As a small business owner, you’ve worked hard to get your brand up and running. And, if you want to achieve the success you have in mind, your target audience needs to know all about your work and be able to find you. This is where brand awareness comes into play. 

Brand awareness refers to how many customers recognize your business and what it offers. It’s the most important marketing lever because it has a huge impact on the first stages of your sales funnel and the foundation of customer acquisition. The more brand awareness you can generate, the higher your sales numbers will be. 

So what can you do to increase awareness of your brand? Here are five practical ways to shine a spotlight on your company and attract the right people. 

1. Regularly publish content your audience wants

Content will act as a visitor magnet for your website. So you must develop a solid and consistent content marketing plan to attract the right customers. 

Content marketing is a strategy businesses can use to engage and retain their target audience using blog posts, videos, infographics  and other media types. This is vital for raising awareness of your brand because it establishes you as an expert in your field and keeps your business in the minds of potential customers. 

But, to get the best results, you need to ensure that you don’t just generate content for the sake of it. You must put together content that your ideal customers actually want and need. Here are some ways you can make sure you’re creating genuinely helpful content that your audience is looking for: 

• Conduct keyword research to understand what your customers need and how you can appear at the top of relevant search engine results pages. 

• Visit forums and social media accounts relevant to your niche to see what questions people are asking about your industry. 

• Take note of the questions your prospective customers have so you can write content to help answer them. 

To give you some content marketing inspiration, let’s take a look at a number of different businesses that always get it right. 

RMIT Online is an online university that does a great job of regularly publishing content that its target audience — mainly consisting of prospective students — genuinely wants. This helps them to reach more of their target clients. 

For instance, they’ve put together detailed articles about what salary a marketing manager can expect to get. This is perfectly geared towards answering common questions their ideal customers are likely to have because pay is a huge consideration when it comes to what you should study and pursue as a career path. 

This piece of content answers all the questions potential students might have about the salaries for various marketing positions, giving a rough idea of what they can expect to find in the job market after graduating. The article also does a great job of discussing other requirements and job duties of the positions to help educate students looking to enter the field. 

Let’s also look at an example from FreshBooks, an online accounting software tool, to understand how to create great content to increase awareness of your brand. Their post on how to write a winning invoice letter offers key information that customers will return to each time they need guidance on this process. 

Their approach includes publishing blog posts that outline step-by-step instructions for processes that are essential for their target customers. This content educates and positions the brand as the go-to source for information about handling your finances and ensuring clients can pay you quickly and easily. Since the content addresses the needs of the company’s audience, FreshBooks will draw new customers to their site and this can build brand awareness among those looking to buy accounting software in the future. 

You can use the same approach in your content marketing strategy by creating content that your target audience is searching for. This will help you appear at the top of relevant search results and build brand awareness among potential customers. 

Finally, another great example of content marketing comes from Helix Hearing Care, a hearing aid provider. They have a fantastic and comprehensive guide to hearing aid maintenance that’s sure to prove very useful for their target customers. 

It does a great job of explaining all aspects of hearing aid maintenance, and it addresses common questions that potential and current customers are likely to have about their hearing aids. This will help build brand awareness for the company as potential customers are likely to find the page when looking for tips on how to maintain their hearing aid devices. 

The content is optimized with relevant keywords in its headers and it dives into everything from what cleaning tools to use to how to replace a hearing aid battery. This type of in-depth content will help the brand rank for competitive keywords, and build brand awareness as a result.  

You can implement the same strategy by thinking about common questions that your customers have and then creating content to address them. This approach will help you rank higher for relevant queries and build awareness of your brand over time. 

2. Invest in PPC advertising

Pay per click, or PPC, marketing is a strategy that involves paying a fee when one of your ads is clicked on. 

PPC advertising tends to be relatively cost-effective since you’ll only pay for ads whenever someone clicks on them. You’ll need to take steps to get the most out of your PPC ads, though. Here are some strategies you’ll need to use: 

• Keyword bidding: If you want your PPC ads to appear on relevant search engine results pages, you’ll need to bid on the keywords you would like to target. It’s important you choose these wisely, looking at metrics like their search volumes and levels of competition. 

• Write engaging PPC ads: You need to ensure, when putting together your PPC ads, that your copy will really connect with your ideal audience. Consider factors like their pain points and priorities to ensure they click through and buy. 

• Optimize your landing pages: The job of a landing page is to get your audience to convert, because it’s where customers will land when they click on a PPC ad. So, you should make it easy to convert with simple forms or other ways for your audience to contact or buy from you. 

PPC campaigns can also help raise general awareness of your brand.. Even people who see your ads but don’t click on them may be hearing about your company for the first time and may circle back to see what you have to offer. It takes some time, but PPC marketing is a great way to raise brand awareness. 

3. Turn customers into brand ambassadors with referral incentives

If you want to turn existing customers into loyal brand ambassadors who spread the word about your brand, you may want to provide them with incentives. This means that, when someone recommends your products or services and it leads to a sale, they will receive some sort of compensation for their actions. 

This could be done through a structured affiliate marketing program, offering discount codes, or even free products. You could also generate traffic with influencers by offering them incentives for incorporating your products into their content to further extend the reach of your brand and establish more awareness of what you do.

Referral incentives can help you drive new business for your company. They offer an essential type of social proof that will make new customers feel more secure in their purchases. Take the time to think about your target audience and what incentives will work best for your company’s bottom line while also building awareness of your brand.

4. Build a strong presence on social media 

There isn’t a more powerful tool for raising brand awareness than social media. The more active you are across multiple social media platforms, the more likely the right people will hear about your business, products, and services. 

Effectively engage with your audience on social media by maintaining a constant and predictable presence. Post content at peak times when your target audience is most active and use a scheduling tool to make sure your output is consistent. It’s also important that you monitor your analytics to ensure your posts are performing as they should. 

For example, LinkedIn marketing tools can help you scale your marketing efforts and identify precisely what techniques will help to build the most awareness around your brand. This is a great way to streamline the engagement process and ensure your social media efforts get results by targeting the right people with the right message and at the right times.

You can also engage with your followers by responding to their comments and even sharing their posts that relate to your brand. This approach helps build a relationship with your audience, which can grow your presence over time. 

5. Reach your ideal customers on search engines with SEO 

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the practice of enhancing your online presence. The goal of this is to help your site rank highly on relevant search engine results pages, or SERPs, which can help boost your brand awareness. SEO also tends to be a very cost-effective way of building recognition for your brand because it can provide a fantastic ROI by driving relevant traffic to your site over time.

When you have a comprehensive SEO strategy, it helps to increase your brand reach by driving consistent traffic with content that answers questions and addresses the pain points of your audience. Be sure to conduct keyword research to find relevant terms that your audience uses when searching for your products, services, or content online. You can use tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to find keywords with high search volumes and low competition to drive the right people to your site. 

Once you have a list of keywords, you can build your website copy and content like blog posts and how-to guides around those terms. Use them in your titles, headers, and content to help ensure you get discovered through search engines. 

Summary

You want to build brand awareness the correct way to reach the right people. Think about your target audience and keep an eye on your competitors. Take your time and make choices that will set your business up for long-term success. 

As your brand awareness grows, you’ll find yourself facing more and more opportunities to attract new customers and make sales. So it’s something that’s well worth investing some of your time and digital marketing budget into.