The first stage of a buyer’s journey is awareness.
They simply become aware of your business. They aren’t necessarily ready to buy yet or even ready to opt-in to your email list or newsletter. But because of the content you created, they now know who you are.
Why is that valuable to your business?
Naturally, if people don’t know who you are, they can’t join your audience or, most importantly, buy from you.
People must first learn about your business.
And for that, content marketing is perhaps your best ally.
For example, I conducted a search for “How to write a great blog post” on Google. This is what came up.
Which result would you click on? That’s right: the big Google snippet from HubSpot.
This shows you how powerful content marketing and SEO together can be for building brand awareness.
I don’t have to preach to you about how many people use Google to search or how many of those people prefer to click on organic results instead of paid results.
The reality is that people search like crazy. If you’re the one coming up on the SERP, then they’ll see your brand name over and over again.
Ideally, then, when they click-through to your content, your website and the content itself will continually impress them.
For instance, I went ahead and clicked on the HubSpot result to see what their blog post looked like.
It seems like they thought of everything. They offer free blog post templates and even a reading time estimate.
Both of those details help to flatter the person who arrives on the page.
You want to do the same thing.
After all, the last thing you want is to gain a great SERP position and then lose that position because of a high bounce rate.
Take a little extra time to create great content before publishing it.
How, though, do you measure what great content is?
In terms of brand awareness, pay attention to high-level metrics. These include things like number of readers, number of pageviews, top performing pages, engagement rate, time on site, and articles viewed.
That measuring stick will help you make sure you’re investing in the top-level things that matter.
You can, for instance, figure out which blog posts are performing the best and try to replicate that. You can also, however, find out which blog posts are performing worst and then figure out what went wrong.
The point is that the more you measure your successes and failures, the quicker you’ll have a top-of-funnel content marketing strategy that actually works to build brand awareness.
SEO is one great way to do that.
But, of course, content marketing is vast, and SEO is only the tip of the iceberg.
Social media content is another great way to build brand awareness, for example.
Since most people access their accounts every day or every week, the chances of people seeing your posts skyrocket.
That’s true even if you only post three or four times a week.
That simple feat will work wonders for building your brand awareness.
That’s is exactly why massive retailers like Dove use the platform to spread brand awareness and engage their audience.
Just remember that people don’t go onto social media platforms because they want to see your posts and buy your products (unless we’re talking about Pinterest).
For that reason, don’t get too sales-y.
Ideally, you want to spread your brand message and strengthen your brand identity without being too pushy about it.
Most people on social media are simply looking for entertainment.
Offer that entertainment, and people will appreciate your business and be more likely to buy from you in the future.
Oreo is another company that uses social media to spread its message. And since they are a big enough brand with a strong enough message, they can afford to be a bit more sales-y.
In other words, once your brand image is strong and people know who you are, they mind less when you talk about your products.
At first, however, you must prove to your audience that you care about them.
Only once they know that you genuinely care about them will they listen to your discounts, deals, and offers.
You have to focus on your brand image first and your sales second.
Social media is incredibly powerful.
And every marketer knows it.
If you want to start building brand awareness for your business, focus your energy on SEO and social media.
People will see you, they’ll learn to trust you, and, most importantly, they’ll probably buy from you later on.