Are you searching for ways of using digital marketing for brand awareness in Singapore? Competition between businesses or companies has made the need for brand extension a matter of priority in sales. The reason is that most brands understand the need to increase brand awareness through engaging with consumers directly using online means, for example, the Internet.
For instance, social media sharing, brand giveaways, and advertising are one of the best ways of increasing brand extension online. This article looks at effective ways of using digital marketing for brand awareness.
Recent studies show that 77% of consumers go online daily, and over a quarter of them reveal being “almost constantly” online. However, the digital marketing field is vast. When developing a brand awareness strategy, you should decide the digital marketing channels you will use and how much priority to give to all of them.
Homepage Video Content
One way you can use digital marketing to increase your brand awareness is by developing engaging home page video content. Video content is among the topmost effective ways for brand awareness. Videos are more engaging, memorable, and popular among most consumers than all other types of content. Whether you are a B2B or B2C brand, it is vital to have a clear video marketing strategy. With video marketing, you can tell your brand’s story engagingly and concisely. It’s your duty to engage them with rich content, for example, through video marketing to ensure that they stay longer on your site. The result is that your site ranks higher in search engines results.
Homepage video content helps to get the consumer’s attention and retain it. A video is a medium for getting information quickly and in a format that consumers can easily digest. According to Cisco, 82% of digital consumer traffic is video-based.
Video marketing also increases information retention. Adding visuals will help boost retention by nearly 55% compared to audio-only. With a homepage video, a marketer can control their communication’s content and voice. This will help you to deliver transparent and consistent brand- or user-generated content.
A homepage video content is also a scalable and shareable digital marketing strategy. You will be able to increase brand awareness across every touchpoint, such as social media channels. Moreover, video marketing will also provide you with actionable brand marketing data for analysis.
If your content marketing strategy includes video posting, you will see increased conversions. You can use your video marketing strategy to target stakeholders or the entire online community. Moreover, you can also communicate at scale by using subtitles and audio descriptions to cater to users with audiovisual impairments.
Studies show that consumers have a 64%-85 chance of buying a product after watching a video. Therefore, you will deliver quality leads while also motivating consumers to consume.
On top of engagement alone, home video content also boosts your SEO when you add inbound links, share buttons, integrate ”native” videos on the site, and post on different channels. Hence, your site will rank higher in Google’s search results.
Social Media
According to Statista, there are nearly 3.02 billion social media users globally, and it’s the norm for users to visit the social media networks at least once daily. Social media is becoming a significant part of how people spend their time and where they obtain information. Therefore, social media marketing is another important digital marketing channel that all digital marketers should include in their brand awareness strategy.
Social media users frequently discuss successful brands on social platforms, and the conversations become essential to brand awareness and sales growth. It is difficult for brands to keep up with all social media platforms. Social media marketing aims to find clients and potential audiences; therefore, digital marketers should focus on places where the clients and audience spend most of their time.
While using social media for brand awareness, it is vital to ensure that you deliver content and engage with audiences. Your content should be specific to the type of social media you use. For example, if you want short posts, you can use Twitter, Facebook for longer posts, and Instagram is perfect for quality visuals.
To increase brand awareness using social media, you must also encourage your audience to share your content to help you reach their network. Sharing helps to convince potential consumers to become clients. Therefore, as a digital marketer, remember to add options for social sharing when publishing content so that your audience will share directly from the source too.
Another strategy you can use for brand awareness through social media is mentioning influencers and customers. You must develop a culture of engagement on all your profiles, which will encourage others to do so.Â
Mentions will reward your audience by making them feel valued and recognized. You will also earn favors with other accounts by mentioning partner brands and influencers, especially those aiming at increasing their following and expanding their audience.
A robust digital marketing strategy pulls together your social media, content, blogs, SEO, and more to increase brand awareness and attract new business.
Paid Advertising
Paid advertising is one of the most effective ways for digital marketers to build brand awareness and generate revenue online. You can introduce your brand in ads that the brand’s target market can see. If you create ads that depict what your brand is about and add a memorable name or logo, you will notice an increase in the number of people interested in your products or services.
According to a recent study by Google, search ads have a positive effect on brand awareness. You can geo-target the ads to your chosen area according to the IP address if you are running a local business. Search ads will reach consumers who are already in a receptive state of mind.
Consumers are actively looking for products and services; therefore, they will remember you if they see your brand when they search.
A smart digital marketer knows that using paid search can help them get in front of consumers who know they want something but have not yet decided precisely where they will buy it. There are numerous routes that you can choose from according to your budget and type of business. They include:
Influencer content. You can partner with influence to grow brand awareness since you can directly target your key audience according to your target demographics. You can grow brand awareness with influencers by using brand ambassadors, one-off posts, and competition.
