getting the word out there about your product or service.
We’ll dig a little deeper into this now, but if you’re ready to jump straight to the methods for increasing brand awareness, you can find some shortcuts here:
Nowadays, the competition for attention online has reached new heights, meaning companies have to work harder than ever to build awareness and get buy-in from prospective customers that come in contact with their brand.
It’s not all doom and gloom though – the work may be harder, but the reward is higher than ever.
By frontloading the effort of building brand awareness online, your prospective customers are far more familiar with you and your product when they make the decision to convert.
And what this means for your business in the long-term is that these customers are less likely to churn.
Top tips for increasing brand awareness
So how do you compete with the world’s best brands to build awareness online?
I’m glad you asked.
There are a few simple and effective methods you can use to get your brand seen, and what’s more, is that they’re super easy to implement.
So let’s take a look at how you can get started.
1. Guest posting
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll know that content has become a force to be reckoned with in recent years when it comes to driving business success across the board.
Not only does it give you a blank canvas to work from when it comes to creating a brand tone and voice that people resonate with and keep coming back to read, but it also acts as the perfect platform to let people get to know what’s important to your brand.
People will always be able to rattle off their favorite authors, journalists and poets. So when they’re asked what their favorite blogs are, why shouldn’t yours be one of the first that springs to mind?
In saying that, it can be difficult to attract the attention you need to instill this level of loyalty to your brand, and as with most things in life, sometimes you need a helping hand to get started.
A great way to get readers to your blog is by guest posting on other brands’ blogs. That way, their readers will be able to see your brand next to the content they’re enjoying on a blog that they trust.
Like so:
What’s more – aside from the fact that you’re attracting eyeballs that may not have otherwise found your content, you’re also being given the seal of approval by that partner that they see value in what you’re writing about.
2. Referral programs
‘Refer a friend’ incentives have been around for a very long time.
And guess what? They’re still around because they work.
It’s statistically proven that you’re 83% more likely to buy a product or service off the back of a recommendation from someone you trust.
Let’s face it, if you’re looking for a dentist and your friend recommends theirs, you’re probably going to pay them a visit (especially if your friend has nice teeth 😉 ).
In the same way, asking your customers to recommend your product or service to their network acts as an effective way to grow your awareness by word-of-mouth, and shows them that you value their opinion.
Many companies offer rewards as part of these types of programs, like gift vouchers or in-platform perks, making it a great way to reward your customers for being the front-line, brand advocates that they are.
Dropbox has become known as one of the frontrunners in the referral marketing game, and for good reason.
They launched a program wherein their customers could get extra space in their Dropbox account by getting their friends to sign up. Its launch saw massive success and has continued to drive sign-ups ever since.
3. Infographics
Infographics are the information equivalent of a funny cat video – they capture attention and are very likely to be shared on social media. So if you want to create a viral effect with your content, look no further (unless you have some funny cats lying around your office).
via GIPHY
In a nutshell, an infographic is a creative medium through which you can communicate a lot of information.
If you have large sets of data that you’d like to share with the world (but also don’t want to bore them into oblivion), an infographic is a great way to get the information across.
Not only that, but the more times that infographic is shared on social, in other blog posts, or featured in email newsletters, the more your brand is seen by new, prospective customers.
Check out how this infographic was cleverly designed to illustrate a detailed history of the infographic itself – it’s easy to read, engaging and contains really valuable information.
Would you be tempted to share it? I know I would.
4. Social media contests
As the old saying goes, people love things that are free.
Ok, maybe it’s not a saying, but it’s true nonetheless.
We all see contests for iPhones, laptops, concert tickets – or my personal favorite, free food – on social media every day.
You can also get creative with your own product and offer features or packages up as prizes.
Hallmark, for example, offered their Instagram followers the chance to win a bundle of birthday cards in exchange for them liking and commenting on the post.
You’ll also notice their use of hashtags, which is key for helping people to find your post once you’ve published content on any of your social media channels.
Sharing an incentive to like or share your post, or even follow your page can increase brand awareness exponentially in a short period of time.
5. Retargeting
An age-old favorite amongst marketers, retargeting is a cookie-based technology that enables you to tag users who have visited your website so you can target them with advertising at a later stage on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, the Google Display Network, and many more.
The major benefit of using retargeting as part of your marketing strategy is that you’re serving up constant brand reminders to prospective customers, no matter where they are online.
Our link retargeting technology takes that one step further by letting you tag and target people who have never even been to your website.
That’s right.
By creating branded links with Rebrandly, you can embed your retargeting pixels in your links and tag anyone who clicks on them. So, say you’re sharing partner content – or even some news coverage your company got – you can direct people to someone else’s site and still be able to serve them up tailored ads later on.
Not only does this help you increase brand awareness, but it also helps you to grow out your retargeting audiences quickly.
And a bigger audience = a bigger customer-base.
