Increase Brand Awareness and Credibility
In the digital space, credibility and trustworthiness are becoming increasingly important. Modern shoppers and decision-makers know that there are dozens, hundreds, if not thousands of companies they can choose to work with. If your website does not offer them the reassurance they are looking for, they will easily find someone else. What can you as a brand do to increase your brand’s credibility, but also your target audience’s
awareness about it? How can you use your website for the purpose, and what do you need to include to ensure you come across just right?
Provide Free Resources
A great way to boost your brand’s credibility and brand awareness at the same time is to create relevant resources that are useful, valuable, and free. They can come in the form of blog posts, white papers, case studies, podcasts, how-to videos, etc. Go for any format that allows you to impart information and experience.
This tactic will help you rank better, provided that your content is good, thus boosting your traffic. It will help you get picked up by others, so more traffic and SEO points. And it will also ensure you come across as an expert, someone who can be trusted. Let’s look at how Ad Badger has done it. They have an actual main menu item called “free resources.” This is where they feature the brand’s blog, as well as a bunch of other useful things: guides, calculators, tools, webinars, and even their newsletter. It’s a great way to get more clicks to this part of the website.
Source: adbadger.com
Use Interactive Content
While we are on the subject of content, let’s briefly mention interactive content as well. While it’s not an absolute necessity, it can help you level up your content marketing game and improve several important KPIs. Interactive content improves time on the page, but more importantly, it also helps you, yet again, prove you are an expert and care about your audience. By providing a simple tool or an engaging piece of content (think interactive infographic, quiz, questionnaire), you can solve someone’s problem and get to know them better. This will enable you to create even more targeted marketing campaigns as well as improve your product or service.
ATH has a great protein calculator they advertise in the hero section of their homepage. It’s easy to use, extremely relevant, and ties in organically with the brand’s products.
Source: athsport.co
It’s also bound to generate some quality backlinks and social shares.
Say It with a Video
Another content format you should be utilizing, if possible, is video. Often hailed as the most popular content format (which it is, but not in the marketing sense), it can help you communicate additional information with your audience. A short video can, for example, show what your product looks like and how it can be used. But you can also add a story to the video. You can explain what its benefits are, layer customer testimonials onto it, and provide proof of value. In short, a video lets you say more. Get Safe did a great job with their homepage video. They show the product, explain why you
need it, and feature a lot of humor. This instantly sets them apart from their competitors, who tend to have cookie-cutter videos. You get a sense of who they are as a brand, all from 46 seconds.
Ask Your Clients to Pitch In
Client testimonials can instantly raise your brand’s credibility, which is why it’s so frustrating for new brands to get started: they simply have no one to recommend them. However, once you have several clients under your belt, ask them to give you their honest blurb about the quality of your work. As you acquire more and more experience, swap your testimonials out regularly, aiming to highlight different aspects of your work. If possible, aim to feature testimonials that mention something you’ve not devoted too many words to yourself. For example, if a client notes that you are a great communicator, make sure that makes it onto your website. Take a look at Seller Plex and how they have done it. Near the top of their homepage, they feature several main testimonials that give you the key benefits of working with them. When you scroll down, you also find several video testimonials that go into more detail and explain what you can expect when partnering with the brand.
Source: sellerplex.com
Utilize Various Types of Social Proof
Speaking of social proof, let’s touch on the importance of having various types of it present on your pages. Especially on your product pages. You want to reassure your customers that you’ve not merely faked a review or a couple of testimonials. The more social proof from various sources you have on a page, the more weight it will carry. Especially if you can also share something about the people who have left said social proof.
Take a look at Forever 21. They give you both customer ratings and customer photos. More importantly, they let you filter reviews based on different criteria, so you can easily discover what a certain type of customer liked and what they didn’t like. They also have a “verified purchase” badge to reassure you it’s not just a random review: the person actually owns the item.
Source: forever21.com
Build an Online Community
Building an online community has numerous benefits:
● It lets you communicate with your target audience in a more authentic way.
● It helps you share your latest news and promotions
● You can foster a much deeper relationship with people than you ever could on your website or even on social media. You can use Facebook groups for the task, but Slack channels are also an effective way to gather a lot of like-minded people.
Aura has done a great job with this tactic. Their Facebook group for FBA Amazon sellers is very popular, and they use it for much more than just sharing product news or trying to get people to convert. There is a lot of advice to be found there.
Make sure that your community-building efforts focus on value and not just on creating yet one more channel for your sales team to utilize.
Leverage Social Media
Social media is another great avenue you should be utilizing to promote your website. However, it is equally important to use your website to promote your social media presence.
Brands that don’t have established social media channels, or that only post very rarely, tend not to be seen quite as credible as brands that take the time to communicate with their audience on socials.
This does not mean you need to be present on every channel. You can choose one that works best in your niche and devote a fair effort there. This will work much better than spreading yourself too thin across several of them.
Bando is a brand that does a marvelous job across all the major social media platforms. They have also done a good job of highlighting their social media handles on their website in an unobtrusive yet clearly visible way, so you can’t miss them.
Source: bando.com
Don’t Forget the Email Campaign
Finally, don’t forget that you should also use your website to promote your newsletter and vice- versa. Touching base with your audience via email is a great way to remind them of your existence and gently nudge them to (re)convert. This means that you also need to clearly highlight your newsletter signup form on the website and, more importantly, make it clear why someone should sign up.
ShopSolarKits did a great job in this department with their “Get weekly emails keeping 80,000+ solar enthusiasts in the loop, for free” hook. If you share your contact details with them, you can expect to be the first one to know when they have new products or discounts available, which makes it worth the signup.
Source: shopsolarkits.com
Wrapping Up
All of these tips and tactics can help you boost brand awareness and credibility. However, it’s important to align them with your overall marketing and sales goals, as well as the needs of your target audience. Just because a brand similar to yours is doing something does not mean you should blindly do the same. Take some time to discover what would work for your audience, and go from there.
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