5 ways to build brand awareness

Whether you’re a tiny startup or a business that’s been functioning successfully for years, boosting awareness of your business is never a bad thing. Especially during this difficult time, it’s important to have a number of tools in your armory to help you keep your business in contention. Getting your business to stand out in a crowd isn’t always easy, but putting time and effort in now will pay off in the long run. Hopefully, these tips and tricks will help you to increase awareness of your brand or business. 

1. Utilise social media 

If your brand doesn’t already have social media accounts, now’s the time to set them up! Having a social media presence is essential for businesses. It can help raise awareness, facilitate sales and generally help the public take an interest in your brand. You can also advertise through social media accounts, so it can be helpful for making sales (particularly in the run-up to Christmas). Facebook is brilliant for advertising products and boosting awareness. Twitter is a helpful platform for communicating with customers, and LinkedIn is a perfect networking tool. 

2. Branding and logo 

Make sure your logo and branding are working hard for you. You want to ensure that your brand is instantly recognizable, so take a look at your current assets and see if they need a refresh. You could hire a branding agency to help you or work with an individual freelance designer, which would be much cheaper. When your logo is clear and distinctive, you can build the rest of your publicity on it. 

3. Call in the experts 

Learning the distinction between what you can do yourself and what you can’t is key to running a successful business. For some, doing their own accounts is easy; for others, it’s impossible. The same goes for website design. There are websites that will help you to build your own, but for slick, user-interface-optimized websites, there are website design and build services for you to choose from. 

4. Research SEO 

Search Engine Optimization is a powerful tool to help you build brand awareness. Many consumers don’t look past the first page of search results, so if you’re not there, you could miss out on many, many potential customers. So, how do you get there? 

Taking the time to research SEO strategies (there are different, effective strategies for different types of business) that could help you will pay off in the long run. Check out how you can get your webpage to sit on the first page of results, and see how you can intercept consumers along their path to purchase. 

5. Ask for reviews 

Online reviews can make the difference between a purchase or no purchase. People are far more likely to visit a website after reading positive reviews, as it feels like a personal recommendation for someone. This can help to boost awareness of your brand and increase sales. So, make sure you’re signed up to a couple of review websites and get going!

5 Ways to Promote Your Small Business for Free

For entrepreneurs just starting out with their small businesses, one of the biggest challenges is boosting your awareness. You need to get more eyes on your brand and attract customers to your website. But how do you do this when your company is unknown, and there’s so much competition out there?

Of course, if you had the budget, you could hire a printing company to make posters and branded merchandise or splash out on paid ads to go directly to your target audience. But businesses that are just starting out rarely have this money to spend.

Fortunately, there are several ways of promoting a small business that are not only effective, but are completely free as well. To help you boost your brand awareness while protecting your business budget, here are five free ways to promote your company.

Social media

Unless you’ve lived under a rock for the last decade or so, the concept of using social media for business won’t be new to you. But it’s staggering how many businesses get it wrong. An excellent social media presence will work wonders to draw in fans and potential customers. But make sure not to be overly salesy and promotional about your business, or people will lose interest. You need to entice followers with educational, informative, and entertaining content. 

SEO

Suppose your business is a pet grooming company. When people type search queries into Google, such as “how to wash my dog,” you ideally want to be right there at the top of the listings. And the way to do this is by being good at search engine optimization (SEO). This means that your website content is optimized for Google’s algorithms to rank it highly so more people see it. There are so many ways to boost your website’s SEO, but you can start by doing some keyword research, improving your site speed, and regularly posting new and original content.

Word of mouth

An excellent way to raise interest in your small business is to spread the word to people in your community. Ask your friends and family to talk up your business to anyone who will listen, and put up signs around your local area. Offer people you know discounted rates or freebies in exchange for telling others about your product or service, and before long, you will see the customers start to trickle in.

Relevant online communities

Whatever industry you are in, you will be able to find a wealth of online communities dedicated to this area of interest. Look for Facebook groups, Twitter hashtags, and forums dedicated to your field of expertise. The more specific, the better. Become actively engaged with these communities and again refrain from being overly self-promotional. Answer questions, help people solve problems, and establish yourself as an industry thought leader before getting your salesperson hat on.

Press releases

If your small business has a story behind it that will resonate with people, there might be an opportunity to get into the press. Contact your local newspaper or industry publications to find out whether they’d be interested in publishing your story as a press release to their readership base.

Keeping Your Team Motivated While Working Remote

In the world we live in now remote working is becoming ever more popular, although it has many benefits, it can also have some barriers that you need to overcome. Working from home is great to keep people working even if they have commitments at home, this can help companies keep staffing levels up but have some flexibility for their staff. Some workers can thrive when working from home as it is easier for them to focus in their own environment rather than a work environment, but others enjoy being in the office as it helps them keep concentration and make sure they stay motivated to actually work and not get distracted.

If you have staff working from home and you are unsure how to keep them motivated and make sure they are staying on top of work, then these tips may help you understand how and keep them on track while working remotely.

Source: Pixabay

Keep up communication

Some people need guidance to help them stay on track; this can be hard to do if communication is not used. You can stay in contact with your team at home in a number of ways, with virtual meetings, conference calls, or individual calls, making sure there is a line of communication open for all employees will help them feel part of a team and stop people feeling isolated. If people are feeling isolated, then this can cause them to be demotivated and work less or get distracted easier.

Set goals

Setting people goals is a great motivating tool to use; it gives someone a purpose and drives them to work towards something. By setting goals you are also making it easier to see who may not work best from home or who are struggling to concentrate and get work done, if you set reachable goals and people are hitting them, then that will give them motivation and confidence that they can work well from so you can increase efficiency and make them work smarter instead of harder just by giving them a goal to reach.

Reward them and celebrate birthdays

Some people love the team environment because you can celebrate birthdays together and throw little inhouse parties for them and make it feel like a little family at times. When working from home it can be hard to feel this and sometimes this will demotivate a person but you can still try and celebrate birthdays by doing zoom parties or sending virtual event gifts so that they do not feel left out and they still feel part of the team. Sending gifts and doing little parties is also a great way to reward good work and make people feel motivated if they are hitting goals and meeting targets.

If you have one or more employee working from home and you are unsure how to keep them motivated and feeling part of the team then hopefully these few tips may help you get started and gain an understanding of what to do.