Simple.
Tools to help you get started
When it comes to building brand awareness online, there are a number of things you have to consider, like consistent visual identity and tone of voice.
If people recognize your brand, they’ll come back to it.
On that note, there are a handful of tools you can use to help you get started with this.
So let’s take a look at some of the tools you can add to your toolkit.
Visual tools:
1. Visme
Visme is an intuitive online platform with a mission to allow anyone to easily visualize their ideas into engaging presentations, infographics, animations, product demonstrations and more. It’s entirely based on HTML5 and runs on any browser with simple easy to use drag and drop functions that requires no experience.
2. Piktochart
Piktochart is another easy-to-use design tool that helps you tell your story whether it’s in the format of a presentation, report, banner, or infographic with the visual impact it deserves. Today, you can even generate a script to better tell your story.
3. Canva
Canva offers its users both free and paid stock photography, fonts, illustrations, and thousands of templates to help them design with little to no experience needed. In addition to that, you also have the ability to save your brand colors, fonts and assets to ensure consistency across your designs.
4. Venngage
Venngage is an advanced infographics tools with highly customizable controls for both beginners and advanced users. The tool comes with hundreds of different charts, icons, pictograms and widgets so that you can easily create professional looking infographics.
5. Lumen5
Lumen5 is a video creation platform designed for brands and businesses to produce engaging video content for social posts, stories, and ads. Their goal is to enable anyone without training or experience to easily create amazing videos in minutes. Another similar alternatives is the many AI story writers now available.
Social media tools:
1. Buffer
Buffer is an intuitive, streamlined social media management platform trusted by brands, businesses, agencies, and individuals to help drive meaningful engagement and results on social media.
2. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media management platform that enables you to quickly find and schedule great social content, as well as measure its impact—all on a single, secure platform.
3. SocialBee
SocialBee allows you to schedule and recycle all of your social media content. You can categorize your content to save time when creating your posts and use their advanced RSS functionality, multiple import features, browser extension or Zapier integration to add content to SocialBee automatically. Finally, you can use custom domains (hint hint 😉 ) to brand the links you’re sharing, get in-depth analytics and grow your retargeting audience by adding your pixels to every link you create.
4. Bulkly
Similar to some of the above tools, Bulkly is a tool to help you save time when it comes to posting on social media. With a few clicks, you can automate the process of adding status updates to your social media queues and recycle all of your social media updates, eliminating the need to manually schedule the same updates over and over.
Content marketing tools:
1. Hemingway Editor
If you’re investing a lot of time and effort in content marketing, Hemingway Editor is going to be your best friend. It analyzes your writing for complexity, use of passive voice, difficulty to read, and much more, helping you to simplify your content and please your readers.
2. Grammarly
From grammar and spelling to style and tone, Grammarly helps you eliminate errors and find the perfect words to express yourself. Their intuitive text editor is a central place on the web to write and to customize the types of writing suggestions you see.
3. Yoast
The mission of Yoast is ‘SEO for everyone’. Their plugin feeds directly into your WordPress account, giving you valuable insights about the SEO value of your blog before you publish.
4. StoryChief
StoryChief puts everything you need to get your content marketing done in one place. Organize, structure & publish your content on a wide variety of channels from a single dashboard.
Analytics tools:
1. Rebrandly
Rebrandly is the most advanced link management platform to brand, track and share short URLs using a custom domain name.
Branded links are the evolution of short URLs. Simply put, they turn a long, ugly link into a short, memorable phrase – featuring the company’s own domain name.
With branded links, you can:
- Increase social engagement and CTR by up to 39%
- Improve your conversion rate with advanced traffic routing
- Grow your audience by adding retargeting pixels to your links
2. Google Marketing Platform
With Google Marketing Platform, you can get free tools to make the most of your marketing, from site and app analytics to intuitive testing and more.
3. Ahrefs
Ahrefs allows you to see the exact keywords for which your competitors rank in organic search and the amount of traffic driven by each of them.
You can use the Top Pages report to see which pages send the most traffic to their sites, as well as the Content Gap feature to uncover the keywords they rank for but you don’t.
4. SEMrush
SEMrush is a keyword research tool that helps users to fix technical website issues, improve the health of their backlink profile, and track local rankings on both mobile and desktop. Marketers can easily spot opportunities they are missing compared to their rivals and get ideas for their SEO, PPC and content marketing campaigns.
Over to you
Have you tried and tested any other methods of increasing brand awareness online?
Or used any tools that we haven’t mentioned above?
We’d love to hear from you in the comments!
Further reading:
- How to build brand trust on social media
- How to Strengthen a Brand With Visual Elements
- How to choose a brand name
This article is about:
- Brand awareness
- Building brand awareness
- Tips and tools to help you increase brand awareness online
Originally Posted: 23rd of October 2019
Last Updated: 14th of May 2021
