Top 5 Digital Marketing Tools Agencies Use To Increase Brand Awareness

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Would you say that Red Bull is an adventurous, daring, one-of-a-kind brand? Do you know you’re going to feel enlightened after watching Discovery Channel? Would you agree that Nivea promotes self-care as much as skincare?

And – most importantly – would you like the same level of recognition and awareness for your brand?

If you want to increase your brand awareness, but you’re not confident going it alone, hiring a digital agency, like Digital Silk, can be a smart move.

Read on to learn about the best digital marketing tools that agencies use to help you place your brand in front of your ideal customers and increase your brand awareness.

What Is Brand Awareness?

Brand awareness is the level of acknowledgment your audience has about your company and the products or services you offer.

In essence, it’s about how recognizable your brand is and how your audience feels about your products or services.

Brand awareness can include anything from your customers recalling the look of your logo to your target audience having a clear understanding of the qualities that distinguish your brand from the competition.

Top 5 Digital Marketing Tools Agencies Use To Boost Brand Awareness

A digital agency uses a wide range of digital marketing tools, including both inbound and outbound marketing tactics.

Within a digital agency toolbox, the following are the best tools to help you educate your target audience about your offerings, reach the most prospects, and raise your brand awareness.

It’s not by chance that Moz is ranked first for keyword “SEO” – it’s the SEO that got them there

Tool #1: Search Engine Optimization

SEO allows you to meet your prospects in their search stage, as they are looking for the types of products, services and/or content your brand provides. It’s one of the best ways to put your brand in front of a highly targeted audience with purchase intent.

When done by professionals, SEO includes:

  • Keyword strategy: This includes defining relevant keywords for your business and your audience, performing competitor research and finding ways to outperform your competition and rank higher in search results.
  • Technical SEO: This includes a carefully thought-out URL structure, website navigation structure, information architecture, sitemap, Schema markup, clean source code and other frontend and backend improvements to optimize your website for speed, compliance, accessibility and excellent overall web performance.
  • On-page SEO: This includes headline hierarchy, keyword optimization, title tags, meta descriptions, Alt text for images, internal and external linking structures and other elements to ensure every page of your website is optimized to bring the best results.
  • Off-page SEO: This includes link-building campaigns, guest posting, online reputation management and other tactics to ensure high-quality backlinks for your website and grow your brand visibility and credibility.

SEO is also a great tool to help you directly answer your audience’s questions through your website, blog, podcast, online courses, videos or other types of content you publish.

Most importantly, SEO is sustainable. If managed properly, it will allow your brand to rank for relevant key terms and attract qualified audiences long-term.

Although it takes time to see the results, SEO is a highly cost-effective solution for matching your content with the audience’s intent, raising the level of awareness, and gaining massive brand recognition via organic traffic from Google and other search engines.

Google is using its own PPC ads to advertise on its own platform and you can too!

Tool #2: PPC Advertising

While SEO helps you grow your brand awareness organically and in the long run, pay-per-click (PP) advertising can help you instantly place your ads front-and-center in Google search for your audience to find your brand when they need it the most.

Whenever someone types in the search box a specific keyword related to your business – the ones that you set your PPC campaigns for – they will be immediately exposed to your offers.

How can an agency help you with your PPC campaigns?

Some of the digital tools an agency uses include:

  • Search ads: These are especially effective for local searches and keywords that include terms “near me,” “nearby” and others similar, because Google’s statistics show that 76% of people who search on their mobile phones for something nearby will actually visit the business within a day.
  • Display ads: These ads are based on contextual targeting and will be shown on various apps and websites that are relevant to your audience and related to your offers; these ads appear at the top, on the side or in the middle of the content and are known to be very efficient as they reach 90% of internet users.
  • Gmail ads: These ads can be created as part of Google Ads campaigns and they are also specifically targeted to grow your brand awareness by reaching as many potential customers as possible; please note that starting July 1, 2021 Gmail ads will be “read only,” meaning that advertisers won’t be able to create new Gmail campaigns or make changes to existing ads after this date.
  • Remarketing campaigns: These are the ads that will reach people who already visited your website, went through your offers, watched your videos, looked at your online catalog, saw your product pages or interacted with your company in some other way; these ads are highly efficient in reminding people about your brand and bringing them back to your business.

