Whether your brand has been around for decades or you’re just getting started, it’s important to continually build brand awareness. Below are some ways Thrive Creative Group helps small businesses successfully build and continue their brand awareness.

Website

• Having an optimized, user-friendly, polished, mobile responsive web design for your business is extremely important. The design should be customized, professional, and interactive.
• Search engine optimization (SEO) is an essential step in creating and maintaining a digital brand presence while improving your organic search results. 
• Your website should also be optimized with keywords about your product and services and photos (don’t forget the alt-text) for search engines and the user experience.

Social Media 

• Organic Posts

• • Organic ads are the best way for businesses to develop a connection with their customers as organic social media is used to establish their personality and voice, aka brand.
  • A well-maintained, active social media presence gives customers a legitimate location to post concerns, complaints, and compliments.
  • Organic ads are also cost-effective, as posting on social media can be completely free if your budget doesn’t have room for paid ads. 
  • Don’t forget to get your brand advocates to engage with your posts to help boost exposure!
• Paid Ads
  • Running paid ads or sponsored updates on social media is an excellent way to reach your target audience because of the level of targeting that’s available.
  • One common mistake businesses make when placing paid social media ads is paying to advertise on all platforms. Research which ones perform well organically with your target audience and stick to those.

Email Marketing

• Email marketing is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to build brand awareness.
• It allows you to reach your customers directly and build a long-lasting relationship, as long as you focus on providing genuine value and use email marketing correctly.
• Most importantly, be sure to get permission. Put a pop-up box on your website or sign-up sheet in your office to encourage customers to sign-up for your emails. 

Blogs

• Blogging frequently can drive more traffic to your website.
• Sharing your blog links to social media targets different audiences, generating more leads and engagement. 
• A lot of content is searched on the internet daily. Blogging is beneficial when it comes to SEO. 
  • Always add a video or photo to your blog posts as people enjoy visuals. Don’t forget your alt-text!
• Writing monthly blogs for our clients is one of many services our marketing team offers!

Video, Video, Video!

• Creating a video to help your customers understand your products and services can help increase your brand awareness.
• Make sure your videos are clear and to the point. The attention span of most people is extremely low therefore you cannot expect them to spend more than a minute or two watching your content.
• Promote your videos across all possible platforms. Create a YouTube channel and upload your videos then post those links on social media. YouTube links can also be embedded on your website.

Community Sponsorships

• Being involved and showing that your community-minded can build strong customer relationships and helps get your brand out there in other ways.
• Sponsor and attend local events you really care about; youth ball teams, golf tournaments, community events, join the chamber, etc. 

Google Reviews

• Respond! Respond to all of your Google (and Facebook) reviews, whether they’re good or bad.
• Keep your responses simple.
  • Acknowledge the person and what they said.
  • Thank them for leaving a review.
  • Then get them offline, especially for a bad review. You don’t want to start a back-and-forth conversation that others will see.
• Thrive recommends writing a handful of canned responses for both positive and negative reviews that stay within your brand. This will make it easier for multiple employees to handle responding to reviews.

Paid Advertising (Google display, billboard, pay-per-click-retargeting)

• Launching targeted pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns are a terrific way to get your brand in front of your target audience. 
• PPC campaigns can be streamlined and set-up based on your advertising budget and you only pay a fee when the ad is clicked on. You’re essentially “buying visits” to your site.

Retargeting

• You can spend a lot of time, effort, and budget to get visitors to your website, but staying in front of your visitors once they leave the website is also important. A well planned retargeting strategy is the easiest way to continue to build brand awareness.
• An ad retargeting strategy enables you to continue to show ads to your visitors, even if they have only been to your website once. They will then continue to see your brand on other websites they visit.
• Retargeting works best if it’s part of a larger digital strategy and in conjunction with inbound/outbound marketing generation.

If you’re not taking steps to continuously build brand awareness, then you’re likely falling behind or missing customers or worse falling behind your competition. Thrive Creative Group spends each day partnering with businesses that have long term goals to grow their market share but little time and help to get it done. If you’re a new small business owner in need of a team to take the burden of marketing off your plate or you’ve been in business for years but are unable to keep up with your competitors, let us help you with a marketing strategy that works!

At Thrive, we also do custom WordPress Website Development, Social Media Marketing, Graphic Design, and most anything you’ll need to make your business Thrive.

Contact us and let’s talk about Brand Awareness.