6 Steps to Create Brand Awareness for Your Product or Services

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Consumer recognition is essential for any business. The way the audience remembers and recognizes your business is known as brand awareness. When consumers remember a company’s or business’s products, contents, logos, or anything else related to that product or service, that company or business has developed significant brand awareness. Brand awareness is important because it helps consumers become familiar with the products and services. Customer acquisition is higher when the brand is familiar and the business can bring comfort to the target audience. 

If the target audience is unaware of the business or doesn’t trust the brand, then the customer base and sales are not going to increase. This is where brand awareness comes into the picture. There are some innovative strategies that could help increase brand awareness for any business. 

Identify the Target Audience

Who is your audience and what do you want to communicate with them? This is the first question every brand should ask themselves. Cultivating a strong brand awareness is impossible without understanding the target audience and their priorities. This is the first step in creating brand awareness for your products and services. 

Understand the Industry and Your Peers

The next step is to conduct a good study of the industry and analyze and understand the competitors. Once you understand the industry and competitors, it will be easier to understand the areas to concentrate on. 

A strong Voice for the Brand

One of the most significant aspects of brand building is establishing a voice for the brand. It means an image or motto of the business that will reach the audience through various channels and digital marketing tools. A brand should use all the mediums of communication wisely in order to deliver the key message of the brand to its target audience.

Influencer Marketing 

Another step to building strong brand awareness in the trending digital environment is to choose influencer marketing. The latest industry research shows that the decision-making of almost 60% of young consumers is influenced by digital influencers. One of the most effective ways to accelerate brand awareness is to partner with influencers who have large social media followings. Small-scale businesses and brands approach micro influencers for their authenticity and engagement ratio with the niche community. Influencer marketing is a strong way to establish brand awareness. 

The Power of Content Marketing

Content marketing is another powerful step in establishing the brand among the target audience. Content marketing has the power of telling a story that will resonate with the target audience, which would result in increased brand awareness. Content marketing also showcases what the brand represents and the qualities of the brand. It resembles the brand’s vision and significance. 

Brand Awareness Through SEO

Publishing an article and playing with the keywords is not enough. Good search engine rankings can do wonders for the brand. SEO helps your brand to rank and is easy to find by users. But more than that, SEO helps in creating a strong digital presence. Hence, it gives an incredible brand image to your business, and the audience feels the brand is more credible and trustworthy. 

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5 Common Mistakes a Brand Makes While Doing Branding

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Any business is recognizable only with proper branding. It is a series of events that a company or organization initiates in order to establish itself in the marketplace. In other words, branding is a blueprint of how you want the world to see your business and perceive your brand. There are some common mistakes businesses make while branding. Whether you are a small business or established with decades of experience, these are the major mistakes that need to be avoided. 

Ignoring Customer Experience

Customer experience is the most significant aspect of any business. The growth and success of your company directly depends on the customer experience. Branding is about making the right impression of your products and services. But how the customers feel about the overall business is equally important. So branding should be done in such a way that customer issues are resolved promptly. 

Branding without Guidelines or Strategies

An organization with no proper brand guidelines is bound to experience inconsistency. Brand guidelines are protocols from logos, websites, to social media pages and ads. It is the set of rules followed by a business to maintain consistency. It tells you when, where, and how to use a simple logo. How to maintain a writing style and voice for the brand. What imagery and typography are to be used, etc.

Inaccuracy in Content Marketing

The overall content of a business should resemble the company’s vision. “Content plays the major role in the digital presence of a business.” From copywriting to newsletters to blogs to articles, everything should maintain the brand’s vision. Inaccuracy and inconsistencies in content marketing have a negative impact on branding.

Compromising on Brand Identity

“Brand identity” is the visual elements and overall image of the company. Beginning with a cheap brand identity is a common mistake among brands. It involves selecting cheap logo designs, websites with poor user experience, and inadequate digital presence. Compromising on the brand identity means compromising on the branding. 

