Brand building is a big part of making any business successful online in the long term (job boards included). And since there are so many different ways you can go about building your brand, the fact is that the process of increasing awareness of your business is quite simple and, at some times, even easy.
So without further ado, I present to you 9 different effective brand building strategies guaranteed to increase your business’s popularity.
1. Blog a Lot
I love business blogging (and not just because I’m a freelance blogger). There are just so many benefits to be had when you blog: traffic generation, successful content marketing, and authority/credibility building. But one of the biggest and most valuable benefits of all is the resulting increase in brand popularity when you blog a lot.
Some people criticize business blogging. After all, a weblog actually started out as nothing more than a way to express your opinion online. But over the years, it’s grown into much more that. It’s a versatile marketing channel that brings businesses 55% more visitors, 126% more leads, and 434% more indexed pages (ImpactBND).
2. Be Everywhere Your Audience Is
![Brand Omniscience]()
Slender man is everywhere his audience is. Are you? Image credit: mdl70 via Flickr.
On an Internet marketing forum that I once was active on, I remember a thread created by a rather popular user. He said the following (I can’t remember his entire thread, but here’s the gist of it.
He (let’s call him Bill) was an active member in his niche (online fitness): blogging, guest blogging, commenting on other blogs and participating in niche-related forums. One day, out of the blue, Bill got an e-mail via his website from a member of his target audience saying that the person had been seeing Bill “everywhere he turned”, and had eventually decided to purchase one of his products.
Neat, eh? Bill built his brand by putting himself wherever his target audience was — they couldn’t help but notice him and his products.
3. Run Contests
Ok, ok, I confess. I got this idea from a blog post I read over at Smart Passive Income on how Josh Earl grew his email list 3418% (that’s nearly 200K subscribers!) in just a measly period of 11 days.
How’d he do it, you ask?
He ran a contest. As simple as that (well, not quite so simple, as you’ll see when you read the post). But the fact of the matter is, running a contest is one of the single most effective brand building strategies around. It has the power to get tens or even hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of eyeballs on your website in an extremely short amount of time.
Granted, not all contests go viral, but reading Josh’s post above will give you a good idea of how to create one that does.
4. Conduct Viral Marketing
Although contests are a large part of viral marketing, they aren’t by any means the only part. Viral marketing can make use of many different traffic generation and marketing channels (even “conventional” ones like social media, article marketing, and eNewsletters). It’s all in how you do it.
When you’re trying to get your brand go viral, you’re going to need some sort of content as a base — whether it’s a social media update, blog post, or a syndication-ready article. And that content, somehow and somewhere needs to mention your brand. If you don’t include mention of your brand in it, you’ll get no brand building results if/when it goes viral.
Furthermore, the content needs to be shareworthy. Not only should it be easy for viewers to share (if the content is on a third-party network like Twitter or Facebook, there’s not much you can do about it. But if it’s on your website, then get some attractive share buttons that stick out like sore thumbs), but it should also incite emotion. According to the Moz blog, anger is the most viral emotion.
5. Create Coupons & Promotions for your Products
What do people do when they’re bored, trying to save money, and have a newspaper/magazine handy? They cut coupons!
Online, people also do pretty much the same thing. People are always looking for coupons and they always will be. I mean, who doesn’t love a 50% discount?
By creating coupons for your products and sending the codes out to popular niche coupon boards, you can get some eyes on your brand pretty quickly and maybe even a few sales. Those sales might be at a lower profit margin, but remember that those sales are from new customers whom you can get to buy from you again and again and again.
By conducting other promotions for your products and general brand, you can get your brand to spread like wildfire among your target audience.
6. Branch Out
Go back to your ideal customer profile. Head over to the section that details the likes, the wants, and the desires of your target audience. Are they into football/soccer? Some other sport perhaps? What are their favorite pastimes?
By branching out into those sports or into commercialized pastimes, you can show your audience that your brand is able to identify with them. That’s pretty much one of the driving concepts behind Super Bowl advertising (although you obviously don’t have to branch out that far).
The main point is to get out of your comfort zone and get your brand associated with whatever is hip nowadays. Stay with the trends and move with the fads, and soon enough your business will get noticed.
7. Be Social Media Geeks
According to survey data from Edison Research (the guys who do polling for presidential elections) just two years ago, only 33% of Americans have ever followed a brand on social media. That includes Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, every social media network. Since that data is two years old, I’m guessing that the actual percentage today is around 40%.
But still — seriously? That’s millions of people you can potentially reach.
Does that statistics prove that Americans (and all people in general) aren’t likely to follow brands on social media? Hardly. What it does prove, however, is that brands aren’t doing a good enough job reaching out to their target audience on the social media channels that are most relevant to their brand.
For example: if your brand is a restaurant or some sort of eatery, don’t try to reach people on LinkedIn. Bah. That’s for business professionals. Instead, become active on places like Pinterest where practically the only things shared are 1) pictures of slim people who sing the praises of p90x, 2) cats, and 3) recipes & pictures of delicious food.
8. Publish Videos
Video marketing is one of the most underutilized marketing strategies ever. Period. Not hardly enough business are producing videos to supplement their brands’ content.
Videos hold a certain power over people that other forms of content like blog posts and social media updates don’t have. Why? Because it’s so visual.
Even school kids prefer videos to text content — ask any 6th grader whether they’d like to watch an educational movie on platypus habitats or if they’d prefer to just read from their textbook. I’ll guarantee that not a single one will go for the latter option.
People. Love. Videos. There’s just no getting around it.
But something else you need to keep in mind is that just as your target audience will react positively to high quality, well produced videos, they’ll react negatively to low quality, unprofessional videos. So if you’re going to try video marketing on a skimpy budget, just forget about it. You’ll end up doing more harm than good.
9. Build an Army of Brand Evangelists
What are brand evangelists, you say? They’re people who evangelize about your brand (shocking, no?).
In short, they’re the guys who see your brand, love it, and then tell all your friends about you.
In long, they’re members of your target audience whom you have impressed. A lot. They’ve read through your blog posts (and loved them), watched your videos (and loved them), followed your social media profiles and interacted with your updates (and loved doing it), and who now try to get others to do the same.
Brand evangelists think your brand is awesome and are ready to tell the world about it.
Most of us are all brand evangelists, for some brand or the other. Me, I’m a huge fan of all of Neil Patel’s work: QuickSprout, KISSmetrics, CrazyEgg, everything. Consequently, I’ve linked to relevant posts of his in my blog posts many more times than I can count. I can safely say that I’ve probably driven hundreds, if not thousands, of new visitors to his collection of websites.
That’s what you need for your brand. You need to wow people so much that they can’t help but sing your praises all over the Internet (and even off the Internet as well).
Wrapping Up
What we’ve just gone through is a lot of brand building strategy to digest, so let’s quickly condense it into a short little recap:
- blog a lot (business blogging produces through-the-roof results)
- be omniscient (every which way your target audience turns, you should be there waiting for them)
- run contests (remember Josh Earl)
- do viral marketing (create and publish shareworth, emotion-inciting, viral traffic ready content)
- create coupons and run promotions (because everybody loves a discount)
- branch out (again, be and advertise where your audience is)
- be social media geeks (60+% of America is still unreached by brands on social media — reach them!)
- publish videos (visual content > text content, sometimes)
- build an army of brand evangelists (wow people so much that they evangelize about your brand online and offline)
Which of these strategies do you think is most relevant for your business? Which ones will you be implementing in your marketing campaigns today? Let us know in the comments below!
