The presence and brand recognition are essential ingredients for the success of any modern company. In addition to meeting the basic criteria of success: quality, price, reliability, and sustainability, the company must show “the soul”, what it’s made of, and these are the people like you and me, people that stand behind the BRAND.
This does not mean literally showing the company’s staff, but rather the way of approaching customers. The old ways of doing business have always made space between customers and companies and thus people felt alienated like they’re some kind of goods.
In recent years, things have changed significantly – not only did companies open and displayed facts that are known only to them, but they became so much closer to the customers that they have become friends.
People Want to be Part of the Brand
The desire to establish a rapport with existing and potential customers is growing more and more, because of more and more studies showing that people want personal details, a story, a daily notification, in other words, they want to be part of the company, part of the brand.
80% of consumers said “authenticity of content” is the most influential factor in their decision to become a follower of a brand.1
However, such business trends would not be possible without the Internet and myriad of available tools.
Take Advantage of it and Interact with them
For starters, the interaction with customers can be passive and active.
In passive interaction potential customers are initially faced with the site, logo, and the story. On the other hand, active interaction involves the use of social networks and direct communication. In both cases, there are tons of handy tools specialized for this.
Optimize, optimize, optimize!
When working on passive interaction, consider the following:
- Using SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) techniques and optimizing the site for your target audience. These will allow the flow of traffic for your site, longer stay time as well as the conversion of website visits to actual sales.
- We all know that the first impressions are an important part of each brand’s presentation, therefore, a good and balanced design of the website plays a key role. It has to be accessible on all devices as well as to have a harmonious relationship of colors, buttons for sharing on social networks and a striking LOGO.
Personalize, personalize, personalize!
Another important thing to consider is the personalization of the site because it contributes to a more pleasant customer experience, thus showing you care about their deal with you.
Working on personalization includes working on elements such as:
Audience insight – interact and engage with your audience by listening what they have to say and how they feel about your brand, in feedback forms, surveys or on social media. These are powerful pointers of where’s your brand at, what’s working and what needs to be changed in order to meet customer’s expectations.
Personalized content – This can range from email personalisation to the type and format of onsite content displayed to each visitor. A database of details about your audience makes this much easier
According to Forbes Insights & PwC Content Survey, 94% of senior-level executives believe delivering personalization is critical or important to reaching customers.
Ways of delivering personalized content stretch from email to the type and layout of onsite content presented to your visitors.
Segmentation – Since you can divide your audience based on a wide range of factors such as user behavior or demographics, segmentation makes achieving content personalization a much easier process.
Create a Social Media Presence
The beauty of using the social media for growing brand awareness lies in the fact that you’ll hardly be going to meet an individual today who doesn’t use or hasn’t heard of any of the mainstream social media networks. The same goes for the majority of businesses, whether they sell sportswear or produce organic foods – they all harness the potential and flexibility of social media platforms.
By enabling you to speak and interact more directly with your target audience social media can extremely boost and strengthen your brand’s profile. To get the most out of it, make sure you go through the following phases:
Choosing the right platform – Understanding and deciding which one best suits your brand, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram or Pinterest, depends largely on your brand’s target audience. Whichever you opt for, you can always use what social media management tools have to offer.
Developing a strategy – A well-defined strategy involves defining a series of elements, starting with what you want to use social platforms for, your brand’s essential principles, then the frequency of posting, and, finally, the style and tone of your expression. Besides developing a strategy, make sure you also provide feedback for your customer’s questions and other interactions, as soon as possible.
Measure your success – In order to gain some major insights that can help you develop future operations, you should also focus on measuring your social media activity against your core objectives and KPI’s. It’s not enough to just take actions, you need to understand how your efforts and interactions with audience reflect on building brand awareness and overall success.
Finding and establishing ways to make your target audience be aware of and remember your brand, are well worth investing a lot of time and work as long as you commit to working on them faithfully while always learning and keeping track of ever-emerging new trends.