5 Ways to Supercharge Your Brand Awareness

I recently looked at data from a survey conducted in December 2015 of more than 1,000 small businesses across the U.S. regarding their use of digital marketing. Respondents were asked to list their top digital marketing goals, and priorities, which also reveals some challenges. The results clearly showed me what small business owners hope to achieve with their marketing in 2016; first sales but after that growing brand awareness or conveying information.

The ultimate goal of any business is to gain more trust with current clients and achieve better brand awareness among the target audience.

One of the hardest things for many small business owners to do is to put themselves in the shoes of prospective customers long before that customer is aware that you have the answer.

We often want to convince and persuade people we can solve problems they don’t even know they have.

In order to effectively increase brand awareness you must fully understand the questions your prospects are asking themselves before they are aware that you or your solutions exist.

For example, if you sell websites, you must start to increase  brand awareness through your marketing to prospects, not by explaining how great your websites are, but by addressing ways that businesses can build a stronger case for industry expertise, attract more customers and make it easier for customers to find the information they need — all great uses of websites by the way.

At the awareness stage, your prospective leads aren’t doing research with the intention of purchasing anything from you. Instead, they’re simply looking for answers, entertainment, or information! Approximately 96% of visitors that come to your website are not ready to buy.

And that’s exactly why, at the early stages of the customer’s journey, you create content that is educational and useful.

Examples of educational content:

You lure them in, with the hopes that when they are ready to buy, they’ll think of your business.

To get this content in front of eyeballs, advertising, SEO (search engine optimization) and social media marketing play a huge part.

Your ads may be the first way someone is introduced to your business. Advertising is looked at by most small business owners as a tool to sell, instead of create awareness. This awareness approach can in fact benefit a small business, if the advertising message is right, and if the awareness that is created, spells out a key benefit.

The point is that the most effective form of advertising for the small business does sell — not a product a service, but an action. A call to pick up the phone, fill out a form, request for more information, visit your website, leave a business card, or send an email to get something of value. To begin a relationship with the advertiser.

The good news about this approach to advertising is that you don’t need fancy copy, hired models or big budgets. You only need a very strong offer targeted at the right audience. Sell permission to educate your prospect and you will find that advertising does indeed increase brand awareness quite well.

Don’t forget marketing materials that can be downloaded online to help tell your story and increase brand awareness in more tactile ways.

Do you know why most marketing materials fail? Because first they are sales materials. . .written to convince someone to buy. Guess what, nobody wants to be sold anything.

Really effective small marketing materials educate the prospects by:

Awareness and trust are it for business owners and unless you’ve got millions laying around to buy ads on a million channels, you better get down in the trenches and map out how to educate first, sell later.

Simply put social networking on sites such as LinkedIn or Quora are excellent ways to increase brand awareness . It will allow you and/or your team to answer questions and meet prospects in the industry. Instead of going to these sites with the sole intention of selling your products, try to educate and connect with these people on a personal level.

Social media is incredibly helpful in first introducing your customers to your business or product. Being active on social media, especially LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+ can help your SEO ranks. Often, social media channels will show up high on any local search. Frequently use keywords for which you want to show up in searches, and you can improve your search engine rankings in those keywords.

In addition, social media advertising has become more effective over the years. You can target potential customers based on interest, who they follow or like, even location getting your brand/product or service in front of more of your ideal clients.

The overall theme of this post is to question whether or not y ou are driving value that goes beyond the products and services you sell. That is the essence of a increasing brand awareness today, and I hope you’re applying it to your brand awareness efforts.