As a property manager, you’re probably well aware of the significance of digital marketing. From email marketing to local SEO and everything in-between, visibility can make a notable difference in your business. However, that’s far from an easy pursuit, as competition is fierce and everyone craves online brand awareness. To help you rise above your competitors, we’ve compiled a list of strategies to boost your company’s brand awareness online.
What is brand awareness?
First, let us briefly distinguish the terms we use.
You’ve likely noticed we used “visibility” almost interchangeably with “brand awareness” just above. The key word there is “almost”; the two do overlap and inform one another, but are not quite the same.
In brief, anything you do to reach your audiences falls under the umbrella of “online visibility”. How well you rank in Search Engines Results Pages (SERPs), how many impressions your social media profiles get, and so on – all such marketing largely fuels online visibility.
Brand awareness requires it, but it goes a step further. It refers to how well audiences can recognize your brand or business by its name. Secondarily, it also requires that your audiences associate your brand name with positive emotions and experiences.
This latter part is why many use “brand recognition” instead, but that overlap we may best leave for another article.
Why does brand awareness matter?
Needless to say, brand awareness matters immensely for any business in any field.
Research shows customers prefer businesses they know and, on average, spend more money in each interaction with them. Brand awareness also makes marketing easier, as those audiences are already past the discovery phase in their customer journey. Finally, positive brand awareness fuels customer retention – which property managers likely value more deeply than many.
Five strategies to boost your company’s brand awareness
Having established what it is and why it matters, let’s now delve into the 5 most notable brand awareness strategies you may consider in 2022.
#1 Set up or enhance your content marketing strategy
Starting with a much-underappreciated practice, we may touch on content marketing strategy optimizations. Or, of course, setting up a content marketing strategy if you don’t have one in place.
To cover the latter case first, content marketing is one of the things that truly separate online success from failure. Its benefits to digital marketing include:
- More effective SEO and better online visibility
- Higher conversion rates
- Higher customer retention rates
But what exactly is it? Content Marketing Institute defines it as follows:
“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
To establish a robust content marketing strategy, or enhance your existing one, you may start with the following consolidated steps:
- Define your goal. Carefully consider which goal your strategy will strive for; in this context, it should be raising brand awareness. This hyper-specific goal should inform all subsequent steps and adjustments over time.
- Identify your audiences. Craft accurate personas that best represent your audiences and buyers, using all analytics tools you have available. In doing so, you may pinpoint which content best resonates with them, which channels they prefer, and so on.
- Examine your in-house talent and budget. Having done so, you may then need some introspection to determine which types of content you may produce and distribute.
- Align your content with your other strategies. Finally, you may start incorporating your content into your other strategies, from social media activities to SEO and more.
#2 Engage in SEO
Having touched on SEO, we may now explain why SEO can spearhead strategies to boost your company’s brand awareness online.
As the name suggests, SEO is a set of practices that optimize content for search engines. By adhering to it, you may secure better rankings in SERPs, thus ensuring more visibility and more brand awareness. It is the perfect pair for content marketing strategies, where one fuels the needs of the other.
That said, SEO is rather challenging. There are over 200 ranking factors to adhere to, which not every business can effectively account for at first. So here we may start with the basics that can directly serve to boost brand awareness:
- Conduct thorough keyword research. With your personas in hand you may carefully consider which keywords are most valuable to them. Examine their questions, concerns, and pain points, and use those to deduce your ideal keywords.
- Cluster your content. Next, you may fuel your SEO through content clustering, as we’ve covered before. This practice will contextualize your content for search engines and reassure them of its value and relevance.
- Optimize your loading speeds. Finally, delve into both on-page and technical SEO to fine-tune your website’s performance. Cull heavy themes, compress your images, minify and optimize your JavaScript, and so on. Audiences deeply care for loading speeds, as Google research has found.
#3 Consider paid advertising
Next, you may entertain paid advertising as a complementary marketing channel to boost brand awareness. This will depend on your budget, first and foremost, as well as on your audience analytics.
Why is that? Here we may cite some relevant statistics by Ahrefs:
- 90.63% of pages get no organic search traffic from Google.
- Only 28% of B2B marketers don’t use paid content distribution channels.
- Only 28% of B2C marketers don’t use paid content distribution channels.
That said, paid marketing should only complement your strategies, not overtake them. Consider how such forms of paid marketing as the following may synergize with your other strategies:
- Paid search marketing can augment your SEO campaigns, targeting keywords you can’t organically rank for.
- Paid social media advertising can help capture the attention of your social media audiences.
- Retargeting advertising can help rein in those visitors your website didn’t lure on their first visit.
#4 Work with influencers
On the subject of social media, you may also consider influencer marketing to boost your company’s brand awareness. Much like the ones above, influencer marketing doesn’t just seek to generate views; it seeks to inspire trust in your brand and establish positive connotations, which brand awareness thrives on.
You may consider this strategy if:
- Your audience analytics suggest it is right for you,
- You have a robust social media presence to support it, and
- Your budget allows it.
Thankfully, as regards the latter, affordable micro-influencers may be the ideal choice for brand awareness over their star counterparts. That’s because micro-influencers enjoy much higher engagement rates with their audiences, making for more effective campaigns.
This distinction offers an excellent example of the difference between online visibility and brand awareness. Mega influencers will indeed offer more visibility via larger audiences, but micro influencers’ engagement rates will serve awareness campaigns better.
Should you need an example of this in action, you may consider Zara’s #DearSouthAfrica campaign from a few years back. This extremely successful campaign was fueled exclusively by micro-influencers, for this exact reason.
#5 Remember offline promotion
Finally, you may also work toward raising brand awareness offline. Of course, you may continue to add more pages to your website and bolster your online presence as you do. But what if a key audience segment of yours is offline?
Admittedly, as a property manager, you may not frequently have this issue. Still, your personas and research might suggest you have a lucrative audience segment to tap into through offline channels. Perhaps older, less tech-savvy customers, or simply ones that don’t engage much online.
In this case, you may consider such offline marketing channels as:
- Print and TV ads
- Billboards
- Cold calls
Yes, such channels are indeed still effective. What’s more, they can still serve as a part of your customers’ journeys – even if those conclude online.
Conclusion
To summarize, brand awareness campaigns seek to boost brand recognition and associate your brand’s name with positive connotations. There are ample ways to approach such campaigns, from robust content marketing and SEO to offline channels.
The optimal ways to do so will depend on your own audiences and analytics, your in-house talent, your budget, and your existing strategies. Nonetheless, brand awareness is imperative in 2022, and boosting it can yield demonstrable results.
