Brands live and die by their ability to attract new and retain existing audiences online. An effective online presence is essential in raising awareness, building trust and meeting your customers’ expectations.
Achieving this can be challenging in an ever-changing online world, but there are three critical areas companies should focus on to grow their business on the web.
1. SEO
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a great way to be visible online. Appearing at the top of search engine result pages (SERPS) doesn’t just happen by accident. Search engines look at things like title tags, keywords, internal links, website design, page accessibility and other external factors when they rank webpages on their results pages. Optimise all these elements and your webpages will soon be rising up the rankings.
2. PPC (pay-per-click)
Creating paid PPC campaigns is a brilliant way to increase traffic to your traffic. There are a number of different PPC strategies you can use:
- Search campaigns
- Display ads
- Video ads
- Shopping ads
- Paid social ads
- Email campaigns
These types of paid ads aren’t as expensive as you might think. You’re in full control of your budget and you only pay for the clicks your ad receives. If you can factor this into your marketing budget, it could give your website a big boost.
PPC campaigns are easy to create and upload and don’t require any serious technical design. They provide a lot of stability as, unlike SEO, they don’t rely on the normal search engine algorithms, which regularly change. This makes it easier to predict the effectiveness of future campaigns based on current performance.
3. Social media
Social media is no doubt one of the best ways to get your brand out there. With 4.62 billion people around the world using these platforms, it’s a no brainer. There are many benefits to using social media, including:
- Reach a large audience
- Create engagement with followers
- Pay to boost reach even more
- Develop brand awareness
- Engage directly with your audience
- Increase traffic to your website
- Increase sales leads
Learn from Red Bull
A powerful example of how well social media can help with brand awareness comes from Red Bull. The energy drinks company used Instagram to strengthen its profile on Facebook and YouTube and increase sales of its ‘summer edition’ tropical energy drink in Australia.
The Red Bull campaign was focused on brand building. It started with a promotional teaser just before the start of summer. To highlight the new eye-catching appearance of the cans, it used yellow/gold filters across an array of images and videos showing sun-filled, summery days.
The campaign also used the hashtags #thissummer and #redbullsummeredition to connect the feeling of ‘summer’ with the idea of customers sipping their refreshing, tropical drink.
The campaign was immensely successful, leading to:
- 10% increase in top-of-mind awareness among customers
- 9% rise in favourability
- 7% decrease in the ‘unconvinced’ market
- 1.2 million consumers reached
The lesson? Used well, social media can be a potent tool to drive engagement and raise brand awareness. By creating an effective social media campaign – like Red Bull – you can have customers eating – or drinking – out of your hand.
Source: Social Grain
How can we help?
The team at Tailored are experts in digital marketing, including social media. We have the experience and the expertise to help take the stress out of growing your brand and your business on the web. If you’re looking to take your online sales to the next level, get in touch and see where we can help.