Brand awareness is a golden ticket. It can actually be the golden ticket if the reason people are familiar with your brand is a good one. It means you’re easily recognizable.
You may even be the first company that pops into their minds whenever they need what you have to offer. That said, it’s not something that happens by chance or by luck. It takes a whole lot of planning and strategizing. But once you start reaping what you sow, you realize that every single moment and all the money and effort pumped into it was worth it.
But what is a brand awareness strategy? And what are some of the best tools to use to make it as easy as possible for your team?
A brand awareness strategy is aligning all elements of your business into one recognizable concept. And it’s all about marketing.
But not just disruptive ads and pop ups that people are quick to skip. It entails a more organic approach — subtly popping up whenever someone is researching anything that has to do with your industry; creating relatable content that makes people feel good when they see it; slowly but surely becoming part of pop culture.
Some companies do this so well, their name becomes synonymous with what they sell. Think Kleenex for facial tissues, Pampers for diapers, and Band-Aid for adhesive bandages. They’re household names, despite the fact that they all have plenty of competition.
While there are many pieces of the puzzle that made them reach their level of success, there is one essential component — inbound marketing.
There are many ways to market your business. And depending on your industry, it may very well be effective to go the traditional route with ads, billboards, and commercials.
However, inbound marketing — the type where people find you when doing an online search — can be a lot more effective to build brand awareness without being obnoxious.
There are different types of brand awareness. Maybe a person immediately thinks of you when they need your goods or services. Or maybe they see a logo with no text, yet they know exactly which company it represents.
But to get to that point, a person needs to be exposed repeatedly to such content. Therefore, the more information you put out there in the internet universe, the more likely it is that your target audience will find you.
Once people start finding you, they may begin to use you as a resource — especially if you’ve become a leader in your industry.
Say, for example, that someone is using you as a case study, or is quoting something you’ve mentioned on your website, your business blog, or editorial. They can link back to your own content, share on social media, or discuss you within the context of a trending hashtag.
All of these actions increase your online presence, and thus, the likelihood of people becoming instantly aware of who you are.
When people start to share your content and use you as a reputable source, it establishes you as an authority within your niche. This is worth gold, since you want to be seen as trustworthy. But make sure you actually are. Brand authenticity is just as important as anything you have to offer.
This trust is what keeps people coming back and referring to their friends and family.
What you publish online stays there long-term. It doesn’t matter that you wrote it six months ago or two years ago. People will continue to find it — especially if you do a historical optimization or repurpose it.
So in addition to your editorial calendar, you still have an extensive portfolio of information people can keep referring to.
When you publish content regularly, people start to recognize your tone. Are you funny? Witty? Have a dry sense of humor? Are you sober and square all the time because you work in a dry industry like legal or finance?
It doesn’t matter what it is. When you share content regularly, people start to recognize your brand voice and identity — and this is definitely part and parcel of building a good brand awareness.
One of the key elements of inbound marketing is providing valuable information. For this to work, it has to be customer-centric. Instead of always pushing for a sale, you educate your intended market.
Answer their questions. Guide them through processes. Offer free tutorials, ebooks, whitepapers, podcasts… anything that they can refer to to address some of their pain points. This way, you’re doing something good for humanity and they realize that you’re not just there to make a buck; but to also actually help them.
The more people come across your content, the more they share it. The more people see it, the more they click on it on search engine result pages (SERPs); and the more they link back to your content.
All of these factors come into play when Google ranks content. Granted, you still need to have an SEO strategy, but this is also part of effective inbound marketing.
Not everyone who comes across your content at the same stage of their buyer’s journey. Some people are ready, willing, and able to make a purchase. Others aren’t even aware of all of their issues yet; while another portion may be researching and comparing what they find.
No matter who comes across your content, you should nurture your leads by continuing to provide useful information that’s valuable to them — regardless of where they are in the sales funnel.
Writing blogs, lead magnets, or any other type of useful content is easy to share — either through people copying and pasting the link, or sharing directly from your own social media pages.
Do remember to be patient to see all of this happen, however. Inbound marketing is an effective strategy to create brand awareness, but it does take time to yield results.
Ok. So now that you know how much you would benefit from inbound marketing, what are the best tools and resources to deploy your strategies? Glad you asked.
The customer experience is everything. It’s what makes or breaks a business. It’s what keeps people coming back. It’s also what causes people to go to a competitor when they find it lacking.
