In my previous post, I discussed the benefits of building a strong brand and using logo branded USB flash drives as a cost effective method of building brand awareness.
The key to creating strong brand awareness is repeated exposure of your brand to your target audience.
Your efforts to build brand awareness help consumers become familiar with your products or services. Over time, by repeatedly exposing your brand to your target audience and by delighting them with remarkable experiences, you earn their trust and loyalty. And that usually translates to more sales and a host of other benefits for your business.
As you already know, Coca cola, Nike, and McDonald are already giants among brands. Yet, they continue to pour millions of dollars on advertisements, commercials, event sponsorships, and endorsements. Why? It’s because they recognize the importance of maintaining their brand identities in the marketplace and the intangible benefits that a strong brand brings.
Fortunately, you don’t have to spend millions of dollars like these corporate giants in order to boost exposure for your brand. Thanks to the Internet and a host of other modern guerilla marketing methods, you have many low cost, yet effective marketing methods to maximize your brand exposure.
Discover these 5 Powerful Modern Marketing Methods to Build Brand Awareness:
(1) Search Ads Boost Brand Awareness
According to a joint study conducted by Google and Levi’s, paid search ads were found to boost consumer awareness of the Levi’s brand by 23%, even though the ads were not always clicked.
Conducting search on search engines like Google and Bing has increasingly become a popular method for consumers to shop and search for information. As such, search ads not only drive traffic to generate sales, but also help build brand awareness for your products and services.
The benefit of using search ads is that you have complete control over your budget and your ad messages. Furthermore, you can immediately track the responses of your ads with analytic tools such as Google Analytics.
(2) Maximize Brand Awareness and Boost Sales with Free Social Media Tools
Of all the tools available, social media has the most potential to help you promote your business and increase brand exposure. Best of all, most of these powerful social media tools are free to use, giving you the same opportunity as the corporate giants to promote your brand.
What’s great about using social media tools is that you could reach and engage with millions of people, with many of them potentially turning into your prospects and leads. Consider these statistics:
That’s a large pool of people to market to. Of course, you will not be able to reach all of them, but you could see the opportunity that social media tools give you.
According to the 2011 Social Media Marketing Industry Report put together by Michael Stelzner of Social Media Examiner, Small and Medium Businesses using social media marketing realized significant gains in brand exposure, traffic and sales.
Furthermore, most marketers noted that increased brand awareness is the main benefit of using social media!
If you are new to social media, I would recommend you to start with building a facebook page for your business and setting up your profile on twitter. Once you have built up your twitter profile and facebook page, the key is to listen to the conversations, engage with your customers and prospects, and continuously provide them with useful and beneficial information that solves their problems and addresses their needs.
(3) Reel people in to your site with a content-rich blog
Blogging used to be a buzzword that you often hear about. Nowadays, it has become the most powerful inbound marketing tool to raise awareness of your brand.
Blogging is a powerful platform for you to establish yourself as an expert and a thought leader in your field. You could blog about issues and topics related to industry. You could share useful and educational content with your target audience.
By continuously adding high quality and useful content, you gain so many benefits. First of all, blogging is an essential SEO strategy. Google is known to reward sites with higher search rankings if Google notices that your site regularly adds new and fresh content.
Additionally, you could attract attention from targeted visitors who are looking for information related to your products or services.
Once they come to your site, they may comment on your blog posts, giving you the opportunity to further engage with your prospects.
Here are some more blogging tips:
If you are still looking for a blogging platform to use, Wordpress and Blogger are two of the most popular blogging platforms. They’re free too!
(4) How a Compelling Press Release Can Quickly Raise Your Brand Profile
If you want to quickly raise the profile of your brand, then write a compelling press release that is newsworthy.
A Press Release can benefit just about any businesses, regardless of your size. Although it is commonly used to announce new products or new services, it can also be used to announce any information or events related to your business or products/services.
To be effective, your story must have newsworthy information, written in journalistic style, and follows standard PR format.
You could either use online press release services such as PRWeb.com and BusinessWire.com or you could also send your story to newspapers, magazines, and TV shows.
The benefit of using an online press release service is that they can send your story out to the top news sites such as Google news, yahoo news, and a bunch of other blogs and media outlets.
If your story is compelling and interesting, it could quickly generate lots of publicity for your business and helps drive massive amount of traffic to your website.
(5)Use Online Videos to Quickly Build Your Star Powers
With the the popularity of online video site such as Youtube skyrocketing, online video should be an essential component of your marketing strategies to create exposure for your brand and your business.
With online videos, you provide your audience with an alternative and fun medium to consume your content as some people prefer to watch videos over reading.
Furthermore, videos allow you to show your personality, which helps you build a deeper connection with your target audience.
