Boosting Brand Awareness Through Customer Engagement
Your brand is the public-facing component of your business or organization. As such, it’s important that you consider how it’s perceived by your audience. Unfortunately, many businesses fail to take this into consideration, which can have negative consequences (such as poor sales and lack of growth).
Fortunately, it’s possible to use these perceptions to both increase customer engagement and build brand awareness. This type of marketing technique can be useful in improving your business, fostering customer loyalty and customer retention, and ensuring your continued growth within your industry.
In this post, we’ll introduce both brand awareness and customer engagement. We’ll talk about why they matter, and look at 10 ways you can improve them for the benefit of your business. Let’s get started!
What Is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness is the degree to which consumers are familiar with your brand, including its distinctive qualities and features, as well as the products or services you offer.
There are many elements involved in improving brand awareness, although the three most common include:
- Building customer awareness
- Promoting your website and social media profiles
- Adding value to your industry
All in all, brand awareness is a vital quality for any brand to possess.
How to Build Brand Awareness
Now that we’ve established the importance of brand awareness, it’s time to consider how you can improve the current visibility of your brand. These techniques can increase your profits over time, and are crucial to your overall success.
Step 1: Boost Brand Awareness by Targeting Specific Audiences
Your current branding efforts may target a wide audience base, and that’s okay. However, you do want to segment your efforts, so as to target particular sections. This will mean you’re still reaching out to your entire audience base, but in more specific ways.
Marketing segmentation is a process that enables you to break down your current consumer base into smaller subgroups. However, you will segment them based on brand interactions, behaviors, and other crucial customer data, as opposed to demographics (such as age, gender, and location). You will need to have a better grasp of customer insights to help you come up with a better customer engagement strategy.
You can do this with the help of tracking software like Google Analytics. This will enable you to see how different groups of your audience interact with your website and marketing campaigns, so you can target each group more individually.
Step 2: Use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to Improve Brand Awareness
Search engines play a major role in driving organic traffic. In other words, a favorable placement on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) can help drive more qualified traffic to your website and increase brand awareness and boost consumer engagement.
This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes into play, as it enables you to achieve higher SERP rankings. You can use it on your website, social media profiles, and more.
To get started, there are two types of SEO you’ll want to consider. These are:
- On-page SEO. This relies on factors such as content quality, keyword research, and HTML.
- Off-page SEO. This is influenced by PageRank, bounce rate, links, and more.
While SEO can take a bit of time to master, especially if this is your first foray into its use, the results should prove beneficial to your overall brand.
Step 3: Build Brand Awareness Through Social Engagement
Social media is one of the greatest sources of customer engagement, but many companies overlook its use. If you want to build brand awareness, social media marketing is crucial.
By prioritizing social customer engagement, you build a better experience for your current customers, while also improving communication with prospective customers. Fortunately, there are a number of easy ways to do this:
- Incentivize interactions: This includes creating contests that offer gift cards or discounts as prizes, and advertising random drawings for customers on your profile.
- Include no-strings-attached offers: For example, you can share exclusive discount codes with your followers.
- Just ask: You can ask direct questions to your followers in the form of social posts, polls, or questionnaires.
When combined, these actions should improve your social presence and customer engagement. Social media is also a convenient platform for customer feedback. How you conduct customer interaction on social media can help improve customer relationships and customer satisfaction. Lastly, social media is another channel to convert potential customers into engaged customers.
Step 4: Establish Remarketing Campaigns to Boost Brand Awareness
While you probably do all you can to convert visitors on your website, not every lead will take the next step. This is where remarketing campaigns come in.
In short, remarketing campaigns aim to connect with previously-targeted audience members, in an effort to get them to convert. For example, you can place advertisements on websites and blogs that you know your audience visits. These ads can be designed to appeal to those who did not convert on their initial visit, in an effort to draw them back.
With a strong remarketing campaign established, you can then hope to claim all those previously non-converted audience members. This can boost your overall conversion rates.
Step 5: Use Influencer Marketing to Target Your Audience on a Larger Scale
Social media influencers – that is, individuals with popular social media profiles and a targeted audience – are one of the best places to look when it comes to reaching out to your own audience. After all, the ‘right’ influencers will often have the attention of your ideal audience on a fairly large scale.