This is why, in addition to having a good customer support department, it’s crucial to have a good customer relations management software. This helps you keep track of all contact information, previous communications, and anything else that may be relevant to provide personalized content — something that’s useful specifically to the person you’re serving.
Inbound marketing requires drafting a lot of content. Therefore, you want to use tools that let you build, manage, and update it easily. This is why having a good content management system is essential.
They usually come with prebuilt themes, drag-and-drop capabilities, and/or SEO suggestions; and some of them even allow you to link your social media platforms so that you can easily share content and manage all of them from one centralized location.
You want people to find your content whenever they do an online search. A good inbound marketing strategy involves keyword research and knowledge about on-page and technical SEO.
And every single piece of content that you publish gives you an additional opportunity to rank on search engine results pages.
Email marketing is a good way to communicate with your audience because it gives them the chance to interact with your content at a time that’s convenient for them. They open it when they have time.
It also helps keep you top of mind to your blog or newsletter subscribers, since they get to see your business name regularly in their inbox.
You can’t track what you can’t measure. In order to determine whether your inbound marketing approach is working, you need to be able to see the numbers — how many people are visiting your website, sharing your content, and/or opening your marketing emails.
By the same token, you want to know your bounce rate and how many people are unsubscribing from your content. No matter what you’re seeing, you’ll gain valuable insights that can either confirm that what you’re doing is working, or whether it’s time to regroup and modify your approach.
Social media is huge. You want to pick the platforms where your buyer persona is most likely to spend their time and focus on those. And while you could hire someone to work full-time tracking every mention on social media, a more effective way of doing this is to use social media management tools.
This way, you can answer questions, reply to reviews, and see what people are talking about whenever they discuss your business.
While there are a lot of tools and resources to help you gauge the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, the best source of information is your target audience themselves.
Surveys allow you to ask for feedback on their own time. You can include them in your marketing emails or social media platforms to gain insights on what your customers really want.
While there are many software options for every single one of the tools mentioned above, HubSpot provides an all-in-one solution.
They offer three tiers (starter, professional, and enterprise), depending on the size of your team, budget, and number of contacts; so you can be assured that you have everything you need to increase your brand awareness, including:
HubSpot’s Marketing Hub helps you lay down the foundation for attracting the right audience.
It includes features such as traffic and conversion analytics, live chat, form templates for landing pages, email marketing templates, marketing automation, and ad reporting, to name a few.
HubSpot’s Sales Hub lets you set up your sales processes to make things easier for your team.
You can automate deal-based actions, set up sales reporting dashboards, track revenue, design a product library, email tracking and notifications, meeting scheduling, document sharing, and track rep productivity performance, so that everyone in your sales department can hit the ground running.
HubSpot’s Service Hub provides you with all the tools to provide extraordinary customer support. This includes the ability to create a knowledge base and chatbots to provide faster answers and allow your support team to focus on more complex issues.
You can also keep all tickets in one centralized location, regardless of whether they were received via email, social media, or live chat. And with their customer portal, your customers can log in to check the status of their projects and keep track of all communications.
HubSpot’s content management system, known as the CMS Hub, makes it really easy to run a blog. You can draft, edit, share, and modify to your heart’s desires. You can design it to look in a way that matches your brand perfectly.
And it has valuable SEO suggestions to ensure your content has a better chance of being found by your target audience.
HubSpot’s Operations Hub connects all of your business apps and automates processes in one centralized location.
This makes things a lot easier for all of your departments, as well as for your customers. Some of these capabilities include webhook set up, data quality automation, and data sync integrations.
HubSpot’s CRM is free, and it makes contact management as simple and seamless as possible.
Import and segment your contacts, clean up your contacts list, create custom objects and custom deal stages, automatically associate companies to contacts, and link it to your calendar so that prospects can book meetings with one of your team members. You can also monitor performance with their sales reporting tools.
All of these solutions are user friendly and integrate with a long list of applications, including Gmail, Google Calendar, Salesforce, MailChimp, Proposify, Shopify, Eventbrite, and Zoho, to name a few. However, they do involve a learning curve — which you can overcome by taking their free HubSpot Academy courses. You can also contact us at Bluleadz to discuss HubSpot consulting and services.
No matter how you look at it, HubSpot offers all of the solutions you need to grow your business.