Failing to Connect with the Target Audience

A brand that fails to connect with the right audience means that the brand has failed. This common branding mistake happens when there is a lack of industry research and customer behavior analysis. If a brand is unable to connect with its customers on a personal level, it may fall behind competitors and its business growth may suffer.

Conclusion

Branding isn’t easy. It’s a long process and some mistakes are unavoidable. Keeping those mistakes in mind while running the campaigns is one way to foresee the failures. Failing is a part of learning, and when you understand these mistakes, you should make them in all the stages of branding. Strong branding can drive the business into a bright future, and for that, it’s essential to know the mistakes and tend to avoid them.

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How to Grow Your Social Media Profile?

Having a good social media profile is equal to more online exposure. It helps you connect with your audience and improves your digital reputation. Your social media profile is the first one that shows up on the Google SERP when someone searches for your name (unless you are already a celebrity or someone with a popular page associated with you). Similarly, if you are a brand, you need digital attention from the right people to grow your business. So, building an effective social media profile is mandatory for brands, influencers, and others. 

You need the best social media profile so that your target audience can engage with your content. There are ways to grow your followers, subscribers, and audience for your profile. The organic way is to maintain consistency, choose the right platform, content optimization, active engagement with the audience, and many more.

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Choose the Right Channel

The very first and most important decision is to find the right channel for your growth. There are many social media channels and concentrating on every platform at the same time might not be a good idea. It’s more wise to understand where your audience is at. Do some research based upon your area of interest and the audience demography in that particular niche. Be it on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, or Tik Tok, you need to know where I am going to find a strong digital space with all my advantages as well as limitations. 

Profile Optimization

You might already have an account or have managed to maintain an account with the normal amount of social following and interactions. The next thing is to optimise your social media profiles. It starts with simple steps like uploading a good profile photo, video, or logo. And make sure to follow the social media parameters, like for Twitter, the photo should be 400px by 400px. Optimize the bio, description, attach relevant links, add discoverable keywords; these are all part of the page optimization.

Maintain the Consistency and Purpose

There are profiles that post on a daily basis but still fail to engage with the audience. On the other hand, daily posting does get results if done with a purpose. Also, the publishing frequency doesn’t matter if the content is inspiring, helpful, and actionable. So, know your best time to publish social media posts and do it with consistency and purpose.

Follow Other Profiles 

To extend your reach, you may follow other relevant profiles and brands from the same industry. If you are a brand, you shouldn’t be doing the same with competitor brands. But on a personal level, connecting with others is good for profile growth. Share their stories and posts to add value to the conversation and engagement.

Engage with the Audience

Your audience is your first priority. It’s for them that you are creating content, so engaging with the audience should be a big yes. Two-way communication with the audience is a great way to build a strong profile. You can respond to their personal messages and comments and like their comments. This provides good digital acceptance among the target audience and helps to grow the profile.

Collaborate with Others

Another great way of building a strong profile is by collaborating with other profiles. If you are an influencer, collaborating with other influencers helps in a great engagement ratio. Working with micro-influencers provides an authentic following and extends reach. 

Consider growing your profile as an add-on to yourself. When you have a quality profile in all areas, including content, profile appeal, and optimization, then you will automatically drive a quality number of followers. So continue finding values for the profile by trying the most creative methods.

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Scope of Influencers in the current situation

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My Haul Store

Why do influencers exist? What is the scope of being an influencer in the current situation? These are some of the questions that people seek answers to on social media. The answer is simple: influencers exist because they represent a community of people who belong to a common niche or area of interest. So influencers exist because we, as digital users, are active on social media. 

The scope of social media influencer marketing has increased since the pandemic. The latest survey of influencers from the country’s top cities shows that 50% of them fall under the age group of 18–24, followed by 24–30. This indicates that the youth of today can influence, inspire, and are able to make change. Most of the influencers are youngsters, and it’s empowering. 

