Which of these statements describes your brand?
“We have a solid brand and consistent customers/clients, but we’re ready to grow and take our business to the next level.”
“We just launched our company and are starting from the ground up. We need exposure because no one knows we’re out there yet.”
“We’ve been in business a while, but I feel like we’re missing out on potential opportunities to more well-known competitors.”
If you fall into any of the three categories above, you’ve likely been thinking about the need to grow the brand awareness of your business. But how? What are the most effective ways to do this?
While there are many marketing strategies you can employ, one of the simplest, most affordable, and effective is content marketing.
Let’s explore increasing and improving brand awareness and how content marketing can get you there.
First Things First: What is Brand Awareness?
If one of the first statements we shared sounds familiar, you likely need to focus on growing brand awareness. It’s a bit of a buzz term though and while people may recommend you focus on it, you may not be entirely sure all that it actually entails.
Brand Awareness Explained
The phrase is just like it sounds. Brand awareness is the level of familiarity that someone has with your business, goods, or services. Brand awareness can be high for large companies like Google, whereas brand awareness is much lower for a small mom-and-pop store in a small rural town. However, brand awareness is not totally dependent on the size of the organization.
While yes, larger companies are able to garner considerable brand awareness more easily, there are many small companies that grow their BA successfully too. The main thing to keep in mind is who you are targeting with your brand and making sure that persona, audience, and group know who you are. Everything else is just gravy. Focus on the awareness of your key demographics above all else.
Why Invest in Increasing
Brand Awareness?
Increasing brand awareness does not happen easily or overnight. It is an investment – and a long-term one at that. So, why do it? Is it worth it? What kind of return might you see on it?
There are many ways that increasing brand awareness could help your business, but these are the top 4 to keep in mind.
Grow Exposure: This is especially important if you’re a startup or a brand-new business. If no one knows who you are, no one is going to buy. Investing in brand awareness – through multiple avenues – is essential. The same is true of an established business too though. If you’ve been plateauing for a few years in new customers and new revenue, it’s time to invest in expanding the pool you’re pulling from.
Stay Top of Mind: While a customer might still not be ready to buy, whenever they are, you want them to think of your business first. If you have low brand awareness, this won’t happen and you’ll miss out on that potential revenue.
Improve SEO: The more people see and remember your brand, the better chance of them actually searching for it when they are ready to buy. This can improve your SEO and drive more traffic to your website.
Expand Your Reach: Imagine all of the customers out there you could have if they just knew who you were. Many people would likely buy your products or services easily, but they just didn’t even know you were out there. With expanded reach comes expanded revenue.
How Content Marketing Increases and Improves Brand Awareness
Alright – you realize you need to increase brand awareness and are ready to invest in increasing it – how can content marketing help do that? Let’s look at 5 ways that content marketing can help you increase brand awareness.
5 Ways Content Marketing Increases and Improves Brand Awareness
Constant Flow of Valuable Information
Content marketing, at its core, is about engaging, educating, and entertaining an audience. This is done through many means, but the point at the center is to provide real value, not just sell. This isn’t advertising. Content marketing is the antithesis of advertising. Instead of pushing products/services all of the time to increase someone’s knowledge of your business, provide information that will actually help them improve their life/business. When they are ready to buy they will remember your business name as a solid source of information and will have further trust to become a customer.
Staying Top of Mind
That constant flow of valuable information that is content marketing will also help you remain top of mind with customers, even when they aren’t ready to buy. If they come across your valuable content on Instagram or LinkedIn, they may not be ready to purchase, but after weeks of seeing solid education, entertaining, or engaging content pieces, they will have you as the first option in their mind when exploring a purchase.
Educate for Ownership
While valuable content and education grow awareness and keep you top of mind, they can also bring awareness to a problem that the customer didn’t even realize they had. In fact, you may provide such solid content and helpful information that they consider a purchase they didn’t even know they needed, all through your further investment in brand awareness.
Grow Followership
A key to growing brand awareness is also growing your following across social media. While there are many factors that contribute to growing your followers on any social media platform, the foundation of it is solid content. Committing to a content marketing strategy and plan will help you grow followers and increase your reach.
Answer Their Questions
By answering your target market’s questions through content, you can bring greater brand awareness and customers right to you. By providing important answers to their questions, you can make them aware of your company for the first time and even have them coming back for more.
Get Started Increasing and Improving Brand Awareness with Content Marketing
If you want to grow brand awareness and expand the reach of your business, but haven’t started a content marketing strategy – now is the time! We have tons of additional resources you can use on our resources page to get your strategy/plan started. If you’re ready for more guidance when it comes to content marketing, we’re here to help!
Breezy is your instant content marketing team that can help garner the brand awareness and recognition you need to succeed! Schedule a free consultation today!
