Building brand awareness is imperative for your business in order for you to reach more potential clients. High brand recognition contributes to building a community and keeping customers loyal. It is important to stay active in the minds of your consumers to keep them coming back to you.
However, it can be difficult to build a brand that stands out in a crowded market. To achieve that, you will need a solid digital marketing strategy and the right focus on your target audience. We have some ideas about how to accomplish this. Below are some marketing tips you may find helpful for achieving the goal of increasing the recognition of your company.
Nonetheless, it is best to take one step at a time and begin with the concept of brand awareness. What does it mean, and why is it important?
What is brand awareness?
Brand awareness is crucial, no matter which industry your company operates in. In a nutshell, it stands for people’s ability to recognize your brand. The higher your brand awareness, the better results advertising and campaigns will achieve. Knowing your brand may encourage a lot of consumers to choose your company to fulfill their needs as the go-to option. As such, there is a great need to build a strong brand identity and become a top name in your industry.
This is also an essential aspect for both B2C and B2B companies. More than 75% of B2B leaders admit that a strong brand is crucial for their growth plans. So no matter who your target is, it would be nice to stay in their minds for longer.
Why is brand awareness important?
Reaching potential customers is not a piece of cake; countless businesses are fighting to reach a similar target audience. Keeping your brand at the forefront of people’s minds is the first and one of the most important stages of the marketing funnel. It is crucial for acquiring more clients and building a community.
Brand awareness campaigns support expanding your audience and help to search for the best strategies. There are plenty of digital marketing tactics that may come in handy with this matter. For starters, it would be good to focus on the type of content you publish and how you encourage people to visit your website. In such terms, referrals can be a huge support. They will help you to reach a broad audience and increase your engagement rate.
How can a referral program boost brand awareness?
What can you do to use referral marketing for a brand engagement campaign? We are here to show you. But first things first, before you use a referral program to boost brand awareness, you should choose the best tool to do so. In our opinion, it is EarlyParrot, and we will explain to you why.
Making noise about your brand
Once you have created your campaign (with EarlyParrot, this can happen in the blink of an eye), you will be able to reach new customers. Thanks to offering incentives, your regular customers will be more willing to spread the word about your business and invite their friends or family to join your community. By using referral links, you will be able to track who is the best brand ambassador and maybe reward them even more than usual.
Your customers can share their recommendations and links across social platforms and become part of your content marketing strategy. What you need to do is to design the messages for them to share. With EarlyParrot, you can create the content of each sharing page and message that your customers will publish. Think about valuable content that will have a major impact on the recipients and boost social engagement. You will see that social media users appreciate such content and visit your website as a result.
Branding your communication
Speaking of communication, it should be clear as day which brand is behind this content. You need to focus on your visual brand identity. About 3/4 of customers recognize a brand via its logo. So put it in a visible place when creating a communication widget. Moreover, it is also important to brand your rewards. Once a new customer earns a gift for, e.g., registering to receive your newsletter, it should be clear who will send it. This will stick in their mind and place you one step closer to your ultimate goal, which is remaining in their memory. With EarlyParrot, you can add an image to each incentive, no matter if it is a welcome gift or a referral reward. Keep in mind the above and add your logo to the pictures of them. Visual content has a significant impact on increasing visual brand identity, so remember to brand all graphics or videos that you post too.
Taking care of your SEO efforts
One of the most crucial aspects of any content marketing strategy is SEO. It supports boosting conversion rate and keeping your position in search engine results high. When you hear SEO, the first thing that comes to mind is probably keywords. This is the right association, but it is also crucial when making blog posts or other pieces of content. When it comes to referral marketing, links matter the most. Add the name of your brand to referral links in order to boost brand awareness and support your SEO effort at the same time. If you take care of your SEO comprehensively, you will see the results – a high position in search engine results and branded referral links that are a claim to fame.
Staying in touch with your clients
Keeping your customers in the loop allows them to feel a sense of community, and thus brand awareness to increase. Inform them about each change in the program or other general ones. It would also be great to provide customers with some valuable content like whitepapers, ebooks, or infographics. Help them expand their horizons.
In this regard, list building is a crucial aspect to keep everything in order. EarlyParrot supports this process too. Once a given client registers on your site, they will receive an email with an invitation to join your referral program. By inviting each of your customers and informing them about upcoming or earned rewards you will keep them in the loop and expand your brand community, which is the main point of referrals. Plus, you can add some extras to these emails too.
It is important to note that EarlyParrot supports most of the commonly used email marketing providers like MailChimp, ConvertKit, and AWeber, so it won’t be a problem to integrate this tool with your apps.
What else can you do to build brand awareness?
There are plenty of digital marketing strategies for boosting your company’s recognizability. But none of them will bring outstanding results by themself. To support your referral efforts, you need to use the synergy effect and choose which ones would work best together. We have some propositions.
Social media marketing
Being present on social media allows you to stay in customers’ minds for longer. Let’s consider a situation when a client receives a referral link from a friend and visits your site, but isn’t convinced. As they scroll through Instagram, they notice your advertisement and are encouraged by quality content on your profile. Acquisition of a new lead would be the cherry on top if you handle it properly. Inspired by your Instagram content, the potential client may return to your site, use a referral link, and join your program. Doesn’t that sound promising?
Guest posting
Be present on many channels and… websites. Make the most of the possibilities offered by guest posting. Promote your business on different sites and industry platforms by writing informative and interesting texts that refer to your business. Remember, however, that this should not be an intrusive promotion – you should gently suggest checking out your company or its products. Thanks to such occasional guest posts, you will have the opportunity to reach a larger group and acquire new customers. You can capitalize on the reach of the pages your posts are published on and catch their audiences’ attention. It’s a perfect solution.
There is one catch – the content must be valuable and high quality. It should be insightful and full of interesting facts or stats. Otherwise, hardly anyone will want to collaborate with you. It is also crucial to offer something in exchange, such as a post on your blog or backlink. The conditions depend on both parties, but do not forget that no business activity is one-sided. Ask and receive, that is the main rule.
Affiliate marketing
This kind of marketing is often confused with referral marketing, and although they act on similar principles they differ from each other quite significantly. Both are about recommendations, which in the case of affiliate marketing are made by affiliates, i.e. people who have gathered a large audience on social media. They recommend your product and provide affiliate links to followers, allowing them to purchase with, e.g., a 10% discount. The combination of these two recommendation channels may turn out to be very effective. For example, a customer sees a video on YouTube about your product but is not fully convinced. If a friend also makes the same recommendation, though, success is guaranteed.
It is worth using omnichannel marketing to increase brand awareness – you can increase revenue by as much as 23% by presenting your brand consistently across all platforms. In addition, too many channels and advertisements can cause readers to become overwhelmed, which is the exact opposite of what you want to accomplish. Therefore take care when deciding which channels and ads to ignore.
Over to you
Increasing brand awareness is a significant step towards building the appearance of your business. Remaining at the forefront of people’s minds by gaining their recommendations is a good way to stay relevant. But to have everything under control, you need a good strategy and tools. One of them is EarlyParrot, and it will assist you from the first minutes of the installation process.
Thanks to EarlyParrot, you will be able to use the full power of referrals and plan an entire omnichannel strategy too. Once you launch your referral program, this tool will handle the communication on your behalf and automate every process. Moreover, you will be able to track the performance of your program at any time.
Thanks to such support, you will have more time to take care of other strategic aspects and plan, e.g., collaboration with affiliates or social media posts.
Ready to boost your brand awareness?