Brand awareness has become an essential component of today’s marketing. Whether you’re a new entry or a veteran on the market, it’s important to choose the most effective strategies to boost your company. Today we are going to have a look at some smart tactics you can use, as well as some brand awareness examples of companies, together with their strategies.
Smart Brand Awareness Tactics to Try
1. Offer Freebies
Everybody loves freebies, right? So why not take advantage of this great opportunity and offer special customers some advantages? Make people be more interested in getting involved with your business by giving them prizes. Set a couple of checkpoints, such as spending a certain amount of money, being with your company for X years, etc.
2. Limited Time/ Quantity
Even if you’re no expert in brand awareness, you may have noticed some companies’ strategy of making people buy something by saying it’s a limited offer/ quantity. The useful anxiety created through this will help spread the word about your products.
3. Mentions
Social media will always be a solid base for any brand awareness strategy. One of the ways in which you can use it is to mention other people in this industry. Write a post where you mention them briefly, and most likely, they will answer. Thus, you will get access to their own follower base.
4. Offer Enough Content
In this fast-paced world, customers quickly forget about a temporary brand. If you want to leave a permanent mark on them, make sure you offer enough content. Post often on social media, engage them in various events and be present whenever they have a question, whether online or offline.
5. Community Involvement
People love brands that get involved and give back to the community. Whether you sponsor local events, host your own, or simply get involved with schools and other institutions, make sure people know about it. Help them work for a community institution, build homes or administrative buildings and your followers won’t forget you.
6. Multimedia Content
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. But social media showed us that multimedia content is worth a thousand pictures! People are mostly attracted by infographics, colored charts, interactive games, clips, and so on. Focus more on visual content and include various types of information on your page.
7. Email Taglines
Many people are currently trying to find out how to increase brand awareness without investing more money. A simple solution is to add an email tagline. Whenever you write an email to somebody, they will notice at the end your website, blog or logo. In this way, you gain access to a larger audience without spending more on promotion.
8. Guest Blogging
If you have a blog, it’s a good idea to ask friends or competitors to write something on your blog. You can do it for them as well, so you can both access each other’s follower base. Usually, this strategy is limited to one post/ guest, but you can make an entire series and thus enlarge your audience.
9. Contests and Giveaways
Naturally, these are two of the fastest ways to increase your brand awareness. You don’t even need to offer something expensive. Many brands give away things such as a T-shirt or a mug with their logo, movie tickets, photo sessions, etc. Usually, companies give prizes in exchange for likes and shares.
10. Polls and Surveys
Though not many companies use this, polls and surveys are preferred by social media users, for example. It’s important to keep the questions short so that they won’t waste much time with it. In general, try to keep your content relevant and to the point.
Brand Awareness Marketing Examples
Now that you received some suggestions for improving your own strategies, it’s time to have a look at a couple of examples. To understand better the importance of brand awareness, we will analyze a couple of successful brands and their tactics.
1. Uniqlo
This is a Japanese company that sells casual clothes. The strategy they used to boost their brand was to seal a partnership with other brands. As such, they decided to sponsor free admission to MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) in New York, every Friday between 4 and 8 PM. In this way, they gained a new audience which would have been extremely difficult to reach otherwise.
2. Dropbox
Most likely, you have heard about Dropbox until now. If you haven’t, you should know it’s a free service that offers storage for documents, photos, and videos, which you can later share with your friends. Starting with 2009, they had a massive growth on the market. Their idea was to use a referral program. They made it very easy to share Dropbox via email, social media, or simply through a link. If you did that, you got more available space. This managed to boost their user base by an impressive 60%.
3. Evernote
The famous collaboration and note-taking tool, Evernote, was initially released as a closed beta. This phase lasted for 4 months, period in which people had to sign up for it and send further invitations to be able to use the service. It seems that this strategy was successful since Evernote gathered 125,000 users in just 4 months.
4. Buffer
The last example we need to include on this list is Buffer, a publishing tool for social media. It started on smaller websites and then reached the top names in the industry. They relied on writing 150 guest posts, which made them reach more than 100,000 users in just 9 months.
Here you can watch a useful TED talk about the importance of social media when it comes to building a brand:
To draw a conclusion, we can say that the companies we gave as an example above managed to successfully apply simple brand awareness ideas. This proves that you don’t need to invest a lot of money to promote your business. Check out the ideas above and see which one fits you or your business’ personality best. You don’t need to limit yourself just to one, simply combine several and see if you’re getting the results you want.
Image source: depositphotos.com
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