Marcus Richards
Even if your enterprise offers first-rate products and services at highly competitive costs, building brand awareness for a small business is often an uphill climb. No matter how vital a purpose your business serves, you can’t just expect people to magically discover it on their own. While there’s no end-all solution for heightening brand awareness, there are a number of missteps you should avoid when promoting your business.
Misdirected Time and Resources
It’s easy to see why so many small businesses seek to promote themselves through every conceivable channel. After all, the more promotional outlets you utilize, the more people are likely to become aware of your brand. However, if your business is currently running low on financial resources, you have little to gain from investing time and money into promotional avenues that are unlikely to connect with your target audience. For example, if you’re seeking to reach a young, tech-savvy crowd, focusing your efforts on print, television and radio promotion is unwise. By the same token, if your target audience skews older, placing a large amount of focus on digital promotion may not produce the desired results.
To learn more about promoting the specific products and/or services that pertain to your brand, reach out to companies with ample experience marketing brands like yours. For example, brands that are focused on cannabis can benefit from the promotional expertise of Marijuana Marketing Xperts.
An Inconsistent Social Media Presence
You’d be hard-pressed to name a successful brand that hasn’t carved out a powerful social media presence. The web’s most popular social platforms provide brands of all sizes with free, easy-to-use promotional outlets. Maintaining an active presence on social media will enable you to keep your existing followers up to date while bringing your brand’s existence to the attention of scores of prospective patrons.
With this in mind, create accounts for your brand on various social platforms and update them on a daily basis. The ideal number of daily updates varies from site to site, but each of your accounts should receive at least one update per day. You may consider hiring a top brand agency to help with your socials.
If social media proves to be an effective promotional tool for your brand, you may want to consider adding a dedicated social media manager to your staff. Per the title, this person’s job will entail updating and monitoring your various accounts and interacting with followers on your behalf. The right social media manager will also be able to determine the most opportune times of day to create new posts and craft posts that encourage follower engagement.
Refusing to Embrace SEO
If increased brand awareness is what you seek, you can’t afford to overlook the effectiveness of search engine optimization (SEO). Virtually every successful brand under the sun utilizes SEO to some degree, and the longer you refuse to embrace it, the more you’re missing out.
When putting together a solid SEO strategy, take care to make content creation one of your foremost priorities. Regularly posting new blog posts, feature articles and other forms of web content on your brand’s website can be a great way to draw the attention of popular search engines and boost your search ranking. Additionally, when crafting this content, make a point of integrating keywords that reference what your business does and where it’s based. (The latter is particularly important for brands with a hyperlocal focus.)
Another crucial tenet of SEO is mobile optimization. As the name suggests, mobile optimization refers to the practice of optimizing websites for smartphones and other mobile devices. As of the first quarter of 2021, mobile devices accounted for 54.8% of global web traffic, so if your site runs poorly or refuses to load on mobile devices, you have a big problem. Provided you have a competent web designer on staff or are willing to spend a little money, optimizing your site for mobile devices shouldn’t be a difficult or time-consuming exercise.
Building brand awareness can be an arduous undertaking, regardless of how niche or mainstream a brand you’re trying to promote. However, while this task isn’t always easy, it’s far from impossible. Although some brands become popular through pure happenstance, others attain their popularity as a result of meticulous effort. If your small business is having a difficult time on the promotion front, this could be the result of mistakes you’re not even aware you’re making. As such, small businesses looking to increase brand awareness should distance themselves from the blunders discussed above.
