The digital marketing space is more competitive than ever. You can no longer expect to stay relevant in the digital age by merely just having an online presence.
Instead, you need to be doing all you can to promote your company and expand your reach through brand awareness. This is key to growing your business and becoming an authoritative industry leader.
Here are 5 marketing trends that help with brand awareness.
Video Marketing
Those that remain cautious to invest in video marketing are missing out on a host of traffic, leads and sales. Contrary to popular opinion, it also doesn’t cost a lot compared to how effective it is at getting your brand in front of your target audience.
Video marketing can provide value to your customers by present the information in a visually appealing format. Not only can it educate but it can also be a powerful tool for entertaining customers and keeping them engaged.
Customers want to get value with as little effort as possible so what better way to give it to them than a video that does not require scrolling through countless text blocks. They will pay attention to your message for longer, allowing your content marketing techniques to take them further down the sales funnel.
If you can find a creative way to present the information, you can differentiate from your competitors. If your solution can solve their problems, video content can act as the social proof needed to convert visitors into sales.
Anyone can make a video so hop on the trend now and take advantage of the increased brand awareness it offers now.
Analytics Tools
One of the biggest reasons why startups fail is because they ignore data and customers.
“Analytics tools provide granular information about the groups targeted by various marketing campaigns, such as how users behave and how they interact with a specific campaign (likes, shares, sales, social shout-outs etc).”
So, to overcome this problem, you should be using analytics tools to enhance the customer experience and develop long-lasting relationships with customers to create loyalty to the brand.
One of the best (and free) analytics tools to use is Google Analytics. You can use it to set URL tracking goals, see which pieces of content are getting the most attention and a whole lot more.
For example, by seeing which content is attracting the best leads, you would ensure that it is updated with the latest figures, all internal and external links are working and promote it.
However, while analytics tools are great in principle, as a company, you need to know what you want to track and improve before investing time, effort and money on them.
Social Media Stories
While according to Digital Authority that 85% of businesses are using social media analytics because they are aware that it exists and can be used to promote content and grow brand awareness, there are certain functionalities that seem to be underappreciated.
One of which is social media stories.
These started on Snapchat but have spread to other platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Social stories are popular ways for people to share their content on social media for a limited amount of time.
While at first, this may seem ineffective, social stories can provide a host of benefits to increasing brand awareness.
When businesses share content on social media, there is always the concern that the tone or style may not fit with the platform. On the other hand, because social stories only last for 24 hours until they disappear, you can be more flexible and build a brand image that seems more approachable.
Use Multiple Social Media Platforms
To increase brand awareness, you need to present your company to as many people as possible.
People hang out online in different places so being on just a single platform to share new or repurposed content and other posts will not bring you the results you are looking for.
Think about it this way.
You are probably spending a lot of time (or even money hiring an agency) creating high-quality content to share on social media.
But if you’re only limiting yourselves to just one or two platforms, it’s not being used anywhere near to its potential.
For example, a lot of blog posts contain facts and figures to back up their arguments. Naturally, this will then be shared across Facebook, Twitter and/or LinkedIn.
However, these stats can then be repurposed and used to create a presentation or infographic that can be then shared on even more platforms, such as Pinterest and Instagram.
It’s the same high-quality content but packaged in a different way to make the most of as many social media platforms as possible.
The more people that can see it, the better your reach and generating brand awareness.
Mobile Functionality
Your marketing plan should also include mobile functionality as a priority. More and more web traffic is being generated through smartphones and tablets than ever before so it’s vital you have a fast, optimized website and content for mobile use.
In terms of the website, it should be responsive and be easy to navigate to all tabs/windows/etc through a small screen.
In terms of content, if it’s a blog post it must be easy to read; if it’s a video, it must not be too small that visitors can’t watch it or too big that it doesn’t fit to screen; if it’s an infographic, the edges must fit to screen and the content must be easy to read; and so on and so forth.
Thinking about your mobile audience goes a long way to expanding your reach and increasing brand awareness.
Conclusion
These 5 marketing trends will help you and your company with brand awareness in 2019 and beyond. Invest in video marketing as it’s cost-effective and value-driven, bring on an analytics tool to improve the customer experience, use social media stories to become more approachable, share across multiple platforms to increase your reach and ensure your website and content is optimized for mobile users.
This guest post comes from Codrin Arsene, CEO @ Digital Authority Partners