Each of these PPC ad formats can help you gain more visibility, grow your brand recognition and reach new, thoughtfully targeted audiences by placing your ads directly in front of potential customers.

Facebook Ads Manager offers a robust platform for managing advertising campaigns

Tool #3: Social Media Advertising

To boost your brand visibility among social media audiences, you may want to set aside a healthy social media advertising budget.

Organic social media efforts are a long-term and laborious game. This is why brands turn to paid ads for instant results and a significantly greater number of impressions, i.e. eyes on their brand.

Advertising on social media channels can help you:

  • Place your products and services in front of a highly targeted audience
  • Build lookalike audiences to expand your reach to people similar to your ideal customers
  • Reach people in new locations to grow your reach beyond the local market
  • Partner with influencers to gain even more visibility and new audiences
  • Use remarketing campaigns on social media to remind people who already showed interest in your products or services that your business exists and can be useful to them
  • Promote user-generated content to show examples of satisfied customers and pinpoint successful stories

An agency can help you choose the best social channels for your business and create a strategy that will help you promote your brand the right way to get the most out of social media.

You don’t have to be present on every channel – you just need to know where your target audience spends the most of their time.

Also, you don’t need to promote all sorts of content if it doesn’t help you engage your audience – track engagement metrics to see which type of content gets the most likes, shares, clicks and comments to decide whether to advertise with text, photo, video, infographics or something else.

Publishing guides, books, templates and other materials relevant to your audience serve as effective content marketing tactics and HubSpot’s resource library is a great example of that

Tool #4: Content Marketing

Content marketing is still one of the most effective digital marketing tools, or strategies rather, that an agency can help you with.

The reason why we say “strategies” is because, unlike the previous three digital marketing tools, content marketing is not tied to a particular channel. It is an umbrella term for various content formats developed for and hosted on various channels.

The best content marketing tactics for raising brand awareness include:

  • Educational blog posts, especially if you offer complex products and you need to simplify your processes or explain them in detail to make them more appealing to your audience.
  • Case studies and successful user stories to build your social proof and show people the benefits of your products through real-life examples.
  • Downloadable guides, books, checklists, reports and anything else that might help your audience learn more about your brand, grow your brand authority and build trust.
  • Articles that show your support to local (and global) communities and help you emphasize the social, cultural, environmental and other values your brand stands for.

If you are wondering whether instances like values, trust, experiences and commitments you make as a brand really matter that much, keep in mind these insights from Deloitte’s Global Marketing Trends for 2021:

  • Companies should view themselves as human entities that mirror – and support – the values of those they are built to serve
  • To build trust in these turbulent times, brands should look to what people value – and ensure their promises are in sync with their abilities to deliver on them
  • Organizations with a purpose, those that know why they exist and who they serve may be uniquely positioned to navigate through change

Like SEO, content marketing doesn’t create an overnight success, but it can be a strong marketing (and business) asset that will bring your brand awareness to the next level and help you accomplish long-term goals.

HARO is one of the most popular digital PR platforms

Tool #5: Digital PR

Digital PR is a digital marketing tool that can bring you instant visibility within your industry and have some (minor, but some) effect on SEO.

It includes publishing press releases and (sponsored) articles, working with bloggers and influencers on promoting product features, building trust through online reviews, nurturing relationships with media contacts to secure mentions and other tactics.

Benefits of digital PR include:

  • High-quality backlinks from credible online publications and platforms
  • Features in popular online newspapers, blogs, podcasts, videos and more
  • A growing number of customer reviews on relevant platforms
  • A positive impact on ranking in search results for relevant keywords

Digital PR platforms like HARO, Muck Rack, Qwated and Meltwater typically provide access to targeted journalists, so you can facilitate establishing and growing relationships with the media, which can do wonders for your brand exposure in the long run.

Networking with journalists, bloggers and influencers can be an effective tool and a great way to strategically promote your business, manage your online presence and increase brand awareness.

