Expanding Brand Awareness in the 21st Century

With over 3 billion internet users worldwide, marketers and business owners know that using traditional methods for brand awareness is no longer enough. They can generate more sales if they add digital brand strategies into the mix. This provides companies with different avenues, both online and offline, to inform customers and prospects about their brands.

A huge number of marketers are expanding their reach using social media.

Facebook is the most popular with 79% of online users accessing the social network for content consumption and for professional purposes, according to the Pew Research Center. Instagram, on the other hand, hit 1 billion monthly users in June 2018. Research showed that 1,347 Instagram stories were posted by marketers in July 2018.

photo/ OpenClipart-Vectors

LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Snapchat round up the top 5 social media used by marketers.

Brands with a social media presence in potential social networks have more chances of generating leads and sales, especially with product videos and images. Research shows that more than 60% of users are likely to buy a product online after watching product videos.

Expanding brand awareness through social media, however, is only successful when the right social network is used. Each platform has its own use and target audience and marketers must understand how to take advantage of a particular platform.

Twitter, for example, is primarily word-based, while Pinterest and Instagram are visual-based. Facebook is more versatile, allowing businesses to post text, images, and videos to promote their brands. To establish brand loyalty, it is important for a business to track their brand across the platforms and understand how to interact with their fan base directly.

Among the brands on social media, the best-performing are Starbucks, Channel, Friskies, and Urban Outfitters.

There’s a common theme among these best performers, however. Their products and services exceed customer expectation. No one knows this better than Ryan Hibbert and his team who developed a business model that is unique and engaging. Their clients are not only aware of their brand but also their take on doing something unique and new from old business concepts.

Another method of expanding brand awareness is through video marketing. Businesses can take advantage of Facebook Live and YouTube’s massive daily views of 8 billion and 5 billion views per day, respectively. This results in marketers planning to add YouTube and Facebook to their content strategy.

As previously mentioned, a significant number online users who watch product videos buy a product online. In fact, videos can increase purchases by over 140%, prompting 92% of marketers to make videos of existing assets they have.

Video analytics also showed that 55% of people who watched videos consume content thoroughly, providing businesses with the platform to promote their brand and expand awareness. Research also showed that more people want to see video content from marketers.

What is great about video marketing is that the better the video content is for a brand the better the chances that social networks will be happy to share it and businesses will have increased audience reach.

Then, there’s content marketing that is considered one of the best ways to increase organic search traffic online. Blogging provides a versatile and effective way to post branded content to help establish brand loyalty and to promote brand awareness for potential customers.

According to a 2018 report by inbound marketing and sales platform HubSpot, blog content is a top inbound marketing priority by more than 50% of marketers. Previous reports also showed that companies that published more than 16 blog posts monthly received 3.5 times more traffic than those with 0 to 4 posts per month.

Content marketing also generates more leads. A 2017 research conducted by the Content Marketing Institute showed that content strategy gets more leads than paid search advertising by three times as much. This is especially true with shareable content that can be linked to different social media and vice versa.

The same method also shortens the sales cycle, especially with premium content delivered with personalization. By providing helpful information that educate customers, trust is established, and brand loyalty is achieved. Among the many types of content that online users consume, anything about money is the most powerful. Research showed that the more a platform talks about the cost and price, the more successful the marketing campaign is.

Author: Dylan M.