By Sujan Patel
Fall can be a difficult season to navigate as a business owner or marketer. Consumers are subtly getting ready for Halloween, Thanksgiving and the end of the year holidays. They're getting ready to spend money, but not quite following through.
This makes fall a great time to work on building online brand awareness for your company so that you're top-of-mind for holiday spending and going into the new year. While there are many strategies out there to increase brand awareness, content, presence and advertising are three sure fire ways to make people more aware of who you are as a company.
Hire a Content Manager
Content marketing is one of the most important marketing trends of 2014. But although it continues to skyrocket in popularity, that doesn’t mean it's just a fad or something that will eventually fade. High quality, unique content is one of the differentiating factors between you and your competitors.
Having a great content strategy goes beyond blog posts. There are many types of content besides the written word that can help increase your brand awareness and engagement, such as quizzes, videos, images (posts or infographics), case studies, glossaries, white papers, webinars and more.
Be There at the Right Time
If you have the right content or the right people to solve others' problems, your brand is going to be stronger for it. A great to make sure you're there at the right time is through connecting with bloggers and/or the press, either through relationship building or a free service like Help a Reporter Out (HARO), which is a daily digest of press outlets and writers looking for sources for their content.
Quora and LinkedIn are also two great places to position your employees as industry experts without seeming like you're trying too hard to get noticed (especially when your content is actually useful).
It’s also important to incorporate link building into your strategy. Good links are a cornerstone of “right here, right time.” Think of the places where you could be getting an applicable link that you may not be. These might include:
- Non-profit organization’s donor or sponsor lists on their websites.
- Social media profiles.
- Local directory profiles (MozLocal is a good service that checks multiple listings at once to make sure they are complete).
- Website footers of auxiliary/landing page sites that are on a separate domain.
- Branding or promotional materials, including business cards, email signatures, banners, flyers and postcards.
- Speaker bios for conferences or other events employees are attending (like networking functions).
As you can see, link building has evolved past asking for reciprocal links and doing it without reason. Today’s link builders look for opportunities where their link should be there, because it genuinely serves the user. Having your website accessible to as many people as possible not only allows users to learn more about you, it also serves as a constant reminder of your company’s name or services, if it’s in the URL.
Do Paid Campaigns to Increase Awareness
For marketers that are looking for low-budget ways to get more press for their company’s brand, hearing that PPC and paid social campaigns are a good idea may seem discouraging. However, doing paid campaigns doesn’t mean you have to spend thousands (or even hundred) of dollars per day, especially if you are in a low-competition industry.
Just start out by boosting a Facebook post for $5 per day and compare your results to another similar post that isn’t boosted. You will also never know how much you are charged per new follower on Twitter until you try one of their paid campaigns. As you get better at optimizing your audience, you learn how to get the most exposure for the least amount of daily budget.
The same strategy can go for PPC. Make sure your keywords are as detailed as possible and continuously tweak your ads to get the highest CTR with the least amount of competition. This will help drive costs down while also giving you exposure to an audience that is actively searching for your brand and its products and services.
Often, it doesn’t matter what the season is. In order to boost your online press and brand awareness anytime, you need to incorporate several strategies in order to make the greatest impact. Combining a paid social, PPC and content strategy (as well as upping your public relations and outreach gain) can give you the greatest chances of continuing to get more press, while also increasing brand awareness among your target audience.
Sujan Patel has championed internet marketing and entrepreneurship for over a decade and is currently the VP of Marketing at thisCLICKS, the makers of When I Work -- an employee scheduling software solution for small businesses.
