Marketing your business – Part 3

In part 2 I covered email and social marketing and how both of these channels have been very important in the past and will continue to be in the coming years. In this article, I will be covering how to create awareness of your brand or product/services way before the customer buys.

One of the mistakes that some brands and online stores make, when they look at different marketing channels, is not having a proper understanding of what that particular channel does and how you should be using it. For example, most people think the PPC is a standalone channel but that is not the case. PPC is a channel that is designed to capture people that have already heard of your brand of service. So when a person sees a TV ad or Facebook post or sees a display ad they are more likely to go to do a search for your business and then clicks on your ad.

Paid search Ads are not designed to target new customers. If that is a goal you have then you can consider running a generic KW campaign however running such a campaign will get you lots of impressions but not necessarily and conversions and can cost you a lot.

Create brand awareness

If you are a new company or your marketing has been fairly restricted. You need to get your brand out there. Don’t wait till you have everything in place start as soon as you can. Think about a new movie or any popular TV series. What do the studios do they show trailers months before. The first trailer might just be the title of the film and a date. This peaks peoples interest then over the next few months they release two or three more trailers until opening night. You need to think the same way when it comes to your company brand

Build product awareness

As with your brand you should consider creating product awareness well before the product has been launched and is still in the beta stage, You can take this further, by inviting members of your intended audience to try out the new product. This allows you to get some feedback that can help you improve the product before you officially launch.

Fans love to be involved

This is not a method that is suitable to all businesses but for those that have a fanbase of people that love your products love to be involved. This is similar to what the Marvel Cinematic Universe did by asking fans about what characteristics certain heroes and villains must have and by including their feedback the movies were much more successful. By allowing fans to be part of the project you automatically start building awareness through word of mouth advertising.

Brand evolution

Branding is a part of your business that always needs to evolve. There was a time where your brand would never change think IBM. However, in more recent times companies such as Google and Microsoft are constantly making tweaks to the logo. You might that it isn’t necessary but why would you intentionally miss out opportunities to tweak your logo. You could make a small change every time you launch a new product or open a new business location whatever activity you are doing in your business think about what tweaks you could make.

Considering your customers

You can learn a lot about your customer at each stage of the customer journey. Taking that information will help you build out a marketing plan for each stage. Think about what kind of messaging you will have at each stage. You can start to think of ways of converting the early testers into long term users. What kind of updates you can make to the beta that will get people coming back.

Conclusion

In conclusion think about what marketing channel you are using and know what the purpose is, is it a channel that is designed to build brand awareness like a display ad or is it to support other channels like SEO. AS Rutland as a business has not been around very long so we haven’t made big changes we have to consider any information for a company this includes shortening the logo to only say RCP or possibly changing the colour of the logo itself.