A good brand campaign can work wonders. It can help grow your business, take you from an unknown to a well-known name in your industry, and even help you become President of the United States.
There are lots of ways to run an effective branding campaign but the key is to find the people who are most likely interested in what you have to offer and engage them where they hang out. Let’s look at 10 innovative brand awareness campaign ideas.
What Is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness is what it says in the name – getting people more aware of your brand. This is a form of marketing but there’s a subtle difference from how most businesses market themself.
Instead of trying to convince people to buy your products or services, brand marketing is all about getting your name out there. You might not get a single sale as a direct result of the campaign but if you do it well, you’ll be the first place they think of when they’re in the market for what you have to offer.
Make It Personal
A common mistake a lot of brands make in their awareness campaigns is making it too “corporate”. Your customers know you’re running a business but they still want a personal connection with the people in that business.
Even if the only person in that business is you.
Socialize with Your Audience
Interact with your audience on a personal level. Take social networks like Facebook and Twitter literally and socialize with people. Build a rapport with them and they’ll remember you.
Even if you can’t connect with everyone in your target audience, they’ll see how you treat other people. Those one-to-one connections can multiply to one-to-many even if you don’t see it happening.
Tell a Story
Everyone loves a good story. The most successful movies, TV shows, and companies have a story to tell. For example, Apple’s story is about its rise, gradual decline to near-bankruptcy, and how its returning founder turned it around and it became one of the world’s biggest companies.
Create a memorable story about your company that people will immediately think of when they hear your name. Make that a part of your company’s identity and share that story at every opportunity.
Develop a Personality for Your Brand
Along with a story, your brand should have its own personality. It might be quirky, funny, adventuresome, or conservative. It should be something that will resonate with your target market but exactly how you want to be seen is up to you.
People will remember you if you express an opinion. If your image is bland and doesn’t make you stand out, your brand won’t stick in their memory.
Use the Freemium Model
If you sell a product or service, consider using the freemium model to build brand awareness. This means you give your product or service away for free, with a paid option that adds features or makes it better in some way.
Smartphone apps are one of the most common examples of this model. A lot of these apps are free to download and let you use a limited set of features or use the app for a limited amount of time. They have a paid upgrade that either unlocks extra features or gives the users some other benefit.
This can help build buzz for your brand by getting people talking about it and sharing it on social media sites.
Offer Free, High-Quality Content
This is like the freemium model in some ways but instead of giving away your product or service, give away your knowledge. Share helpful information with your audience to help make your brand more recognizable.
If the content is good enough, your readers will share it with their network, those people will share it with their, and so on. If this happens on a large enough scale, you’ll end up going viral.
Become a Multimedia Producer
Written content like blog posts and email newsletters are important but in today’s world, you need to offer multimedia content as well. Podcasts get more popular every year and it’s easy to produce your own show. The costs are minimal but can help get your brand in front of a lot of people.
YouTube videos can do the same thing. Creating video content is a bit more complex than podcasts but it’s still relatively inexpensive and easy to do. This is particularly important if you target a younger audience since YoUTube is one of their most-watched sources of entertainment and information.
Partner with Influencers
With the growth of YouTube and other social media platforms like Instagram and Snapchat, some publishers have become celebrities in their market. These people are known as “influencers” because of the power they have to influence their audiences.
A lot of these influencers make a living by partnering with brands to promote them to their audiences. This can be a great way to get exposure for your brand, with people who are most likely to be interested in what you have to offer.
Create a Brand Hashtag
Brand awareness is built into most social networks. Trending topics are the things that people are talking about the most and once something starts to trend, it snowballs from there. As people see it trending, they start talking about it, which makes it trend even higher.
If you can get your business into those trending topics, you can reach a huge new audience to get your brand in front of them. Creating a hashtag for your brand can help. Add it to every post you make on social media and encourage your audience to do the same whenever they talk about your business on social media.
Attend Industry Conferences and Workshops
This idea is a little more old-school but it still works as well as ever. Attending industry conferences and workshops will help you meet people in your market and get your brand in front of the people who are most interested.
If you have a chance to sponsor the event in some way, that’s even better. This can get your name in front of every attendee and potentially their networks. If you provide giveaways or samples of your product that they can use, it can pay back several times over through the extra exposure.
Putting Your Brand Awareness Campaign Ideas into Action
Hopefully, some of these brand awareness campaign ideas struck a chord with you. If so, don’t feel like you have to do them all at once. Take it one step at a time. Start with one campaign idea, get it up and running, and see how it works. If it works well, scale it up as much as possible and then add another idea to the mix.
Another effective way to build your brand is through search engine optimization. Getting your site ranked near the top of Google will put your website and name in front of all the people searching for what you have to offer. And those are the perfect people to target since you can offer a solution to their problem.
There are several factors in getting a top ranking in Google but one of the most important is links pointing to your website from other sites. Backlinks.com can help you build those links without spending a huge amount of time and effort on it. Get in touch with us today for a free link building consultation and find out how we can help you build your brand.
