Challenge 2: Building Brand Awareness

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Let’s take a minute to go back to the very first days of business. Starting a business requires a lot of strategy and thought. You must ask yourself questions like: What will my business be named? What sort of logo should I have? What is my product offering?

Over the course of launching and designing your company, you undoubtedly put a tremendous amount of strategy into designing and creating your brand, and how your company will be presented to the outside consumer.

So, after all that work, shouldn’t someone be seeing it?

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Google Business Listing

Brand awareness can be achieved through a number of variables, many of which are simple and effective if you know how to capitalize on them. One great way to be certain your brand is frequently seen and recognized is to ensure your Google My Business listing is set up properly.

If you are a brick and mortar company, once you have a website up and running, it's important to also check your Google Business listing (think of this as your yellow pages listing, for Google), to ensure your company is being presented accurately and desirably.

When your Google Business profile is optimized, your company name, logo, and website will appear in a bold and fresh manner during web searches, and helps consumers to quickly recognize you and your brand.

Additionally, it allows consumers to leave positive reviews on your profile which will help improve your organic search results and lead to a positive brand reputation in the market.

For help setting up your Google Business listing, refer back to our article HERE.

Website Design: Bounce Rate & CTAs

Your website Bounce Rate is the percentage of customers who enter the site and then leave, rather than continuing to view other pages within the site. The lower the bounce rate, the more brand awareness is built with that visitor because it means they are engaging with the content on your site rather than leaving right away, likely to never think of you again. There are a variety of ways to improve your bounce rate - whether that be with an interactive web design, a compelling portfolio, or educational blog articles. Talk with your web designer about ways to decrease your bounce rate through website design.

When you build your website, you should also always be considering your CTAs.  CTA stands for Call(s) To Action, and is one of the most valuable marketing strategies you can employ. When someone visits your site, you want them to perform a variety of strategic actions - whether that be purchasing a product, reading an article or giving you their email address so you can further interact with them on another channel. Everything on your site should be built to push visitors to perform the actions you've laid in front of them. The longer they stay on your site, the more likely it is they will A) remember your brand, and B) perform one of these actions. If they are already visiting your website, make it easy on yourself! Use a CTA to capture their email address, information and other interests, so you can massage that lead and work on building your business relationship and brand equity with that potential customer.

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Blogging

Believe it or not, blogging is becoming one of the fastest ways to gain traction on Google and enhance your digital marketing efforts.

When you blog on your webpage, you not only give Google fresh content to crawl when people are searching for your industry or products, you also give the impression of interaction. In other words, you are telling the internet: I’m here. I’m active. I am a business that is working and building every day.

Additionally, blogs can be a fantastic way to spread more information about your product or industry, and is a shareable resource that is branded by your website.

While most people still think of blogging as something travel writers do to talk about the time they had bugs for dinner, the wise business owner is starting to understand it's a completely free way to gain an edge and spread your brand online!

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Social Media‍

Social media is one of the best places you can cultivate and improve your brand awareness. With every website build, we always strongly recommend integrating your social media into your website so that those who visit your site can easily start to interact with you and your brand on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. This can mean embedding your Instagram feed on your home page, linking to your social channels via icons in the navigation or footer, or adding Facebook and Twitter Share buttons on your product listings.

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When designing your new website, it's critical to always be thinking of ways to engage your customer, and encourage them to follow you or stay connected with your brand on other channels. Brand awareness can be as simple as just keeping in touch via email once a month, or as intensive as posting on social media twice a week. But one thing is certain, the more often they see and hear from your brand, the greater your brand awareness will be.

Thought we forgot to review a REALLY important way to build brand awareness? AKA email marketing? Of course not! We just thought it was so important it deserved its' own article. Stay tuned for the next post in our blog mini series: Building an Email List