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Influencers have the power to influence the purchasing decisions of their audience. Influencers are social relationship assets with whom brands are willing to collaborate to achieve their marketing objectives. More than 45% of the world’s population are actively involved in social media usage. The majority of these digital natives look to influencers to guide them and assist them in making decisions. People depend on influencers such as vloggers, Youtubers, bloggers, and podcasters for a day-to-day call to action. The scope of influencers in the current scenario is inevitably strong. 

Industry experts, professional advisors, leaders, academic experts, and journalists are also referred to as influencers. They gain respect due to their position, experience, and qualifications. The line between conventional media and social media is blurring. As a result, opinion leaders are building their online reputations. Those who already have an active social following are able to make concrete statements in the digital space as well, just like they were doing in an offline setting. 

However, an influencer must possess the best communication skills and engage with the followers. Their ability to transfer knowledge makes them the catalyst in the consumer’s decision-making. And this decides what scope they have in the modern environment.

There are issues with influencer marketing, such as a lack of authenticity, oversaturation, fraud, etc. But despite all that, there are ways influencers can benefit society. They are part of an impactful digital trend. They are the outcome of social media’s equalizing power. In a digital world, people get to decide whom they should follow. This would result in the growth of a diverse influencer marketing culture that would better reflect society. Gaming influencers, fashionistas, and mental health influencers express a diverse range of identities and areas of interest.

Influencers are strong social media figures with loyal followers. They are able to easily attract attention and make people aware of important causes. Climate change, war, famine, women’s empowerment, all these issues get notified on social media and the part influencers play in this is crucial. Recently, David Beckam handed over his Instagram account to a Ukrainian doctor in the city of Kharkiv. He has also urged his followers to donate to UNICEF to support war-affected regions. This is an excellent example of what influencers are capable of and what the scope of each and every emerging influencer in the modern world would be.

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How Do Digital Marketing Specialists Monitor Their Strategies?

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Every business goes through some form of digital marketing practice. It is necessary to run campaigns in order to be visible in a highly competitive digital environment. Content marketing, paid advertising, influencer marketing, SEO, and social networking, are some of the most commonly used digital marketing practices for conversion boosting. Monitoring and digital marketing strategies are equally important. 

Digital marketing specialists are required to audit the major KPIs on a regular basis. But more importantly, you must set clear goals and know what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. 

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Set Clear Goals and Objectives

The initial objectives and goals of a new campaign make the whole digital marketing process grow and evolve in favor of the business. Set the goals and determine what you are going to achieve in a given time frame. This leads to the progression of the rest of the campaign monitoring. The goals must be measurable, achievable, specific, timely, and realistic. Create a framework for implementing various aspects of digital marketing, such as email marketing, SEO, and social media.

Identify the Market

Researching the market segments is the next thing after setting the goals. Your target segments are the groups of people you want to reach out to. If you understand their expectations, problems, and choices, then only you will be able to tailor the marketing campaigns. 

KPI Tracking

Marketers are required to measure key performance indicators (KPIs) that involve tracking the data and converting it into useful metrics in the form of useful metrics that can be calculated and recorded in easy-to-understand charts and dashboards. It refers to the company’s methods and tools to monitor performance metrics. Traffic metrics, conversion metrics, and revenue metrics are some of the few vital KPIs in a digital marketing campaign. 

Invest in Digital Marketing Tools 

The manual monitoring of the digital marketing campaign does not offer precise results. Hence, the marketing specialists are required to use the right digital marketing tools to save time and effort. Most SEO specialists and content marketers use tools like Webmaster, Moz, SEMrush, and Ahrefs. There are also many other tools like BuzzStream and Google Analytics, but understanding the main goals and features of the tools is important. 

Track the Stats 

Investing in the costliest tool isn’t enough. To tailor the campaign to the target segment requirements, you need to continuously track the stats and data and must take actionable steps whenever necessary. Digital marketing trends change swiftly, and success always demands immediate action. However, marketers mustn’t get overly excited about all the pieces of data. Keep tracking the stats, making strategies and data-oriented decisions. 

