You have the product, the passion, the time, and the vision, but have you got the customers? If your target audience can’t discover your brand, how do you plan to expand your dream entrepreneurial pursuit?
Raising brand awareness is the key to success, yet showing off your company in all its splendor is tough when your budget doesn’t quite make the grade.
It is true – marketing can be a real money burner, and not everyone has cash for stoking the fires of modern business.
Thankfully, there are ways around this. The wonders of modern technology (when combined with a healthy dose of business savvy) are here to help, and now even the smallest of microbudgets can make big waves.
If you want to get noticed anytime soon and you’re worried about your budget holding back, then here are some top tips that you might want to take a look at.
Outsource
First things first, it’s important to note that paying for the services of a dedicated marketing agency may end up saving you a great deal of money in the long run, especially if you hope to latch on to the benefits of influencer marketing.
Say you wanted to tap into the billions of Facebook users (potential customers!), but you do not have the time, the experience, the tech, or the money to support an influencer campaign all by yourself – outsourcing this aspect of your brand building process can enable you to connect with a Facebook influencer agency that does this for you, and for a fraction of the price.
Outsourcing is a tried-and-true money saver, and it’ll provide you with results far quicker than doing everything yourself from scratch.
Influencer marketing is alive and thriving, so don’t be afraid to start partnering up with the pros to help you boost your brand the right way.
After you’ve tallied up the costs of paying for the analytics tools, monitoring your campaigns, and of course, your time, outsourcing can be a mesmerizingly attractive option.
Stay Active Online
The more you post online, the more opportunities people have to engage with your brand before it gets buried in the bottomless pit of social media.
Staying active means regularly sharing articles and posts online, interacting with customers on your social media page, updating your website, writing new blogs, and tweeting about your company’s progress. These are the basics anyway.
Your online activity represents more than just reaching out to new customers – it enables your brand to feel fresh, current, relevant, and above all else, desirable.
If you’ve ever stumbled across a badly managed website, you’ll have likely closed the tab immediately.
The last thing you want is for people to do the same for your brand, so make sure you’re up to date, both in terms of content and software.
To ensure maximum coverage, it’s important to link up all of your various online profiles. When your entire online presence is interlinked, you become much easier to find. For example, people need to be able to find your brand via a tweet that caught their eye, so make sure your information is always easily visible.
- Top Tip – Try and avoid sharing content from brands that clash with your values and beliefs, this doesn’t look great when you’re trying to build up a trustworthy brand reputation. Sharing posts should be a good way to connect with existing audiences that represent your brand’s morals, not the other way around!
Network Constantly
Forming new connections is important in business – you never know what kind of person has money to invest into a brand they believe in, and networking is a superb way to stumble across them for free.
Reaching out is easier than many think too, so there’s no need to panic. Just remember to be open and honest about why you’re contacting someone, and make sure to keep them on your radar once you’ve made contact.
A good network can provide you with a mountain of benefits, like access to the advice of successful CEOs, top-tier talent, training opportunities, and potential best friends.
Networking is an intrinsic part of the modern business arena, yet it is an area that many people are reluctant to explore, particularly when they’re starting out with their new brand.
It’s worth remembering that people enjoy a little flattery, so if there’s a brand leader that you respect and want some advice from, don’t hesitate to let them know your feelings. As long as you’re always friendly, polite, professional, and you write with purpose, then you have nothing to worry about.
Every time you interact with someone, you’re representing your brand, so remember to come across in a way that strengthens your story rather than hides it. Transparency is the key to good communication, alongside all the other elements, of course.
Networking isn’t just confined to the digital world either – there are many great ways to network skillfully (and it is a skill that can be learned and sharpened), like attending networking events, letting friends and family know about your brand, and hosting your own special events.
Go Local
Local brands matter greatly to many people, which is good news for you because it means you can get your name out there and connect with customers in your immediate vicinity, and there are ways to do this for very little money.
Local radio stations might be willing to have you on for an interview, and it’s always worth contacting the local paper to see whether or not they can help you out too.
You could also consider making some flyers and taking them to local bars, stores, and restaurants on the off chance they’ll put them up around their property for you.
You can make high-quality flyers very easily nowadays, thanks in part to platforms like Canva (which is also free to use).
Write Guest Blogs
If you’ve got some insight into your industry, why not show it off through some guest blogging? This is a great way to raise brand awareness and tap into an existing audience base, and you may even get paid for doing it.
Try reaching out to publications whose content relates directly to your own industry – this way, you can be sure that your brand story reaches the right kind of audience.
Guest blogs can help you generate a huge amount of internet traffic, especially if you’re a bit of a dab hand at writing SEO-friendly content.
Inserting backlinks to high-authority websites is also a good method of generating extra traffic, as is making sure you’re able to write high-quality copy. High-quality writing still rules the roost in terms of any kind of content generation, so make sure you’re able to write well on your chosen topic.
Writing guest blogs can be a real opportunity to show the world your expertise, your passion, and your mission statement.
In order to make sure you get it right the first time, make sure you plan in advance of searching for blog spots. Many publications will ask for a writing sample before they agree to host your work.
You may also need to come up with an elevator pitch, which is usually around 250 words that outline who you are, the purpose of your article, and (possibly) why you’ve chosen to submit content to the publication.
The Joys of Experiential Marketing
Experiential marketing is essentially using participatory methods to engage your audience with your brand. A smaller scale (and cheaper) example of this might be to host a competition on social media or even a recurring quiz that you can reward your audience for participating in.
Experiential marketing works wonders for driving audience engagement and therefore raising your brand awareness, so next time you’re working on a marketing campaign, make sure to factor it in if you can.
Admittedly, this kind of marketing can get expensive extremely quickly, especially if you wish to host events. Ideal examples of this would be the Stranger Things experience or the Red Bull Soapbox races.
The Perfect Aesthetic
A good logo can be an incredibly powerful ally when it comes to raising brand awareness; just look at the instantly recognizable Nike tick. While it’s true Nike has all the money in the world for its marketing budget, it’s still a good logo.
The sleek, stylish, and sporty aesthetic is unmistakably Nike, just as your aesthetic should be unmistakably you.
From the color palette to the font and the imagery, there’s a lot of details to consider, but each one is exceptionally important when building a logo you want people to remember. Most of the time, less is much, much more.
It doesn’t cost much to redesign your logo either – just a creative spark and some free online software in many cases.
These tips should be enough to be getting on with, at least until your budget grows and the customers start queuing around the block just to get a look at your brand.