Display advertising. If you lack set demographics like age, gender, and location to use, you may also select specific ad placements that will appeal to your target audience. Your display campaigns can come in different shapes and sizes including banner ads, interstitial ads, rich media, and native advertising. These approaches are effective in delivering your message in front of an engaged audience.
Pay per click. Pay per click is more of a performance-based channel where brands focus their attention on paid search campaigns results instead of brand awareness. Building PPC ads on strong and targeted keywords specific to what your brand does and sells will grow your brand affinity for users searching for products. This will help them associate your brand with the products they are searching for.
Paid social. If you are using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media channels, you can increase brand awareness through paid social. Even with a small budget, you can do much, especially when you invest in brand content.
Content Creation
Content creation is vital in building a brand. Branded content brings value to your clients by letting you show your audience how your brand is and what it represents. This type of content aims at entertaining or informing, to catch the consumers’ attention, and drive real engagement.
Content creation involves the use of articles, infographics, podcasts, among other channels. A strong brand awareness campaign is more than just customers knowing your brand name. It reveals how well the audience knows and understands the qualities making your company unique.
You can only set your brand apart from the competition through the development of an effective content strategy. Content is also an excellent way of showing personality, sharing opinions, and positioning your brand on issues. This means that content humanizes a brand, and customers would rather do business with humans than brands.
Before you begin content creation, you must understand your audience, their likes, preferences, and interests. You also need to know their problems and the type of solutions they need. If you connect with your audience naturally, you will understand them and tailor your content to make it speak to them.
Aside from understanding your audience, you must also understand your brand, its story, visions, values, voice, and solutions offered to consumers. Crafting an effective content strategy requires you to know these crucial things about your brand since they are the reasons why your new clients would care about your brand.
In the early stage of the marketing funnel, you may want to use articles and blog posts as they are the most common forms of content. If your audience has a short attention span, you may want to use infographics because they are easy to read and understand.
Once you have created your content, it’s essential to monitor how it performs, analyze its effectiveness using key metrics, and adjust.
Remarketing Campaigns
Remarketing campaigns allow you to show targeted ads to consumers who have already been visiting your website. These ads follow the consumers across the internet and appear when browsing, watching YouTube videos, or scrolling through their social media feeds.
Remarketing allows brands to remain connected with their audience. When consumers visit your website, ads follow them all over the internet. This is a great way of increasing your brand exposure. More exposure means that the brand will become more recognizable and give you a competitive advantage.
Apart from increasing brand awareness, remarketing campaigns also increase the chances for the consumers who visit your website to take action. This is essential since 70% to 96% of people who visit websites leave without taking any action and never return to these websites, according to Bounce Exchange.
If you want to be successful in remarketing campaigns, you must know the different types of remarketing campaigns to implement for your business. They include email remarketing, display ads, among others.
Content Syndication
Brand awareness also means brand recognition which is the extent to how consumers can identify your brand by its features. For consumers to recognize your brand, you need to do more than just publishing content and leaving it there, hoping people will see it.
You will have to make your content appear in other places for more exposure, a technique known as content syndication. The technique involves republishing content on different sites to get a wide audience. This strategy is an excellent way of increasing brand awareness and driving links to your website.
Before you begin content syndication, you must understand that duplicate content may hurt your SEO and potentially lead to penalties for your website. Therefore, you should be careful with how you implement this strategy.
Because it is difficult to land syndicate content on major and authoritative websites, you can start from scratch by doing self-service syndication. This way, you will republish content on publishing websites like social networks, blogging platforms, and multi-author blogs.
Public Relations
Public relation is also an effective, powerful digital marketing channel that is often neglected. With a good PR strategy, you can earn mentions in publications that your audience is reading, and this will increase brand awareness and result in authoritative links boosting your SEO.
This strategy involves pitching gust posts and thought-provoking articles on relevant websites on the web. You can write guest posts for websites that have content your audience cares about, especially in high-profile industry publications. This way, you will build trust in the voices representing your brand, even if you write content not directly about your products and services.
Guest posting helps your audience think that you are the leader and that you dominate the market niche. This is a great way of building, creating, and establishing brand awareness online. The strategy also helps you gain access to a different type of audience.
Digital marketing has become a popular way of boosting brand awareness. Every digital marketing technique is unique and has its own set of strengths and weaknesses for particular brands. This means that public relations may work for one company but fail for another company. Therefore, it is essential to determine how well every strategy will work for your brand by diving in and finding your own digital marketing mix.
Brand awareness does not have to be as daunting as it may seem. If you employ the channels discussed in this post, the process will be easy. Remember to keep testing new strategies to identify the ones making the most significant impact.