You’ll first need to find these influencers, by looking for the most popular and opt-mentioned people and sites in your niche. Then, reach out to them and attempt to open communication. Focus on establishing a relationship, rather than simply asking for favors, and you’ll likely be able to find ways to help each other out.
Step 6: Deliver Top-Notch Guest Content
It’s one thing to create impressive content for your own blog. When it comes to building brand awareness, however, creating high-quality guest content is what will put you on the map. This includes offering thorough advice throughout the piece, as well as answering questions in the comments section of the post.
By guest posting around the web, your brand will not only be known for its quality content, but also for its knowledge and willingness to share with the community.
Step 7: Create Customer-Focused Partnerships with Other Brands
While influencers can help you reach your current target audience, a brand partnership can connect you with an entirely new audience segment. You can even market your brand to a previously unexplored market this way.
In short, a partnership is when two brands with similar products/services and marketing segments work together to improve sales and increase awareness on each others’ behalf. It’s best to create these connections with brands that have a slightly different audience, so as to further improve your reach.
Best of all, these partnerships are beneficial to both parties. As such, they can be quite easy to set up, once you’ve gotten your brand firmly established.
What Is Customer Engagement?
Now, let’s switch focus slightly. Customer engagement is the strategy you use to engage and communicate with your consumers. It can occur in various ways, although the most common is via direct contact and social media campaigns.
Less directly, customer engagement can also include the experiences you provide to your customers. So whether the communication is a reaction, a direct interaction, or an overall response to your brand’s message, it’s all part of the customer engagement experience.
How to Increase Customer Engagement
Along with improving your brand awareness, you’ll want to fully engage your customers. This means you want them to not only know who you are, but to have first-hand experience interacting with you.
You can achieve this by increasing your brand’s customer engagement. Here are three ways to do just that.
Step 1: Humanize Your Brand
To the outside world, your brand is just that – an inhuman and unknowable brand that is only looking to make a profit from its customers. This is why one of the greatest ways to increase customer engagement is by humanizing your brand.
You can do this by creating a brand personality. It will be an ambassador for your brand, much like Progressive’s Flo or the Pillsbury Doughboy. This individual will personify your brand, which should make it easier for your customer base to connect to your business.
Step 2: Create a Personalized Customer Communications Experience
One of the easiest ways to connect with your customers is during the customer service experience. Whether by email, phone, or another digital means of communication, your customers should feel engaged and taken care of throughout the entire process.
This is where creating a personalized customer communications experience is important. Fortunately, there are many ways to do so. One method is to use the information you’ve collected on your customers – such as names and birthdays – as a way to connect with them. For example, you can send each person an email on their birthday.
You can even add such personalizations to your website, via quizzes and questionnaires. These will help to offer more customized recommendations, which can further improve the overall experience for your customers.
Step 3: Listen to Your Audience
As a brand, you want your audience to listen to you. You can achieve this by creating useful content, and even establishing strong social media campaigns. However, you should also consider the fact that your audience wants you to listen to them.
By listening to your audience, you show them that you take their concerns seriously. It also helps you to engage on a more personal level, which will earn your brand respect.
Fortunately, listening is easy. Keep an eye on your social media profiles, and take into account what your followers are saying. Answer their questions and concerns directly, even if just to acknowledge that they’ve been heard, and implement changes based on what you’re hearing whenever feasible.
Brand Awareness and Customer Engagement Working Together
When you combine your brand awareness and customer engagement strategies, you can improve brand loyalty and the overall digital experience for your audience. As you might imagine, this is likely to have numerous beneficial effects for your business.
To achieve these goals, you can implement a strategy known as engagement marketing. Its ultimate goal is to increase brand awareness while building trust, and its implementation can position your brand above your competitors. Of course, you’ll also want to implement as many of the techniques discussed throughout this post as are practical for your business.
Boost Brand Awareness With Superior WordPress Performance and Support
While you’re busy working out the details of your business’ brand awareness and customer engagement strategies, it can help to leave your WordPress website in the capable hands of professionals. This is why we recommend WP Engine and our variety of WordPress hosting plans, including managed hosting.
WP Engine offers a reliable platform as well as an award-winning support team. Our Resource Center also exists to provide you with some of the best advice and help you can find online!