Adequate tracking of every digital marketing campaign is crucial for businesses. Understanding the right strategies that would work best for the brand and audience can be tricky sometimes. Tracking the conversion rate, determining the average session duration, and monitoring the bounce rate are all aspects of digital marketing that will tell you how strong the website’s content is.

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Why are Internet Marketing Services Trending?

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Why are brands and marketers so excited about internet marketing services? More than 4.8 billion people use the internet today. This makes internet marketing one of the easiest and most affordable ways of marketing, and brands have been wisely using it to reach potential customers. What exactly is an internet marketing service and why is it trending?

Internet marketing is the promotion of certain products or services of a brand through the Internet. It is a broad term that covers different ranges of marketing strategies. Internet marketing is done through various online tools in order to drive traffic to a website, generate leads, and finally boost sales. It is also known as digital marketing or online marketing. In internet marketing, brands or businesses use all sorts of digital channels to reach their target audience. 

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With the help of internet marketing, brands are able to target their audience with accuracy. Online marketing focuses on delivering quality content or marketing messages using emails, blog articles, social media posts, videos, search engines, and many more. Modern customers are digital natives; hence, they demand digital content. This makes internet marketing the most effective and trending service in today’s business environment. 

What Makes Internet Marketing a Proven Winner?

The benefits of internet marketing are consequential for each and every brand and business. Internet marketing is a proven winner, and the hype around it is real. 

  • More than 65% of businesses actively invest in SEO and have accelerated their internet marketing as a result of the COVID pandemic. 
  • More than 72% of marketing budgets are spent on digital activities related to internet marketing.
  • Most B2B marketers use email marketing as one of their strongest internet marketing tools.

Most internet marketing strategies are used to generate leads and increase sales growth. One of the main objectives of online marketing is to address a problem the consumer is facing through content creation. The idea is to introduce the product or service as the solution and urge the audience to take the call to action. The success of internet marketing is heavily dependent on the quality of content. This makes content marketing one of the most essential elements of internet marketing. As per the business requirements and audience demographics, content is created in the following forms:

  1. Articles and blog-posts
  2. Case-studies
  3. Infographics
  4. Video content
  5. Podcasts

As internet marketing grows and adapts to the innovations of the last decade, there is always a pressure to deliver results among entrepreneurs and businesses. With all kinds of media and platforms, brands are able to build effective marketing strategies that would assist them in the overall success of internet marketing. Over the past few years, we have seen the tremendous transformation of internet marketing, and the pandemic has accelerated the process. Brands have been able to achieve an adequate ROI (Return on Investment) as a result of their internet marketing efforts. Internet marketing services are trending due to the current business environment. Consumers have become heavily dependent on the digital presence of brands. Regardless of the industry and type of business, online shopping and purchases have become the preferred choice of people.

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The Evolution of Marketing Agencies

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Marketing has evolved tremendously over the decades. Earlier, the system was production-centered. Later, it went through phases and evolved into relationship-based marketing. Modern marketing ultimately refers to the concept of business development. It again narrows down to business development through persuasive relationships. Science and technology have changed the way people live. This further affected the way they do business, sell, and purchase. 

Through print, television, and social media, marketing has changed over the past decades from the simple act of informing customers to influencing people to become potential customers. It comes as no surprise that the evolution of marketing and advertising has directly affected the evolution of marketing agencies. There are two main factors that have affected the evolution of marketing agencies. 

What Do Customers Want?

This refers to the customer’s needs in the business environment. The demands of consumers have changed over the years. What they wanted in the past is irrelevant to what they demand today. If a business fails to keep up with its customers, then its marketing efforts will fail. So customer needs are one factor that directly affected the evolution of marketing agencies. 