11 Sneaky Ways of Enhancing Brand Awareness in 2022 and Beyond
Already, we have touched the basics of brand awareness to grow your business. But to get massive growth in 2022 and beyond, you need to rethink and restructure your brand awareness strategies. Most traditional ways of connecting with audiences are vague and will only cost you thousands of dollars to fail to deliver the expected results.
Brand Awareness vs. Brand Recognition
Surprisingly, even the most renowned digital marketers often interchangeably use the two terms, brand awareness and brand recognition. Even though the two are related, there are glaring differences that you should know to guide your business in the right direction.Â
What is Brand Recognition?
Brand recognition refers to how easy it is for the target customers to correctly identify your brand from a mammoth of other options based on unique elements such as brand colours and logos. For example, you can easily identify Apple products online by just looking at the logo.
What is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness is the next level of brand recognition. It refers to how the customers remember the brand name, the positive emotions it evokes, and the unique selling points of the products and services.Â
When a business has an ideal level of brand awareness in the market, the digital marketing and advertising campaigns resonate with the audience and mean something to them. The campaigns and strategies are geared towards evoking the right emotions and connecting with the customers at a deeper level.
Why is Brand Awareness Important?
No matter the quality of your products/services, the amount spent on paid advertising and social media campaigns, your business’s ability to climb the ladder of success will be low if there isn’t something that sets it apart from other similar businesses.
Your brand comprises the name, logo, content, and offerings. They all work together to offer memorable experiences to the customers. Brand awareness is the aspect of your business that wins the target customers’ trust and gives you an upper hand in the competitive eCommerce landscape.
Here is are the benefits of professional branding.
- Enhances customer recognition
- Fosters customer loyalty
- It gives customers the confidence to buy your products or service
- Maintains brand equity
- Allows shared values
- Attracts talent
- Ensures consistency
Therefore, establishing a brand doesn’t cut it when generating leads online. You need to consistently work on your branding and strength your relationships with the target customers. Your efforts will enable you to effectively connect with the target audience and encourage them to do business with you. Concisely, it’s what will inspire them to choose you over other similar service providers.
The more familiar a product or service is to the online shoppers, the more they will trust it and choose it instead of other options.
Increasing your brand’s familiarity and popularity will make it easy for you to;
- Advertise the business on multiple platforms
- Introduce new services and products
- Establish a strong reputation in the market
- Find and retain loyal customers
Good brand awareness opens invaluable business growth opportunities. It also helps in attaining the set marketing goals and objectives, such as establishing a solid audience, increasing clientele base, and getting ahead of the competition.
How to Build Brand Awareness
Now that we have that out of the way let us shift gears and review the top sneaky brand awareness strategies you can use in 2022 and beyond to grow your business exponentially. The secret is being consistent with strengthening your image in the eyes of potential customers.
Some of the top companies with a high level of brand awareness globally are:
- Nike
- Coca Cola
- Johnson & Johnson
- Visa
You can learn a lot from these five companies about deeply staying in tune with the target customers. Most businesses focused solely on using display ads to get impressions in the past. Today, we will go a step further and look at smarter ways of achieving the same with or without relying on display ad networks.
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Create a Valuable Referral Program
Notice we used the word “valuable” in the subheading. Referral programs help increase sales by leveraging affiliate marketing. The marketers are rewarded for every sale made through the provided affiliate link.
For example, the Dropbox referral program awards 500 MB storage to users who refer friends to the platform. This strategy worked well for the company, especially during the initial stages, as it created a buzz online because thousands of people are always looking for additional storage space in the cloud. The company saved thousands of advertising dollars by implementing it, and it’s still reaping profits from the campaign.
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Design Stellar Infographics
Infographics are the most preferred visuals today as they help convey information so that the audience can easily interpret compared to text. Visual graphics such as charts and graphs make it easy to understand statistics and other complex concepts.
Infographics are undoubtedly content powerhouses with a high virality rate than text. The likelihood of an infographic going viral is higher compared to even an evergreen blog post. This aspect makes them ideal for thought leadership and brand building.
An infographic published last year (2021) by WordStream got hundreds if not thousands of shares on social media platforms barely one month after publishing.
When creating the infographic, research topics that the audience often looks for online. Find relevant and rare information that is not already covered to make your infographic stand out from the crowd.
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Freemium With Credit
Freemium is a business model popular online that entails offering free packages for basic features of a product and premium packages for additional features. Thousands of companies that offer awesome products such as professional images like Shutterstock have a free version package.
Since most people prefer free products, they freely use the images on their websites and blogs. However, the images contain the brand watermark, and to remove it, they have to pay.Â
Posting the images with the Shutterstock watermark promotes the original brand for free, thereby helping it expand its clientele base without spending a penny. Use the same strategy to increase your brand’s visibility online. If well-executed, this strategy will help you establish a constant stream of new customers from across the globe.
