How we plan on boosting brand awareness for the New Year

If your goal for 2024 is to reach new people and take your business to the next level, the key is getting your brand in front of as many eyes as possible.

Brand awareness is how people discover your company and ultimately buy your product or service. When people don't know you exist, building your lead list and securing sales is far from easy.

The new year is the perfect time to ramp up your brand awareness efforts and make sure more people know who you are and how you'll bring value to their lives. You can easily compare results year-over-year and determine what's working for your business and what needs to change.

Today, I'm going to show you several strategies we will be using this year to boost our brand visibility and explain how you can apply these same tips to your business.

By the time you're reading this, the new year will have already started, but that doesn't mean that it's too late to put these tips into practice!

Let's begin!

Use Consistent Branding

In my experience, one of the best ways to boost brand awareness is to use consistent branding across all your marketing channels. We've done a good job at doing this so far, but it's always good to make sure all of your marketing material and channels have consistent branding.

Here are a few things we check and tips to get you started:

• Use the same logo, color palette, and font in all your materials, like your website, business cards, social media profiles, ads, and email newsletters. Consistency builds familiarity.

• Create brand guidelines that specify exactly how and when to use your branding elements. Share these with your team and anyone else who represents your brand to ensure everyone is promoting your business with consistent material, colors, and taglines.

• Register key domains and social media profiles like your business name or product name so no one else can use them. This also prevents customer confusion.

• Choose a brand voice and tone that matches your target audience and use it whenever you communicate. If your voice is all over the place, people won't know what to expect when they find your content.

Following these best practices for consistent branding is key to boosting brand awareness and recognition. When people see your logo, color, tagline, or other brand elements, even for a second, they'll immediately think of your business.

Refine Our SEO Strategy

Refining our SEO strategy is something we do every year to ensure people can find our brand through Google. You'll want to do this, too, because Google gets over 105,000 searches every second. Shocking, right?

There's an excellent chance people will find your business if you proactively build and maintain your search presence, which is why this strategy is at the top of our list.

The first thing we do is audit and update our older blog posts and resources to ensure the information is still relevant and helpful. Google determines how to rank content by when it was last edited. This makes sense when you think about it. In many cases, an article updated in 2024 would be more relevant than one published in 2019 with zero updates.

By refreshing outdated content, we can improve search rankings and continue to provide value to readers. I suggest reviewing posts from the last 2-3 years, updating any information that has changed, and adding additional keywords, details, examples, and media within the content.

You should also consider adding schema markup, like FAQ schema or HowTo schema, to your content. Adding this backend code can help search engines better understand the topic and purpose of each page, which can improve your search visibility. It can also help you secure a featured snippet!

By improving our on-page SEO and optimizing for long-tail keywords, we can strengthen our search rankings, increase organic traffic, and boost brand visibility. Refining and building upon our SEO strategy will help ensure we're discoverable and provide value to those searching for our products and services. You can experience these same benefits.

Identify Trending Topics on Social Media

We will also focus more on researching and identifying trending topics in our industry. You can use tools like Buzzsumo to see what people are talking about on the internet. Similarly, social media sites have trending tabs where you can see which topics are gaining traction.

By creating content and social media posts around these popular subjects, we can capture more interest and engagement, which will help people discover our brand for the first time.

Once we spot trending topics, we start thinking about ways we can use this subject in our blog posts, email newsletters, and across our social channels. The key is to tie the topic to the needs, interests, goals, or pain points of your target audience.

If you keep a close watch on trending topics, you'll put your brand in the best position to generate interest and clicks at just the right time. When done right, this approach can lead to a surge of new followers, website traffic, and, of course, brand awareness.

Work with other Content Creators

Partnering with content creators is a great way to boost brand awareness. We like to seek out social media influencers, bloggers, and other creators who have shown interest in our products and want to spread the word to their followers.

Ideally, you'll want to form long-term partnerships with people who operate within your industry. For instance, as an email marketing software, it makes sense that we would partner with hosting companies from time to time. These two products and industries overlap in such a way that people rarely need one but not the other.

You can also go out of your way to reach out to influencers and content creators with a large following in your industry and offer them free samples or discounts on your products if they give an honest review of your product or service.

Since their followers are likely interested in the types of products you sell, it's a win-win situation! They get to try your products and improve engagement on their channel while building social proof for your business.

We also want to make it easy for creators to promote our brands, so we decided to launch an affiliate program. Our strategy involves creating exclusive affiliate links and promo codes unique to each person so we can track how much traffic we get from each affiliate.

If you want to know if affiliate marketing is right for you, consider this: 40% of U.S. businesses say this is one of their best customer acquisition channels.

Host Interactive Events

Hosting interactive events is a fantastic way to boost brand awareness and engage your audience. After all, 91% of people say they want to see more interactive content from online businesses. You can host a wide range of events regardless of your audience size and industry. Here are a few events we expect to host this year:

• Webinars - Webinars can help you share your knowledge and expertise with both current and potential customers. We plan to host monthly webinars on topics our audience cares about. For example, for our lead generation SaaS, we might host a webinar that teaches businesses to grow their email lists.

• Q&A Sessions - Q&A sessions, whether live or via a platform like Reddit AMA, allow your audience to ask questions and interact directly with your brand. You should schedule live Q&A sessions in advance so people can sign up and ask questions. These real-time conversations help to humanize your brand and build trust with your audience.

• Giveaways - Running contests, giveaways, and sweepstakes is an easy and powerful way to build brand awareness. We usually launch several social media contests and giveaways this year where participants can win software licenses and other compelling prizes, like a pair of Apple AirPods.

Hosting a variety of interactive live events throughout the year is one of the most effective ways to spread brand awareness and strengthen relationships with your followers and customers. The key is choosing events and activities that genuinely reflect your brand personality and provide value to your audience.

Conclusion

There you have it! The strategies I outlined today are how we plan on boosting brand awareness for the New Year. I'm confident you can take these tips and apply them to your brand, too.

Don't be afraid to experiment and find other clever ways to get the word out about your brand. There are plenty of exciting opportunities to choose from, so don't limit yourself. The tips I've shared make for a great foundation, but there's always room to grow and improve based on the needs of your business and customers.

So, how do you plan on boosting brand awareness this year? Let me know below!