Three Steps to Building Brand Awareness

New companies coming to market face huge barriers to success, such as:

1. No one knows about the company.
2. No one knows about the new product. 
3. Established players dominate SEO.

So how to get your marketing messages out there?  There are two fundamental options, inbound marketing and outbound marketing. 

Inbound Marketing

Where people come to you directly. This is now dominated by the internet and google in particular, although social media platforms are increasing influence. Search engine optimization is critical and anyone who has dipped their toes into SEO will know that it is a very tough and long road to take. This is especially true for new players, trying to break into a new segment.  

Ultimately, inbound / SEO is very powerful, people who are interested in your product search and find you. Typically though, this is a 12-18 month project initially and then ongoing to stay on top. So prepare for the long haul. 

Google advertising can help here, but it can be expensive and many people are wary of advertising links and always prefer organic search results. 

Outbound Marketing

Where you push out your message. Established outbound marketing channels include print advertising in magazines, newspapers, billboards, mail-shots and email.  Some channels allow for audience targeting and these are usually more successful at reaching the right audience.   If you are selling a niche medical product, a billboard on the 101 is probably not going to be seen by many of the right people for example. 

Step 1 Building Brand Awareness - The Message

Figure out your VALUE. What is it that your are fundamentally doing to help solve a problem? 

Make sure the value is RELEVANT, show how it relates to your typical customer and what it will mean to them. 

Show how you are DIFFERENT from competitors. 

Build up your message, making sure it is easy to understand, without any inside jargon. Now you are ready to deliver your message

Step 2 - Delivering your message

This can be word of mouth, via a sales team, in which case create a compelling powerpoint deck with just three content slides (reflecting the above). Trade shows, conferences and webinars. are further outbound marketing opportunities. Speed and the numbers of people reached are limited with these traditional approaches. 

To scale up quickly however, use of Email marketing can really help. Although not as personal as a face to face meeting, email is still the most powerful marketing channel when used right. 

Find a specialist email list data provider working in your space, eg B2B contacts, consumers and so on.  Ensure that the audience closely matches your target, eg the right Job Titles, Markets, business skills and geographical reach.  For example,  "VP of IT, working in the hospitality market focused on Cloud compute".    

According to a Marketwise case study,  an average email campaign turns 1,000 emails into 16 fully qualified leads who have registered their details on your website.  Again in the same case study, this equals a cost of about $25 per new lead.  That's tough to compete with compared to any type of face to face channel. 

Step 3 - Nurturing your brand

Critical to building a brand is to just keep going, its a long race!   In the email marketing channel, this means looking at the results, making tweaks and repeating. Next time, try a slightly different Job title or market (and tweak your message to match), switch geographies or try new subject lines.  Measure, analyse and repeat. 

Eventually, once you build momentum, outbound marketing can slow down and hopefully your SEO will start to also bring in leads. 

Summary

Email marketing, when correctly targeted, offers the fastest and most cost effective way to get a marketing message out, to build brand or product awareness.  Good luck with your campaigns. 

Maria