How to increase your brand awareness online

Brand Awareness is the level of familiarity that consumers have with a particular brand. It is the way in which consumers recognize and remember your business. The greater the brand awareness you have, the more audiences will be familiar with your logo, messages, and products. If you’re looking to get your brand in front of new customers, recapture lost leads, increase customer loyalty, and grow your business overall, then there’s no better option than increasing your brand awareness.

Why is Brand Awareness Important?
Brand awareness is important because it helps consumers understand, recall, and become comfortable with your brand and products. If you can build brand awareness among your target demographic, you can help your brand become top-of-mind when these consumers are ready to research and make a purchase.

But before we get into how to build brand awareness, let’s go over the essential tactics that you should have already in place.

• Be consistent with the same logo, colors, design, and personality across the board i.e on your website, social updates, and ads.
• Have a website/blog with quality content that’s updated frequently. To spice up your blog, throw in infographics, videos, and articles by influential guest bloggers.
• Be active on social media. Engage and interact with influencers and customers. Share your content. Run contests. Make sure you’re on the most appropriate channels where your audience spends the majority of their time.
• Optimize relevant keywords, title tags, meta data, and image alt text
• Launch a PPC or retargeting campaign.

How to increase your brand awareness online
1. Run Facebook and Instagram ads
Your brand probably already has a social media presence, but have trouble growing followings and engagement metrics. You need content advertising strategies that launch ads on social media. By running brand-awareness ads, you can reach new people who might be interested in your brand and even target audiences based on specific behaviors and preferences.  On Facebook and Instagram, you can launch brand-awareness campaigns that improve your reach and recall. Facebook recommends using video and carousel ads (which include a series of media) to target users who might be interested in your messaging. In fact, you can target audiences by categories such as age, location, gender, interest, and device. You can even create ‘lookalike’ audiences of people who are similar to your client’s existing audience, so you can reach those who are most likely to convert.

2. Run ads on Twitter
On Twitter, you can launch brand-awareness campaigns by promoting your tweets and paying for impressions instead of engagements. You set your bid amount per 1,000 impressions and Twitter optimizes your campaign for the best possible reach.

3. Partner with influencers to review your brand
If you’re having trouble connecting with your target audience, you may want to try reaching them through their favorite creators and influencers. Consumers trust recommendations from influencers more than traditional advertisements or even celebrity endorsements.  Similar to guest posting, agents can start influencer-marketing campaigns by finding influencers in relevant industries and reaching out with partnership ideas. You can do this by simply searching relevant keywords on social channels and sifting through the posts for influencer content. You can also search the #sponsored hashtags on Twitter and Instagram to see which influencers are already working with brands in your industry. You might even use influencer-marketing platforms like Upfluence and Traackr to do the legwork for you. Once you find the right influencers, you can gift them free products in exchange for reviews.

4. Partner with influencers to create content
If free products or services in exchange for a review aren’t your way, you can also leverage influencers to create pieces of content. Influencers know the type of content that resonates with their audience, and by working with them, they can create a piece of content that not only looks great, but that will hit a chord with their loyal follower-base, making them aware of your brand from a source that they trust.

5. Drill-Down on Referrals
Referrals may not be among the brand awareness-building activities that increase your audience by thousands, but they are a highly-effective way of extending your reach to individuals who already trust your brand. 74% of customers view word of mouth recommendations from friends, family, and professional peers as an important influencer in their purchasing decisions. Here are some ways to skyrocket your referral rate:

• Referral contests
• Seasonal rewards
• Social gifting

6. Remarketing Campaigns
Remarketing is a strategy for boosting brand awareness. Remarketing involves showing ads to users who visited your site but left before converting. Remarketing ads are placed all across the web on sites your customers visit. Soon they’ll be seeing your business everywhere – on their favorite blogs, while shopping online, etc. This gives the impression that your brand is much larger (and has a much bigger ad budget) than it really is. And it’s a great way to increase your conversion rate.

Finally, it’s important to remember that brand awareness isn’t “once and done.” We need to keep testing new strategies to see what makes the biggest impact.