eBusiness Weekly
Robert Gonye
You might feel like you’re constantly throwing darts at the wall and seeing what sticks in the realm of business promotion. Or, perhaps you’ve hit a plateau with traffic and you are wondering how you can boost lead generation and promote your brand more. Now more than ever your brands’ propensity to be noticed requires a systematic approach to serving and communicating to your market audience and promote your business.
- Craft a brand image which sticks out among the crowd
It’s been said: “A brand is a set of expectations, memories, stories, and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.”
A brand image is your identifier — how you stick in the heads of the public. It is constructed from your business values, how you sell, and the feelings you want to evoke when customers interact with your products.
A brand identity is what your audience recognises is unique to your business — whether it be reputation, a tag-line, a logo, or a product. These factors work together to create your brand’s holistic identity. For example, if you think about one of your favourite businesses, you can identify things about it, right? How the products make you feel, what the logo looks like, why you are a customer, and what the business’ purpose is.
To create brand identity, think about how you want to create credibility, establish your business in your industry, and incorporate your mission into all your communication materials. Brand identity helps you stay in the mind of customers. If they forget, for instance, your company name, they can still identify you by different factors of your identity, like your logo.
- Know your audience and what they respond to
Having a good idea of your audience helps you identify their desires and challenges. Also, knowing your audience establishes brand loyalty and makes them more likely to be an advocate of your brand to others.
To find your audience, start by creating a buyer persona if you don’t have one. Buyer personas are fictionalised versions of your ideal customer that identifies their challenges and desires. Additionally, you can look over the data you’ve collected to gain a more holistic idea of how your audience responds to your business so far.
Creating content with your customers in mind delights them, and delighted customers love to share their favourite brands with everyone, promoting your business through word of mouth marketing. That starts with knowing your audience.
- Start using social media to expand your reach
Of late, most of our current favourite brands are on social media — and it’s usually from stumbling upon a post or tweet that makes us feel connected to the brand.
Social media marketing is important to include in promotion efforts because it’s how you can interact with your audience. Additionally, you can boost brand awareness, monitor competitor strategy and identify what works for them, and generate leads. If you don’t have a social media account, it’s a good idea to make one as soon as possible.
You might’ve already made some social media accounts, but are unsure of how to use them to promote your business. Keep in mind that different platforms are best for different business goals. For example, LinkedIn has an older audience (working professionals), impacts the B2B industry, and is best for fostering professional relationships and developing business goals.
By knowing this information, ideally, you’re able to correctly identify how each social network can help you achieve one subset of your overall marketing goals and reach your intended audience(s) on whichever platforms they prefer. Once you find your audience on social media and cater to their interests with your content, you can engage with them on a personal level and begin to build your community.
- Make use of an email marketing strategy
An email marketing strategy can be a vehicle for promoting exciting things about your brand to segmented audiences that have shown an interest in your brand. Email marketing shares (and gets the word out about) content your audience will see as valuable, such as exclusive offers, discounts, and pre-sales for new products.
Similarly, on the lead-building side, email marketing can invite potential subscribers to exchange their information on a form to obtain valuable content for free. Then, you can nurture those leads by sending delightful content that helps your audience achieve their goals.
How do you get started preparing an email marketing strategy? The easiest way is to use a content management system (CMS) with tools that help you build and monitor email lists.
- Engage with your audience to build a community
Engaging with your audience is one of the most effective ways to do audience research. What better way to know what makes your audience tick than to ask them?
Audience engagement can give you fruitful insights into how to make campaigns that will serve as effective promotion, while making your prospects feel connected to your brand.
There are a myriad of ways you can go about engaging with audiences. If you’ve been answering comments, asking questions that invite participation, and re-posting user-generated content on social media, you’re already off to a great start. These tactics can get you into the groove of communicating with audiences in a way that resonates with them.
- Optimise your content to get found
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), in a nutshell, helps your business’ content get found on Google. Optimising your website for search can bring it out of a traffic plateau and generate leads.
A great thing about SEO is that there are things you can do right now to improve it. For instance, one tactic you can do to improve SEO is adding alt text to images. Alt-text is a short description that tells Google what’s going on in the image.
SEO isn’t a quick fix to promote your business. It does take time to target keywords.
Strategies to promote your business are in reach, and with proper planning and execution, you can expand your reach to larger audiences. Just patience, knowledge about your business and audience, and consistency will help you grow.
Not every success story is an overnight one. Your business grows over time, and so will your audience if you’re approaching them in the right way.
The views given herein are solely for information purposes; they are guidelines and suggestions and are not guaranteed to work in any particular way.
Robert Gonye is a business growth expert and influencer. He writes in his personal capacity. Comments and views: [email protected]
