6-Step Process to Generating More Brand Awareness Online

So you’ve got your logo designed, a strong mission statement and boilerplate language, a sharp-looking website, and a social media presence. Time to sit back and watch your web traffic trickle in to build up your brand awareness online. Job well done and high-fives all around, right?

Wrong.

You’ve got the framework, but now it’s time to really get to work on the details to grow your brand. Brand awareness tells your customers who you are, what you do, and how you or your product can help them solve a problem. If you’re doing it right, customers will recognize your logo and messaging and be familiar with what you do. Those who are finding you for the first time should be able to easily figure it out.

If you would like to build up your brand awareness and generate more consistent revenue for your business, we’ve put together a easy-to-follow six-step process to help you out.

Develop Your Buyer Persona

Having more people visit your site is always great, but it doesn’t actually amount to much if the traffic isn’t leading to sales. To effectively grow your brand, you need to consider who you are trying to attract.

Think about the people who would find your product or service relevant to them. What kind of people want what you provide? This is your target audience. Marketing to the masses won’t bring you the meaningful traffic you need to generate revenue.

In order to identify your target audience, you can create a buyer persona. To create your buyer persona, you’ll conduct some market research and use real data from your existing customers, while also keeping in mind their demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, economic factors, and goals. This gives you a clear picture of your ideal customer – the people whom you want to be familiar with your brand.

Find Where They Are, Or Where They’re Coming From

No, we’re not talking about where your customers live, rather where they are in the digital space.

Once you’ve created your buyer persona and identified your target audience, you need to figure out where they are active online, and where they are coming from when they find your brand. This could be on various social media platforms or other websites. But how do you figure it out?

Tools like Google Analytics actually make it pretty easy for you to discover where your brand is being discussed online, and to track where your site visitors are coming from. This can help give you a better idea of what people are looking for online when they find your company. These are the places where you need to focus your marketing efforts.

Define Tactics To Reach Them

Now that you’ve figured out where your target audience is online, you can get proactive and go out to meet them rather than waiting and hoping for them to come to you. For instance, if your target audience often reads a certain blog, find out if you can produce guest content or place ads there.

Reach out to influencers who are popular with your customers to see if they would collaborate to create a sponsored post and link back to you. This is a good way to grow your brand awareness to the right audience.

Set Reachable Goals

It can be tempting to reach for the stars, but you’re better off setting smaller, more specific goals that are actually attainable. For instance, you could set your goals as such:

• Get more followers on social media
• More organic website traffic
• Grow sales

While these are all good goals to have, setting them in broad terms makes them unreachable unless you define specific terms to measure them. So break things down further to lay out clear-cut milestones.

• Increase your follower engagement on Facebook by X% by MM/DD/YY
• Gain X% more organic web traffic by MM/DD/YY
• Grow conversions from social media and organic web traffic by X% by MM/DD/YY

Making your goals this specific allows you to use real data to track your brand awareness growth and how well it is turning into revenue, which should be your next step.

Evaluate Your Progress

Once again, it’s not time to rest on your laurels and let things get to work on their own. You’re not doing things right if you aren’t tracking your progress to see what is working and what isn’t. Just like you will use online tools to discover where your ideal customer is coming from or lives online, you can use them to track the progress of your brand awareness.

If you do a sponsored post with an industry influencer, measure how much traffic you are getting from the backlink and how many of those site visits lead to sales. Most likely, sponsored content will cost you some money unless you can work out another arrangement, so in this way you can evaluate the true value of the post and if the juice was worth the squeeze.

Likewise, you can monitor your social media engagement to make sure your posts are reaching the right people. Take a look at what types of posts are getting the most engagement from your followers and which are not. Also, look at which channels are most effective for your brand. You want a presence everywhere, but you may not need to dedicate as much time on your LinkedIn as you would on your Instagram, depending what it is that your business offers.

We dive deeper into these strategies and the tools to use in our post on how to measure the success of your brand building campaigns.

Don’t Be Afraid To Make Changes

While patience can be a virtue with brand awareness, you also shouldn’t be afraid to switch things up. Experimentation is a big part of the process, with a lot of triall, and most likely, error, involved. But if something isn’t working like you want it to – drop it! Change your tact. Or use your data to tweak things and see if it makes any improvements.

You can utilize A/B testing to see side-by-side results on competing material and learn what works best. A campaign is only a failure if you don’t learn how to make improvements.

Growing your brand awareness is a fluid process that takes time, but taking this six-step approach can help you gain trust and become a more recognizable business.