Many people are continually searching for a surefire way to build brand awareness and break through in their niche. After all, it's a critical part of future business success. But how do you grow your brand?
You can do it using a few simple steps.
Grow Your Brand, Grow Your Audience
Whether you are a local business or a Fortune 500 company, growing brand awareness is pretty important. If you're an entrepreneur who just launched your first startup, this is a critical time. You need to take stock in what you're all about, what you hope to achieve, and who your target audience is.
Let's see the main ways to boost engagement and thus expand a business.
Think of Your Customer or Buyer Persona
Who is your message for? You craft a detailed buyer persona to understand your demographic.
This is where you can get creative. Everyone's different. For example, marketing towards a single person living in the city is vastly different from marketing a mother of four in the suburbs. How do you see bringing these two target audiences together?
Practice lining up your brand with these ideal personas to get a better feel of what your future goals will be.
Make Customer Service a Major Priority
You want a customer experience to be extremely positive. This means both building a great rapport with customers and fulfilling their questions, concerns, and requests. Everyone loves excellent customer service. It communicates that you're there for the customer, willing to hear them out and level with them.
Good customer service eventually leads to potential customer retention. People will more likely gravitate toward your brand if you provide fantastic customer service. Brand loyalty, increasing customer retention, and merely listening to your audience is a great practice.
Finding Your Voice
Communication is essential in every facet of life. The same goes for effective marketing and brand awareness. Will your brand adopt a more casual, fun tone? Or is your business aimed at an academic, technical audience?
Some people like to market to consumers as they would to a close friend: full of anecdotes and casual delivery. A lot of people enjoy this approach. Some absolutely hate it. Everyone is different. It goes back to finding the persona of your target audience.
Some of the most famous companies, like Target and Skittles, have upbeat, positive voices.
On the other end of the spectrum, companies like Adult Swim have rather bizarre and incredibly unique tones. While Adult Swim's voice may seem counterintuitive to some, it serves its target audience exceptionally well.
It depends on your personality, strategies, and ultimate goals.
You have some flexibility here in terms of social media posts. It's a great way to test drive what you think will work and what won't. It's essential for effective social media marketing (SMM).
How Social Media Engagement Changes Everything
Speaking of social media, it's arguably the best tool in your digital marketing toolkit.
One way to engage in an effective marketing strategy for brand growth is through social media. Social media isn't merely for sharing pictures and chatting with friends anymore. It has an immense influence on branding and business.
Having an effective social media following can open a lot of doors. Make sure to increase your social media presence and a winning creative strategy for community outreach. This means consistent updates, calls to action, and of course, an attractive design.
There are a few great ways to increase your visibility on social media for better brand growth.
You Need to Be Consistent
You need to be consistent across each social media platform. This means that your voice, aesthetic, and overall presence need to all be in perfect harmony. It harkens back to one of the critical ways of growing your brand: developing and becoming comfortable with your voice and tone.
It's definitely more challenging than it looks and requires practice, strategizing, and understanding your audience.
Having a solid look and feel across platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram is ideal for branding your business.
Post (Just the Right Amount)
A seemingly obvious tactic is to put yourself out there. However, there's a bit of science when it comes to posting. Posting content too much, and people may ignore you out of irritation; post too little, and users won't even know you exist. As you'd expect, the best is a healthy mixture of the two.
What's a good strategy for getting online recognition on social media? A great practice to start with is posting content from your business account at least once a day. Remember, posting too much can end up hurting you.
Make your posts engaging, thoughtful, and relevant. Optimize your content to your demographic, business contacts, and target audience. Don't lose the audience with irritating, ad-like posts.
Go Easy on the Self-Promotion
This may seem counterintuitive, but going hard with self-promotion can be a deterrent for many users. It's the aim to promote your brand. However, you need to have finesse.
On LinkedIn specifically, companies and users who only post consistent self-promotional material tend to be seen as ads instead of engaging with an audience.
Finding the sweet spot between posting engaging, thoughtful content while also promoting your business and brand voice is something that takes practice and skill.
Final Thoughts on How to Grow Your Brand
It may seem daunting, and it isn't for the faint of heart. But it's by no means impossible to grow your brand in this day and age.
If you find your voice, develop a buyer persona, and master social media accounts, you'll quickly hit your marketing goals. More importantly, you'll have a better idea of how to grow your brand further.