Marketing Technologies

In the beginning, print advertising was the only communication medium for marketers. Today, the world of digital marketing technology offers a vast variety of opportunities to brands and businesses. Everything is possible for marketing agencies, from email marketing to influencer marketing. Marketing technology is another strong aspect in the evolution of marketing. It teaches marketing agencies what to do and what not to do.

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What Should Be the Business Objectives of Marketing Agencies?

Good marketing campaigns aim to facilitate impactful messages that create result-oriented calls to action. The success of any marketing agency depends upon their ability to develop relevant business objectives. They should be able to act as business managers in order to understand the client’s requirements effectively. Before setting up the strategies, the account department must understand the client’s demands. The agency must also possess working knowledge in the area of interest. The executive team primarily measures success on the basis of sales. There are also other aspects of marketing that should be valued.

  1. The customer acquisition rate
  2. Profit margins
  3. Investor interest
  4. “Strategic product development”
  5. Distribution and technology partner agreements

The Future of Marketing Agencies

The world of marketing is evolving at an exponential rate. The digitalisation of the business environment has forced marketing to evolve and adapt accordingly. Social media has further pushed this, and now brands are engaging with consumers in a very human way. At the same time, the role of marketing agencies remains the same: they help brands increase their sales and loyalty. One of the major challenges for agencies is going to be the innovation and implementation of big ideas. A person who uses various modes of communication is a different consumer in each medium. Consumers are not the same when they are using smartphones as they are on any other device or television. Agencies should be able to come up with creative solutions for a better call to action for marketing messages. Also, with the advancement of technology and connectedness, marketing agencies will be challenged to prove their results.

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How Does a Marketing Audit Make Difference?

Every company conducts regular financial audits. Conducting regular marketing audits is equally important. Why? It’s crucial for all businesses to consider marketing audits to evaluate the current marketing activities of a company or business. 

A marketing audit is the overall analysis of the marketing environment of an organisation or business. It involves evaluating everything from targets and strategies to certain marketing campaigns or activities. The whole process aims to facilitate an entire overview of the competencies of an organization in order to trace weaknesses and opportunities.

It is a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the business marketing environment of a company. An ideal marketing audit should cover an organization’s goals, principles, strategies, and objectives in order to identify any problem or opportunity related to its business environment. 

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Who Conducts a Marketing Audit?

There are typically three options for any business to conduct a marketing audit. 

  1. One or more internal teams
  2. The current marketing agency of your organisation
  3. A third party agency

An intern team can access the company’s information easily. They are aware of the businesses and available resources. The marketing agency is already involved in the business activities. They could have all the relevant information to interpret results accurately. A third party agency can be relied upon for the most objective audit. 

How Does a Marketing Audit Help a Business?

A good marketing audit facilitates a benchmark for observing future marketing activities. It can also provide insights into the performance and efficiency of the company’s business activities. The key elements covered in a marketing audit help a business grow. 

  • SWOT Analysis: SWOT analysis is a framework used to evaluate an organisation’s competitive position and to develop a strategy. The framework SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. The method used in the marketing audit provides better results.
  • Market Research: Thorough market research, customer behaviour analysis, and prospects can provide insights into the business’s success. This would help to improve products and services further and also help with brand positioning. 
  • External Marketing Environment: Considering the external marketing environment is equally important while conducting a comprehensive marketing audit. One of the fundamental approaches to analyse the external environment is the PESTLE analysis. It’s about taking the political, economical, social, technological, legal, and environmental factors into consideration and identifying how they are impacting the overall marketing landscape of the organisation.
  • Competitor Analysis: Another key aspect of the marketing audit is competitor analysis. It is related to comparing your organisation with competitors in areas related to the business environment. It also involves the analysis of their website, Google ranking, and other online activities.

Benefits of Marketing Audit

Conducting an efficient marketing audit gives you an in-depth understanding of the current business environment and how to manage marketing activities. 

