Proven Digital Marketing Tactics to Blow Up Your Startup Brand Awareness

Brand awareness – an important aspect of digital marketing that is often overlooked for immediate gratifications. While lead generation and sales are vital to ensure a company stays in business, branding will help ensure that leads and sales are not one-off achievements.

But how do you go about creating a strong and trusted brand that customers can identify with?

That is a question we receive often and have decided to tackle in this post.

So, in this post, we are going to take a look at 5 strategies that can help you blow up your brand awareness goal:

Google Ads Campaign (Pay Per Click)

Some advertisers argue that Google Ads isn’t ideal for brand awareness due to the high cost. I used to think so too until I figured that there is a huge difference between having many viewers and having the right audience viewing your message or ads.

Google ads are a great way to get people who are interested in a particular keyword to view your brand. This is completely different from running a social campaign with the assumption that your target audience would identify with your brand. This is not to say that social ads are ineffective.

For instance, assuming you are a health insurance broker, you can decide to run social ads targeting your ideal customer. With this, you are definitely going to get many people to view your brand story or ads at a very low cost. But the ads may be irrelevant to some of the viewers. So, you may accumulate massive views but lesser relevance in the real sense.

On the other hand, if you decide to run a Google Ads bidding for the keywords “health insurance broker”, you may pay higher for the impressions when compared to social ads, but you are more than likely to get improved relevance because your ads would only be shown to people searching for the keywords that you are bidding for.

In a nutshell, both social ads and pay per click are useful strategies for brand awareness. But the strategy to use depends on your campaign goal and how much you are willing to spend.

Social Media Brand Awareness Campaigns/Social Contest

Having talked about PPC as an effective branding tool, the place of social media campaigns; especially Facebook brand awareness ads cannot be overlooked. If you are looking to get more people to view your brand story or products or services at the least cost possible, then, social media ads are the tools you should be looking at.

About one-third of the world’s population spend a reasonable amount of their time of Facebook and its partner platforms – Whatsapp and Instagram, and the company has an advanced targeting option that allows you to narrow down targeting to what users’ preferences.

If you want to take a bit further, run social media contests to increase interaction and engagement with your brand. Over time, your brand’s name would be top on the minds of your ideal audience.

Video Marketing Techniques

You will agree with me that videos are much more captivating than texts and static images. Moreover, it’s easier to tell a brand story using videos. If you still doubt the power of video campaigns in brand awareness, ask the founders of Dropbox and Dollar Shave Club.

If you want to inject authenticity and transparency into your branding, utilize video in demonstrating your product or service. It makes your content more relatable, increases engagement, and if you do it well, it leaves people desiring more content from you. Check out what Nivea is doing with Barber Shop Talk.

Retargeting Ads

Whether you are utilizing Google Ads or social media campaigns, remarketing is one of the best things that has happened to digital marketing campaigns. The fact that you can go after those who had interacted with your content in any form is mind-blowing. You can also go with replacement of leadpages.

So, whether your plan is to appear in the feeds of those who had viewed your social media posts or be present on any site they visit on the internet, retargeting campaigns will help you to be visible to your audience. Until they become loyal fans.

In fact, the retargeting strategy is so powerful that you can utilize it boos to sales and lead generation later on.

Referral Program

Nothing sells a brand like social proof and referral programs. If you run software as a service firm or your company operate in the services space, incentivized referral program will help you get the word out about your product at the least possible cost.

For instance, most digital marketing automation tools use referral programs where you get a discount or earn a certain percent of the subscription fee when someone (or some people) sign up through your referral link.

These have helped companies like Dropbox, Leadpages, and Clickfunnels to grow their subscriber base. It’s a smart way of incentivizing other people to do the marketing for you.

This strategy isn’t just awesome for brand awareness, it is an effective tactic for generating sales leads.

There are many digital marketing strategies that can be utilized for brand awareness. But if you are a startup looking to gain traction in real-time, these 5 will surely help you establish felt presence in your industry

 About the Author

Ali Soudi is the Online Marketing Manager at Be Unique Group, a Premier Google Partner with offices in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, New York, Georgia, Hong Kong, and Singapore. With over 6 years experience in the online marketing space, Ali is a Google certified digital marketing professional and competent trainer with expertise in Google Ads, SEO, social media, and inbound marketing. Residing in the U.A.E, Ali Soudi was born and raised in the U.K.