How to build brand awareness on a budget

Building strong brand awareness is the ultimate goal for most marketers, unless of course you have a job at one of the best known brands in the world. But for those of us here in Perth there aren’t many global brand gigs around, unless you work in mining but that’s not sexy is it?

Determining how you go about growing brand awareness comes down to a few important factors - who you are targeting and how big your budget is. If you are targeting other businesses (B2B) then you won’t necessarily need a huge budget. You can be quite targeted with your efforts and explore cost effective channels, such as local sponsorships, events and networking.

However, if you have a product or service that is targeted at large groups of consumers, for example, you’re a new health insurer entering the market, and you want to grow quickly you need to spend significant amounts of money on mass media channels, including TV, radio, outdoor and maybe even cinema.

But the good news is if you are a local WA business that is starting out, you can grow your brand awareness relatively quickly with some simple and effective marketing activities.

Here’s our top 5 ways to build brand awareness on a budget:

1. Build your social media channels and engage your audience

You know this already but of the first things to do when starting up your business is secure a cosy spot on key social media channels. If you are targeting consumers then Facebook and Instagram will be key if you operate in Australia. If you are targeting businesses or professionals are within your target market, then Linkedin will be a really valuable channel for you.

Once you’ve created business pages on these key channels then, you’ll need to start promoting your value proposition and killer USP. Once you’ve started to position your brand, you’ll need to create engaging content relevant to your target audience. This is called content marketing.

2. Content marketing

Content marketing consists of blog articles, videos and posts about a range of topics that you share online as a tactic to get people engaged and interested in your product or services. Content marketing is primarily used to help with SEO - that’s search engine optimisation that helps you get high up on google search in the unpaid section, called organic listings. Blog articles for example are a key tool to get organic traffic to your website. But you need to be strategic and ensure the topics and keywords in your articles are what people are searching for online.

SEO aside, creating creative content that engages your audience is important and positions your brand is important if you want to build brand awareness. For example, if you are in the mining supplies business then you would create content targeted at procurement managers for mining companies that is relevant to their interests. Are they looking for quick deliveries, low prices or quality products? Find out what makes them tick and position your brand in line with their pain-points so your brand gets cut through.

3. Search engine optimise your website (SEO)

SEO is a very important digital marketing acronym. It stands for search engine optimisation. It sounds fancy but really what it means is that you can make your website optimised in a way that enables it to rank highly on search engines. There are 2 key components to SEO - on-site and off-site. Both are important. These involve the content you post on your site, the title tags you have to explain what your webpage is about, site speed, backlinks, meta descriptions and much more! It sounds quite technical and it is mostly but a lot of it is in the set up of your website and a few quick fixes can help you rank and be seen.

4. Build a referral program

Referral programs are often overlooked but once you’ve got a solid customer base they can really work wonders if you delight your customers and have a good reputation. Putting in place a refer a friend program where you either incentivise the referring client or both parties can be work really well and be more cost effective than advertising. And if creating a referral program doesn’t tickle your fancy, then definitely ask your customers to post a google and facebook review.

5. Get publicity and share, share, share!

With news stories found everywhere on the internet, the opportunities are endless! If you can get free publicity on your brand, you will fast track increasing your brand awareness. You could hire a PR agent to do the job or do it yourself. Simply search for journalists online who are publishing content in your area of expertise and get in touch with them with information that is unique and has a hook. Journalists love to hear from business owners directly. Before you know it, you could be on your local nightly news.