  1. It gives an understanding of what works great and what needs improvement.
  2. An ideal audit can detect problems and fix them before they cause serious problems.
  3. Conducting an audit helps to plan the future marketing strategies.
  4. An audit can identify it if something has gone wrong in the previous marketing session. After the audit, there will be recommendations for improvement, and this can help build a foundation for major changes in the future. 

In short, a marketing audit is a “back to basics” approach that helps businesses grow further. A marketing audit is essential, particularly for small and medium sized businesses. It helps a business understand where it’s heading and gives a marketing perspective.

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How Much Does an Influencer Charge? What are the Factors Considered for Remuneration?

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It has been proven in the current marketing scenario that influencer marketing is not only effective but has become the favourite marketing choice for brands. Brands and businesses are investing substantial amounts into influencer marketing. With respect to this new age of social media marketing, what small-scale brands and businesses want to know is how much influencers are charging. Or what are the factors affecting the remuneration of influencers?

Many factors are to be considered in order to compute how much an influencer charges. The costs may vary depending on the platform, industry, brand goals, and influencer tier. An influencer could be a celebrity, travel blogger, stand-up comedian, or any sort of content creator with a dedicated social following. In a broader term, any social media user with a large number of followers is considered an influencer. At the same time, the impact one could make is based on other factors such as engagement ratio, medium of communication, social media trends, etc. Above all these, the proportion of influence matters the most. An influencer should have the power to persuade his/her audience and make the followers take some sort of action. The power to influence the audience, whether to make them buy a product or service or sign-up on a site/event, is what makes an influencer powerful.

A brand must choose an influencer who is relevant to the brand’s industry. Also, the influencer should meet the brand values, and possess similar audience demography. Recent industry graphs show that a brand has to pay between $500 and $1 million for a sponsored post. 

Collaboration Cost of Influencer Marketing

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As discussed, there are various factors to be considered when determining how much an influencer charges. The parameters that impact influencer rates are as follows:

Engagement and Reach: This is basically the number of followers and subscribers that an influencer has. There are different influencer types, like micro, mega, macro, nano, etc. all based on the social following. The wider the audience, the higher the engagement rates.

Content Platform: The amount a content creator charges per post depends on many factors, including the social media platform they choose. Every social media platform possesses a different audience type. Influencers may also charge the same amount per post regardless of which channel it is posted on.

Type of Content: Every content requires the time and energy of the content creator or influencer. The more time and effort they take to create the content, the more money they can demand, or at least expect. Then again, the quality of content matters.

Industry Niche: A brand looks for an influencer who fits into the niche of business. The content creator must be industry-relevant. Popular niches have more influencers, so the rates are likely to be lower than niches with fewer influencers.

Types of Influencers and Rates

The average payment cycle of different influencers are as follows:

Facebook

  • Mega-influencers: $25,000+ per post
  • Mid-tier influencers: $1,250–$12,500 per post
  • Macro-influencers: $12,500–$25,000 per post
  • Micro-influencers: $250–$1,250 per post
  • Nano-influencers: $25–$250 per post

YouTube

  • Mega-influencers: $20,000+ per post
  • Mid-tier influencers: $1,000–$10,000 per video
  • Macro-influencers: $10,000–$20,000 per post
  • Micro-influencers: $200–$1,000 per video
  • Nano-influencers: $20–$200 per video

Instagram

  • Celebrities: Starts with minimum $1 million
  • Mega-influencers: $10,000+ per post
  • Mid-tier influencers: $500–$5,000 per post
  • Micro-influencers: $100–$500 per post
  • Macro-influencers: $5,000–$10,000 per post
  • Nano-influencers: $10–$100 per post

Though an average amount can be assumed based on industry research, the accurate cost of an influencer will always be based on the discussed factors. For brands, stepping into the world of influencer marketing is a great idea. At the same time, the early struggle they are going to face is finding the right influencer with whom they can afford. Brands may either depend upon influencer marketing tools or they can approach a good influencer marketing agency

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