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Leverage Local Partnerships
In the past, we have extensively discussed the importance of investing in local SEO. While the strategies discussed can boost your site visibility in local search engine results pages, you need to do more to get even better results.
Getting into local partnerships with other businesses to hold community events such as festivals, seminars, and retreats will major impact your brand awareness efforts. The events will introduce your brand to customers who haven’t heard about it before and allow you to interact and collaborate with them on something they hold dear to their hearts.
You could also decide to sponsor a local sports team, organise a tournament, or participate in charity events. Be sure to post banners of the events on social media and other platforms to show the target audience that you care about the community to live in and existing customers that you’re not only interested in making profits.
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Stellar Guest Content
Contrary to popular belief, guest posting is still one of the best ways of building backlinks and awareness. However, you won’t get tangible results if you publish shallow content on third-party websites, assuming nobody will read it.
This year, do things differently by taking time to research and write stellar guest posts. The posts should contain accurate evergreen content that is valuable to the audience. That is, you should strive to kill two birds with one stone – create memorable experiences by providing exceptional content and gain backlinks.
Distribute links of the posts widely and request industry leaders who are considered an authority also to chip in to help you cover the topics comprehensively. For instance, you can interview a renowned digital marketer or the CEO of a manufacturing company in your niche and include details of your conversation or snippets of the interview to enhance the quality and relevance of the guest post.Â
Remember, the guest post doesn’t have to be text-based; it can be a video or even a podcast – the choice is all yours!
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Car Wraps
The beauty of car wraps is that you can customise them to represent your brand’s image and messaging. Unlike the traditional car wraps, the modern ones are more durable and allow the car occupants to still see through the windows after installation.
Start by wrapping your business and personal vehicles, then request other people to participate in the activity. This ingenious and whistly traditional brand awareness strategy still works today. It can create a huge amount of attention and ensure that people know about your brand and what it offers wherever you go.Â
Ensure that the text on the wrap is readable from a distance so that potential customers who come across the branded cars know what you offer and other important details such as your website URL and contact information.
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Hold Social Media Contests
Social media contests are effective in spurring engagement, and with a large number of active users on platforms such as Facebook, the contest can easily attract thousands of participants. For example, you can request them to post photos holding or using your product then other users vote for their favourite.
Offer incentives such as discounts and free shipping on the next order to encourage more people to participate. The contestants will likely share a link to their photo posted on your page with family, friends, and co-workers to get more votes and, in the process, promote brand awareness.
Ensure that you follow the platform’s contest rules and guidelines to prevent it from being discontinued. Here is an article that comprehensively explains the seven Facebook contest rules for 2022.
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LinkedIn Publishing
LinkedIn is a social media platform that allows professionals in various industries to network and share ideas. Nowadays, the platform allows its users to post blogs on their LinkedIn profiles. In the tech or cryptocurrency industry, you can garner massive readership by publishing resounding content about trends and concepts.Â
The LinkedIn algorithm monitors the posts, and if your article gets the attention of many users, it may end up listed on the platform’s homepage. In addition, regularly posting impressive content will help establish you as an authority. Other professionals and companies will start gravitating towards your posts and request your input before making decisions by sending you messages and emails.
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Give Your Brand a Unique Personality
The chances are that many companies are offering similar products and services. Great content will help you get a firm footing and create brand awareness. Go the extra mile to give your brand a unique personality that is fun and relatable to the target audience.Â
A little dose of your fun personality and comedy will make your brand more memorable to the target audience. Dollar Shave Club, Old Spice, and Poopouri are examples of brands that use this strategy to create long-lasting memories in the minds of their target customers. Be cautious not to go overboard, though. Avoid jokes about religion, politics, and other personal topics at all cost.
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Run Remarketing Campaign
Remarketing is the process of advertising your brand to customers who interacted with your business a while ago or have shown interest in a product or service. Running this kind of company will enable you to leverage the good old brand awareness that caught the attention of this segment of customers the first time.
Create custom ads to inspire them to visit your website again to complete the purchase. Monitor the performance of the ads to know which copy and format best resonate with them to get maximum ROI.Â
Social media platforms are digital marketing powerhouses. Use them alongside email marketing and PPC advertising to run an effective remarketing campaign.Â
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Collaborate with Influencers
Hire several micro-influencers whose audience matches your description of the ideal customers to promote your brand on social media sites such as Instagram. Please give them a valuable incentive to share the information, such as commissions for every sale. Even if a section of their audience will not convert, you will still profit from their posts’ publicity and buzz on the platforms.Â
Conclusion
Remember that the aim of digital marketing is to increase your brand awareness in Singapore. It means you need to create exciting content that users will find worthy of sharing and liking on social media channels.
