CMOS and CEOs Sound Off on the Essentials for Getting Buzz and Building Your Brand Awareness
More data has been created in the past two years than in the entire previous history of the human race. Millions of blog posts are written every day. For marketers, this makes brand awareness a huge challenge: How do we stand out above the noise? Marketers and communicators are now competing for consumer attention amid Facebook posts, Buzzfeed memes, blog posts, articles, texts and more.
With the myriad tactics used for brand awareness and the limited resources available to execute on those tactics, finding a silver bullet to build your brand is difficult. To help, AirPR asked leading CMOs, CEOs and marketing leaders to share a piece of advice on brand awareness. The answers resoundingly revolved around a single strategy: creating unique, differentiated content.
Here is what they told us:
“Your brand will no longer be defined by a logo or cute creative ad, but by your thought leadership: Content Marketing and the way we experience that content is the key to your brand identity.”
- