Building brand awareness: Strategies for new businesses

Building strong brand awareness is essential for any business. Without awareness, making sales or scaling becomes nearly impossible because your target audience won’t even know you exist.

The goal of brand awareness campaigns is to inform potential customers that your business is a viable option they should consider.

The challenge?

Hundreds of businesses offering similar products or services are already investing heavily in marketing. Therefore, your brand awareness activities must be deliberate and strategic to stand out.

This blog will cover three strategies to help new businesses build strong brand awareness:

• Social media
• PR
• Content marketing

And we end with an explanation of how to evaluate brand awareness.

Social media brand building

A regular social media presence is a non-negotiable. 

Ninety-six percent of American businesses are on social media—yet only 41 percent generate revenue from a social presence.

The implication is that most businesses’ social media campaigns are failing because they don’t know how to use social media effectively. They might be posting regularly, but it’s not yielding results.

So, there’s a good chance that many of your competitors are not using social media properly—and that’s a massive opportunity for new entrants like you to exploit.

Before you start creating social media posts, have the prerequisites checked off:

• Understand your audience. Without knowing your audience’s interests, behaviors, desires, and needs, you will struggle to create relevant and meaningful content.
• Outline your objectives. Similarly, knowing what you want to achieve with social media guides your content strategy. For example, content designed to build brand awareness to an audience previously unaware of your business (called cold audiences) is different from content designed to push sales once an audience has been nurtured (warm audiences.)
• Establish your brand voice. Think about how you want to be perceived by your target audience. Every business wants to be known as the authority in its field. But, beyond credibility, think about the brand personality you want to display (formal, informal, fun, serious, etc.). Having internal clarity on brand voice helps dictate the tone and style of every content piece. Don’t choose a brand voice on a whim. Consider your audience and understand what voice they will be most receptive to.
• Understand the strengths of every social media platform. Instagram and TikTok are video-heavy, while LinkedIn is text-based. As a result, each piece of content will need to be repurposed appropriately. 

Start building your social media content once you are clear on the above four things. The last thing you want to do is be vague about the above. Ambiguity will reflect on the social media feed through mixed messages and brand signals, which will confuse and alienate your target audience.

So, what types of content should you post? Consider three types.

Educational

When someone scrolls through their social media feed first thing in the morning, there are only three things that will make them stop scrolling and read a post:

• Content that teaches them something new.
• Content that entertains them.
• Any other content relevant to their lives (celebrity news, local news, etc.)

A large part of your social media strategy should be to educate your users.

For example, suppose you’re a divorce mediation firm. In that case, your social media feed might be full of tips and advice on handling various co-parenting scenarios. 

Need inspiration? Take a peek at how The Aurit Center thoughtfully shares Halloween solutions for divorced parents in an engaging Instagram post. 

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Educational content does three things:

• Builds your credibility as a service provider.
• Keep your potential customers returning for more.
• Increases your content’s shareability, attracting more people to your social media channels.

Over time, your audience starts trusting you. With trust established, you can start pushing paid offerings. With your audience nurtured through your awareness efforts, they’re more likely to purchase your offer and become loyal customers.

Entertaining

The second scroll-stopper is entertaining content—the key is to ensure the content is relevant.

For example, B2B brands can maintain their brand voice while still sharing funny memes or videos. 

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Here are some ways to entertain your audience:

• Memes. We live in a meme culture. Memes are a fun way to communicate a message (as long as the message is relevant to the audience.)
• Interactive content. Get your audience involved by asking questions or offering edutainment such as quizzes and giveaways.

Again, such content is highly shareable (and potentially viral.)

User-generated content (UGC)

Why not get your audience to create your social media content for you?

You’re wondering why anyone would bother creating content for you—they will if you make it fun:

• Create a hashtag that people can use to talk about your products. So, when an audience member wants to post about you of their own free will, they’ll use a relevant hashtag to help others (and you) find the content. You can share their content, which always makes anyone feel special.

Cruise America is the perfect example of a brand that uses this method well with its #BeThereNow hashtag. If you post a picture of your journey in your rental RV, you can get the chance to be featured on their website. 

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• Run contests and giveaways requiring audience members to submit or share content as a condition for entry.
• Incentivize your buyers to post about their purchase by offering a discount on their next order should they share their purchase on social media.
• Influencer marketing, where you hire social media influencers from your industry to review your products. Influencers relevant to your industry can sway your audience’s opinion in your favor overnight.

UGC is a fantastic avenue to explore because it’s not coming from the brand. Often, branded content seems too polished in an audience’s mind. People treat UGC posts as regular posts, making your brand more approachable. 

In fact, consumers find UGC 2.4 times more authentic than content created by brands.

Public relations brand building

Extend your online reach from social media to other digital and print outlets.

The idea is to identify the types of publications your audiences read and get your brand mentioned.

For example, if you’re introducing a new type of protein powder for men, you’ll want to be featured in various men’s health and fitness magazines.

The key to good PR is having a good product and nurturing good relationships with publishers. While the former is your responsibility, Agility PR Solutions can help you connect with the right journalists and monitor your overall media presence and mentions to keep your reputation in good shape.

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This is important because not all awareness is good. For example, it’s been proven that a lot of few-star reviews harm your brand and therefore—your brand awareness. 

Negative reviews that have been previously left for the product or service you are selling might encourage other customers to do the same even when they don’t completely mean it. 

However, removing the negative reviews is now possible, but you need to know how to do it. For example, if you have an online store, knowing how to remove negative feedback on Amazon is an invaluable piece of information for you.

Endorsements or features in publications have a similar effect to influencer marketing. Someone who regularly subscribes to a publication trusts that publication. If that publication endorses you, that trust immediately transfers to you.

As a result, good PR can have the same effect overnight as a month’s worth of organic social media content.

Content marketing

The last element of brand building is a content strategy extending beyond social media.

Search engine optimized (SEO) blog posts and web copy help you rank high on Google for relevant search terms. Being on the first page of Google is a golden way to boost brand visibility.

There are three elements to SEO.

• Identify relevant keywords to rank for. The best keywords have the strongest search intent (i.e., they indicate a user’s strong willingness to buy in the immediate future.) For example, if you sell organic coffee beans, the keyword “buy organic coffee beans online” has a stronger purchasing intent than “organic coffee beans.”
• Identify relevant links, Link building is a type of PR where links to your website appear on other (relevant and authoritative) websites. These boost your ranking on search engines because you’re ’piggybacking’ of another website’s brand presence. 
• Writing the content. When creating the blog, use these best practices. 
  • Your keyword appears in the title and within the first paragraph of your text.
  • The blog is at least 1,000 words.
  • Include derivatives of your keyword naturally in the body content.
  • You don’t keyword stuff. If you add your keyword too often, Google will know and mark your content down.

The question of what to blog about remains—the strategy isn’t too dissimilar to social media:

• Create educational content to establish your authority. Blogging allows you to dive deeper into a topic, whereas social media only lets you scratch the surface. Combine good content with appropriate formatting (headings, subheadings, bullet points, line breaks, etc.) to make the content digestible. Having audio versions of the content can also increase its accessibility.
• Create content that empathizes and sympathizes with your target audience. For example, a fitness center should create content that shows an understanding of a user’s struggles to get fitter. You build trust and loyalty by acknowledging their challenges and positioning yourself as someone who can help them overcome the challenges. It’s a tremendous and non-tone-deaf way to discuss your products and services in the context of their lives.
• Incorporate storytelling into your content wherever possible. For instance, a communications coach can share his or her challenges with public speaking and discuss what they did to overcome their challenges. Storytelling helps build a connection with your brand and makes users believe you are the right person to buy from.
• Use your blog section to present the latest industry news and insights and answer FAQs. These all lend a great deal to your credibility.

Take SoFi as the perfect example. They offer the latest insights into student loans such as law school loans, investing, and credit cards, among other important finance topics. 

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How to measure awareness building

How do you know if your efforts to build brand awareness are working? You look at the stats. Every social media platform has an analytics engine to access stats.

For web metrics, you set up a Google Analytics account.

These are the stats you should monitor (the terms are consistent across most analytics engines):

• Impressions indicate how many users have seen your content (including repeat users.) 
• Engagement on social media shows the number of users who liked, commented on, shared, or saved your post.
• Accounts reached on social media indicate how far your content is reaching.
• Follower growth is arguably the leading indicator of brand awareness.
• Views/reach indicate how many users saw your content at least once.

Wrapping up

The need and desire to make sales is understandable.

However, executing an awareness strategy is crucial to your marketing efforts, eventually enabling sales.

On the most basic level, awareness building makes your existence known. By deeply understanding your target market, you can create relevant content that builds and converts awareness.