BONUS: Consistency Across Channels

You don’t want your brand to appear as friendly and humorous on Facebook, but strict or even boring on Instagram. These inconsistencies in image and tone would only confuse your audience and hurt your brand retention, affecting consumers’ ability to remember your brand.

To avoid this, let a digital agency go through your brand book to get deeper insights about your brand and decide on digital marketing tools that align best with your brand strategy.

Don’t worry if you don’t have a brand book or a brand strategy – an agency can create those documents for you to define your brand values, style, voice and overall goals. Having it all well-documented will help the agency you hire to keep your appearance consistent across channels.

Why is consistency one of the most important digital marketing tools for increasing brand awareness?

Because consistency is the key to branding and marketing success.

Representing your brand consistently will help you move the needle on your brand awareness compass in the right direction.

Consistent appearance includes creating:

  • Custom, on-brand visuals for your website, social media ads, blog posts, PPC campaigns etc.
  • Content written in your brand voice and tone, using the language your audience uses
  • Audio and video content produced in your brand style, showcasing your brand values
  • Posts for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tik Tok and any other social network that authentically represent your brand and reflect your brand values

All in all, this will help you accomplish brand awareness goals, both short-term and long-term, and align them with your business, marketing and sales goals to create a consistent appearance across the channels that works best for your business.

How To Determine Your Brand Awareness Level

To determine the level of your brand awareness, start by answering these questions:

  • Does the general public (local or global) know what your company offers?
  • Is there anything (values, content, visuals, etc.) that stands out and can immediately be associated with your business?
  • How do your prospects feel when they hear your brand name or come across your ad in their social media feed?
  • How likely are your customers to recommend your products to their family and friends?
  • How often is your brand mentioned online?
  • Are the majority of online mentions, comments and reviews positive and expressing praise for your brand?

There are many other questions to help you define the level of your brand awareness but, in a nutshell, they all come down to this one:

  • Is your brand widely known and instantly recognizable?

If the answer to this question is “No” and you’d like to grow your brand awareness and increase the number of satisfied customers, digital marketing tools that we presented here might be of great use to you.

Key Brand Awareness Metrics To Monitor On Your Digital Marketing Tools

To measure the success of digital marketing tools and tactics you or your agency applied for raising brand awareness, you can use quantitative and qualitative measuring methods.

Quantitative methods help you measure:

  • Website traffic coming from search engines, referrals and other sources
  • Website metrics including the number of visitors, bounce rates, time on page, etc.
  • Audience metrics including age, gender, location, devices they visit from and more
  • Audience engagement across your website, social media channels, forums and other online platforms, including comments, likes, shares, clicks and more

Qualitative methods help you measure:

  • How much your brand is talked about online (using Google Alerts and other tools)
  • How often and in which context your brand is mentioned on social media (using social medial listening and monitoring techniques)
  • How much your audience knows about your brand, how people feel about your products and how satisfied your existing customers are with your brand (using brand awareness surveys, audience research and other questionnaires for direct feedback from your existing and potential customers)

Measuring the success of your brand awareness campaigns can help you learn more about your brand’s existing status and improve your future campaigns to raise awareness to a higher level.

Digital Marketing Tools For Brand Awareness: Key Takeaways

If you partner with a digital agency to help you raise your brand awareness, an agency will typically:

  • Start with an analysis on how your brand is currently positioned in the market and perceived by your audience
  • Develop a marketing strategy and plans on how your brand should be perceived to achieve your branding and marketing goals
  • Implement various digital tools to ensure you raise your brand awareness and reach as many prospects as possible

The five most effective digital marketing tools for raising brand awareness include:

  1. Search engine optimization: Including technical, on-page and off-page SEO
  2. PPC advertising: Including paid search ads, display ads, remarketing, Gmail ads and more
  3. Social media marketing: Including influencer marketing, targeting lookalike audiences etc.
  4. Content marketing: Including educational articles, downloadable guides, reports and more
  5. Consistency across channels: Including custom, on-brand visuals, audio, video content etc.

All these digital marketing tools and tactics can help you expand your reach and increase your brand awareness in a consistent, meaningful way to gain more visibility, higher recognition and – ultimately – attract more customers.

 

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Nadja Bozovic
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