How Startups Can Maximize Brand Exposure: 4 Simple Tricks
Branding is a vital marketing strategy for any business. Branding can elevate you in a crowded market and help your company differentiate itself from other competitors and other brands as well. That’s why branding should be considered as early as possible, more precisely, during the startup stage of a company. However, branding during a startup stage can oftentimes be a real challenge.
The main reason is that startups usually lack the resources to fully commit to branding. Still, developing a brand is a long process and you don’t have to do everything in one day. Therefore, do what you can with the resources that you have and develop your brand further alongside your startup business. Once you begin the branding process you can work towards maximizing your exposure and awareness one step at the time. With that in mind, here are a few simple tricks to help maximize brand exposure for your startup.
Your first step towards establishing a strong online presence and brand exposure should be social media platforms. Social media is essential for brand awareness because you’re in direct contact with your target audience on various networks. As you may already know, brands have a more personal relationship with their customers and social media can help you build such a relationship. However, to do so, you’ll have to be very social, indeed. Here are a few examples of what you should do to boost brand exposure on social media.
- Identify your target audience and learn as much as you can about them.
- Determine the most relevant social media networks to build your presence on.
- Consider your audience’s demographics to better tailor your messages.
- Incorporate your brand values, brand promise and a unique tone of voice into your messaging.
- Create a unique approach for every social channel you’re present on.
- Create top-quality and highly relevant content for your audience.
- Engage with your audience frequently.
- Always remain consistent.
Social media is a dynamic and unique environment. If you want to leverage its full potential, you’ll have to develop specific strategies and monitor your results. If things aren’t looking too good, you can always redesign your approach.
Focus on local SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is vital for brand exposure, online visibility and awareness. Startup businesses have to start somewhere and your best bet is your local market. That’s why local SEO is imperative. The way it works is that you provide your business information to all the local business listings, as well as search engines, such as Google. The information you must provide includes a phone number, an address, email, open hours, directions etc. This type of a marketing investment may work really well for you, especially since you’ll be able to work on your brand exposure early on. Aside from providing info to business listings, you should work on developing content, acquiring positive reviews and ranking well on your local search results. Quality internal and external links are still as important to SEO as ever, so you might wanna consider relying on professional link building services. A proper number of high-quality backlinks from other websites is a sign that your website is valuable and relevant to users. Tracking and managing large amounts of backlinks can easily be solved by a link building platform, so you can say goodbye to old-fashioned Google Sheets. Also, this tool will smoothly help you in tackling common problems such as broken or lost links.
Utilize content marketing
If anything can help with your brand exposure, it’s content marketing. Content is, indeed, the most effective form of marketing today. The main reason is that it provides true value to consumers. You can educate, inform and even entertain your audience with content but as long as your content is well-made and highly relevant to your audience, to begin with.
Furthermore, consider various types of content. For example, stunning images and videos work well for audience engagement. Podcasts and presentation can bring your content closer to a broader audience. Finally, consider the best way to publish content that will boost your brand exposure as much as possible. For instance, social media contests and giveaways are an excellent way to promote your brand, your content and drive customer engagement with free samples of your products or services.
Engage in word-of-mouth promotions
It’s no secret that startup businesses don’t have it easy when it comes to competing against well-established competitors in the market. However, you shouldn’t be discouraged just because you lack the resources to outrun someone. Good brand exposure can work wonders when it comes to gaining a competitive advantage and the key is word-of-mouth marketing. However, for your word-of-mouth to be successful you must meet customer expectations, needs and demands. Here are a few ways you can do that.
- Provide exceptional customer service and support.
- Ask for feedback and improve upon it.
- Keep your promises.
- Respond to negative feedback well and on time.
- Focus on customer value.
- Provide top-quality products and services.
Once you gain the favor of your customers you can ask for referrals and even reward customers for their recommendations. On the side note, ensuring customer satisfaction will encourage them to become loyal. Loyal customers oftentimes become brand ambassadors and they’ll further promote your brand to their friends and family. Building brand exposure and maximizing it in the startup stage can be a real challenge.
The main reason is that most of your efforts and time are focused on developing and growing your business. However, if you allocate enough resources to your branding strategy, you can start reaping the benefits early on. Author bio: Chloe Taylor is an experienced content writer and editor whose specialties are digital marketing and business-related topics. Besides this, she enjoys creating nice original and engaging articles about work-life balance, as well as revealing some small and simple tricks for making our working environment more eco-friendly.
