Introductions are necessary

Grabbing the attention of your target passerby on the street or on the web is the first step in building awareness of your brand. This is the introduction, the overture to the heart of your enterprise and should communicate high-level points about who you are and what you can offer. The marketer is here to pique the viewer’s interest. And just like you wouldn’t feel excited about a date with someone who is rather blasé, you wouldn’t want the first impressions of your brand to blend in, just another boring and unoriginal ad in a sea of boring and unoriginal ads. Of course, the components should be captivating: an aesthetically pleasing photo, well-laid out design, and winsome and well-informed copy. Though methods have changed quickly over the history of commerce, you as a marketer are tapping into age-old dance of pursuing and being pursued. And if you’re a small to midsize company, you might have already seen how the roles of a marketer, an advertiser, a designer, a writer, and a salesman all overlap.

Escape the sounding death knell
A clear-eyed marketing strategy taps into that interplay by recognizing when to adapt to the new technologies and when to trust the marketing insights that have brought results over years. In many ways, the democratization of the creative world has made marketing even easier - cell phone cameras can do a serviceable job of product photography, accessible platforms like Canva can equip a marketer to create well-designed collateral, and now, the use of ChatGPT and other AI products can eliminate a lot of the busy work that bogs down many teams. However, despite these advancements, the lack of industry expertise and agile marketing strategies sound a death knell for even the best-assembled marketing materials. Here are our best practices for building awareness in digital marketing.

SEO to the rescue
One strategy against the death knell is Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which has made a name for itself as a successful tactic to increasing the number of passersby who are compelled to click on your website because it is higher on the search results list. Marketers can leverage this by entering the back end of the website and fine-tune your website copy to make sure your products or services are described with key words that would reasonably come up in a prospective client’s Google search. This would be the part of the date where you attempt to finish each other’s sentences. For example, if you’re a tooling company trying to signal that you’re available to businesses in need of tooling solutions for the mobility market, you want to make sure that the copy of your web pages, blog post, and product listings includes the necessary key words. You might have all your content listed out nicely, but unless it matches what your ideal client would type in the search bar, the crawlers won’t have it listed up front. SEO is a great solution for businesses that want to easily up their standing in Google results, and it mostly takes time in researching and weaving through the details on the website. 

Honorable mentions: SEO and display ads
If your SEO tactics aren’t bringing enough results or you are interested in a more cohesive approach, you can buttress those results even further by advertising. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is where you pay for your website to appear as an ad in the top section of Google or Bing. Display ads are like mini internet billboards that surface on other web pages of your choice. Both of these avenues are ways you can introduce your audience to your brand. 

How well do you know your audience?
In building awareness, it is important to cast a wide net while also having delineated target audience personas defined by age, gender, median wages, desires, and possible roadblocks to wanting to buy or contract something from you. In other words, you’re defining your “type”. Your ideal clients want to feel seen and catered to, and when you lay out all the defining properties of your target audience, you help your copy and design administer to their preferences. In the tooling company example, you would want photography that immediately relates to the client’s understanding of what they need. Of course, once you have that figured out, you can build on it to suggest how your company stands out from the rest. Then you add in the sleek design, visionary copy can all point to the fact that you know where your customers are now, but you are the only one that can take them to where they want to be in the future.

Research, research, research
Optimizing your tactics to your target audience requires that you research and record what your competitors are doing and what isn’t working for them. This will help in every stage of the marketing funnel and will take a copious amount of time and organization on your part to keep all the details in order. For the building awareness stage, you will be reading reviews of similar products or services, noting which words come up the most, and continuously planning how to address this in your strategy. When your copy and design specifically address those pain points other customers list in those reviews, you set yourself apart from the competition by communicating your own strengths and benefits at the outset.

Marketing that sets you apart
The steps to building awareness may seem impersonal and contrived - we all know what it’s like to be inundated with ads and similar ploys. But remember that the core of your marketing strategy is in knowing and addressing the person on the other side of the screen. With this impetus behind all your marketing materials, you will be in the practice of making trustworthy and eye-catching introductions. Furthermore, your ideal client will know the difference between sincere offers of value and the haphazardly-created ads with wily fine print. It’s time to get yourself out there!

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If this all sounds like a lot of work - trust us, it is! That's why we offer marketing services that do all this and more. If you're interesting in learning more, contact us here.