Videos are especially effective for product demos, giving "how to" tips and tutorials, and doing training. The more creative and engaging you are, the more effective and popular your videos become.
An example of a company benefiting greatly from online videos is Blendtec, the maker of blenders and mixers.
Blendtec’s clever series of “Will It Blend?” Youtube videos catapulted their brand to celebrity status overnight and boosted sales for this previously unknown company.
Their entertaining videos featured all sorts of unlikely objects such as golf balls, toys, balls, rubik cubes, Ipods, etc doing battle with the blender.
To help people discover your videos, you could post your videos on your website or blog as well as on video sharing sites such as Youtube, Vimeo, Viddler, etc. If your target audience as well as members of the media and blogging communities like your videos, your brand could quickly gain recognition and exposure!
You don’t need to use expensive equipment to create a video either. With your phone video camera and a free video editing software such as Window’s Movie Maker or Mac’s IMovie, you could create compelling videos. Just make sure to keep it short (2 – 5 minutes) and let your personality shine through.
Although there are many other low cost and free methods to promote your business and increase your brand visibility, the above are the most powerful.
Take action now to promote your brand!
By combining the above promotional methods with logo branded USB flash drives, you have a powerful package of promotional tools and methods to build awareness for your brand, build customer loyalty, and dominate your market. Now, go at it!
Share your brand building tips
If you have successfully used any of the above promotional methods to increase exposure for your brand, please share your experiences and results below!
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Author: Peter Nguyen
Custom promotional USB drives are a great way to increase brand awareness. Tech items always score high due to their usability factor. Promotional items also should be based on the target audience. If the target audiences are working professionals, tech gadgets and drink ware are usable. If someone is targeting kids, colorful play items would be ideal.
Hi Sucheta, Thank you for your message! Differentiating your company in a homogenous market poses an exciting challenge with the potential for great rewards if you can be more successful than your competitors in doing so. A key three-step formula that we recommend here at Flashbay is as follows: 1) Create a strong and distinctive logo for your brand. The logo should be simple, memorable and unique in its appearance, to really impact your clients. 2) Understand your comparative advantage - define and articulate what your company does differently and better than your competitors. 3) Create visibility of your brand and your key competitive differentiators. There are various promotional techniques you can use to spread the word of your company and its comparative advantage, including social media campaigns, advertising, blogging etc. One of the most effective and elegant tools is to distribute promotional products to your clients, such as Flash Drives, Power Banks, Speakers etc. featuring your distinctive logo and perhaps a slogan with a key message to summarise your brand's comparative advantage. This is a great low-cost way of really increasing your brand visibility and differentiating yourself from competitors. From here, if you offer a quality product, and you are able to deliver on your promises, you will undoubtedly succeed in retaining existing clients and attracting new customers, too, enhancing the value of your company. I hope this helps, please let me know if you have any other questions. Chris at Flashbay
Hi.. I work for an epublishing company. In this domain, all the competitors possess the same features. How should i be a differentiator as a company to retain my existimg clients as well as to attract new clients?
Hi Jamal, What would you do raise awareness and even increase sales for new and existing products in the pharma market as a supplier, with your main clients being pharmacies? Without changing price?
Thanks for sharing with me, The information are very useful and can support me. I will look into all of these factors and strategies.
Hi Jamal, Here's a formula that I follow to create a strong and recognizeable brand. (1) Create a strong logo for your company and your product. Your logo should be simple, easy for people to remember, and distinctive. (2) Define your value proposition - Value proposition is about what's special and unique about your company and your products? What can you do better than others can't? (3) Create visibility and awareness of your brand by various promotional methods - blogging, twitter, facebook, youtube videos, give out promotional products such as flash drives & T-shirts with your logo imprinted on them, guest blogging, public speaking, etc. All of these are low cost ways of creating brand visibility. Now, if you are also able to deliver on your brand promise by offering a great product and providingng superior customer service, your brand value will surely increase over time. Hope this helps.
Thanks so much for the useful information, I apologize for late to reply as I was in holiday around Malaysia. I am satisfied with what you have mentioned, but if we use social media to build our brand with low cost, customer may look into the material and contents of our product. do you have any idea about other factors or strategies that can help to build brand value without costing the company a lot of money Thank you
Hi Jamal, Thanks for visiting our blog. If you want to build brand value with minimal costs, I recommend a combination of blogging and social media. Start a blog to share ideas and thoughts and offer tips and useful information. Then use social media channels like twitter and facebook to promote your blog content. You can also try to find blogs and forums related to your industry and participate in the discussions. The key is to establish yourself and your brand as the expert in your industry.
Thanks for the useful information. could you please tell me what are the strategies to build brand value with low cost
