Top 3 Online Tools to Increase Your Brand Awareness Locally

As an entrepreneur and business owner, you must have faced this problem before - opening a branch or launching your business in a different city or even country. After the project is up and running, the most challenging task you face is finding the potential clients and turning them into paying customers. One thing that could definitely help is paying more attention to how you promote your website online – here’s what we are going to discuss in today’s article.

Your website today is the most effective way of reaching your business goals: increasing brand awareness and authority, promote your products and services, get ahead of the competition, and eventually increase the revenue.

There quite a few ways of promoting a website online and reaching those goals:

• Local SEO (search engine optimization)
• PPC advertising (aka «pay-per-click» or «contextual» advertising)
• SMM (social media marketing)
• External resources

SEO almost always suggests getting results in the long run. If you are up for some quick results, SEO it might not be the best choice. However, the beautiful thing about SEO is that, once achieved, its results are going to stay for long.
Alright, so you don’t have six months to wait for your SEO efforts to produce results. In this case, it would be better to focus on the remaining three options.

Google Business and Pay Per Click Advertising

First thing you should do is get your company listed in Google Business service, set up remarketing options, and launch the PPC campaign.

Pros:

• Quick results and relatively easy to set up
• Effective (if the setup was right)

Cons:

• Rather expensive
• Hard to scale (without spending more money)

Contextual advertising is definitely not the cheapest way of promoting your business, but it does produce great results. Just make sure your campaign fewer general keywords and more specific, niche keywords.

It wouldn’t be unwise to let professional PPC specialists handle the job for you - that way you will be able to get the most of your ad budget.

Professional PPC campaign usually features the following elements:

• Marketing research

You need this to learn more about the market niche you are in and your competitors. As a result, you would know what the strong points of your campaign should be.

• PPC strategy

No strategy = no effective campaign. You’ve got to know exactly where your money will go and what ROI to expect.

• Campaign launch and monitoring

Once the campaign is launched, it is necessary to track all the relevant metrics - conversion, CTR, ROI, etc. If some of them are off, you should adjust the campaign settings appropriately.

As you can see, the effectiveness of your PPC campaign largely depends on how well you set it up. If you are not 100% how to do it, the smartest way to handle this would be delegating your campaign to a professional marketing agency.

Social Media as a Marketing Tool

After your PPC campaign has been launched, it may be the right time to try another great marketing tool - SMM. Social media marketing suggests using accounts on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and others (depending on where you live) to promote your business.

With SMM, it is also important to create a buyer persona and your strategy on how to get love from that persona.

Pros:

• Rather quick results

An SMM specialist researches your niche, creates and runs the social media page, comes up with original and unique content for it, publishes the content and ads targeted for your audience.

• Effective

Social media is where you can easily increase your brand recognition and reach out to millions of your potential customers.

• Cheaper than PPC

Cons:

• Requires a lot of work

By “a lot” we mean really a lot. Quality SMM is always about original, engaging content, which is never easy to produce, especially on a daily basis.

Another difficult thing is finding the key to your audience, which might not happen on the first try. However, if you keep experimenting with the content and delivery, you will eventually find the right formula that works for your audience.

Finally, you’ve got to be honest and passionate about what you do. If you really love your product and your clients, it always shows. Make sure to channel that passion into your SMM efforts – this is what we, as a studio, always try to do when we take up another SMM case.

If you’d like to learn more about running SMM on Instagram, be sure to check out this article here “How to Make Your Instagram Account Make Money for Your Business”

External Resources as a Tool to Boost Your Traffic

Getting your brand name out there can also be achieved through the use of various external resources – classifieds, directories, aggregators, catalogs, forums, review websites, and other similar stuff.

As always, a bit googling helps – try looking for the resources we mentioned in your market niche and see if you can get your business featured on them. Three things you mustn’t forget about – provide your name (obviously), logo, and the link to your website.

Pros:

• It’s cheap and free

Cons:

• Can’t expect too much out of it

This shouldn’t form the basis of your marketing campaign, obviously, but, as an additional source of leads and traffic, it might work!

Conclusion

No matter which way of promoting the business you choose, there are things you can’t neglect:

1. the top quality of your product and service
2. unique, authentic, and original appeal
3. proper marketing “packaging” of your business
4. comprehensive portfolio with examples of your work
5. recommendations, reviews, and testimonials of people you’ve had business with

Oh, and one more thing – when launching a new venture or branch, networking can make all the difference. Don’t be afraid to ask people to share their experience with your brand with others – if they really liked it, they will have plenty of good things to tell about you!

All in all, marketing is hardly about re-inventing the wheel – if you are not sure of the outcome, let the professionals handle your marketing campaign, sit back, and enjoy the results!