Now more than ever, name recognition plays an important role in having a successful organic search marketing campaign. While there is no “brand” signal in the search engine algorithms per se, there is a lot of value that being a brand lends toward other signals that do matter in achieving those search rankings you covet.
You may never be an Oreo’s, a Nike, or an Amazon, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t build your company into a recognized authority in your space using a handful of digital marketing strategies.
Use Content Marketing to Build your Brand
Branding yourself online starts with producing and publishing great content that not only serves a purpose but meets the needs of your target audience. Content marketing is nothing more than having a strategy to create and distribute that content.
But don’t think it’s that easy!
Creating content is one thing, but creating valuable content is quite another. Anyone can write. But not everyone knows how to write well or provide something that searchers and your audience are interested in. Which means that you may need to hire out to get the content you want written.
Develop a content marketing strategy that focuses on creating helpful content that will interest, attract and engage your target audience. Answer questions, provide tips, show how-tos, and whatever else your audience craves. The more of your content your audience reads, the more likely they will be to remember you when it comes time to seek out the products or services that you provide.
Use Social Media to Build your Brand
Social media is an essential component of content marketing, helping to promote the content that you create. But even more importantly, it opens up opportunities to engage with your audience.
Not only can your content be used as a starting point for engagement, engagement can be a starting point for additional content ideas to produce. But the key is staying engaged.
It’s one thing to brand by repetition (think radio and TVcommercials) but it’s another to brand by actually being involved in conversations with your target audience. Social media marketing opens the doors to make friends with your customers. Instead of being just a corporate face, you become a helpful conduit.
Every time you engage with your audience, you’re building your brand and increasing the chances of getting customers and earning free word-of-mouth marketing.
Use Paid Ads to Build your Brand
When it comes to pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, there is usually a very high focus on ROI. PPC is very trackable in that way, so it’s a good option for keeping your marketing efforts profitable. However, PPC also is a good opportunity to provide additional branding for your company.
This is especially true when you run paid ads alongside your natural search engine rankings. Many studies have shown that having a paid link along with a natural link in the search results creates a branding effect that increases clicks 30-70%.
Along with PPC is the option to engage in remarketing. That is, showing ads to people who have recently visited your site. Not only does this bring people back, but it continues the branding imprint that will keep you top of mind the next time they search for what you offer.
Specific Brand-Building Strategies
- Create awesome content on a regular basis.
- Diversify your content (text, images, tools, etc.)
- Use social media to promote your content.
- Engage with your audience through social channels. Have conversations!
- Use remarketing to bring visitors back to your site.
- Use paid ads to promote your content (not just your services) and offer free downloads and other helpful tools.
- Stay in front of your audience in as many ways possible as often as possible.
None of these things impact your organic rankings directly, but they all do have a bigger effect on signals that search engines care about. Remember, the search engines only care about delivering results that their searchers want. If you’re able to build your brand recognition to the point that searchers want what you offer, the search engines will notice. Maybe in a round-about way, but anyway is a good way if it leads to a conversion!