Brand awareness is something every company wants to build, and normally, every company works hard to ensure that more people learn about their products and services every day.
Sometimes brand awareness gets a quantum boost, however, like when a company is featured in a news story, wins an award, or is the first to market with an innovative new product or service. When these jumps in brand awareness occur, it’s important for brands to take full advantage.
Awareness, after all, is the wide net at the top of the sales funnel. It is what drives interest, desire, and ultimately, conversion. The more hay you make from an unexpected boost in brand awareness, the better your sales should be down the line. Here are five tips for turning brand awareness into sales.
1. Track the Right Data
Mentions, reach, and engagement are the big three types of data you want to track. Mentions are exactly what you think: times your brand is mentioned online, in the press, and on social media platforms. You can choose from a number of social listening tools to gather this information. Reach refers to the number of people who see your content. It is not the same thing as “impressions,” which is the number of times your content is displayed, whether or not it was seen. Engagement is measured in many ways, such as the number of likes or comments a piece of content receives. These three parameters can tell you quite a bit about growth in your brand awareness if you track them.
2. Use the Right Tools
You don’t have to rely on passive measures of brand awareness like the ones mentioned above. You can get out there and ask people. For example, many brands use online surveys to help them determine how many people have heard of their brand, how familiar they are with it, and how they came to know about it in the first place. Tools like Google Analytics can help you dig deeper into your website’s statistics, learning things like where your website traffic comes from, and how much time people are spending on your site.
3. Master All Relevant Sales Channels
People may become aware of your brand while looking at their phone on the train to work in the morning. Make it easy for them to proceed to learn more and make a purchase by ensuring your sales can take place seamlessly across the many channels that customers use. Don’t frustrate people with a website that looks terrible on mobile, or an ordering process that requires typing in massive amounts of data on a touchscreen. Whichever channel your customer chooses to access your brand, roll out the proverbial red carpet. Make it easy for them to complete the purchase.
4. Understand Retargeting
Have you ever looked at a product on a company’s website, maybe even considered buying it to the point that you put it in your virtual cart, and then you go on and do other things without completing the purchase? Maybe later you log onto Facebook and see an ad for that exact product. That’s retargeting. When someone leaves your site before completing a purchase, a cookie is left on their browser, which is used by a retargeting platform to serve ads on other web pages they visit. These can be remarkably effective in getting people to complete the purchases they’ve already started.
5. Keep Your Content Game Strong
That news coverage that made everyone aware of your brand may be great, but the effects won’t last unless you keep your web content fresh. People don’t want to hear about a great new product only to get on a website, blog, or social media page and see old, stale content. It makes people feel like you don’t really want their business. Search engines prioritize websites that consistently keep their content fresh as well as adhering to tried and true SEO practices. When you get a boost in brand awareness, you should focus even more intently on your online content to make the most of the increased interest.
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Topics brand strategy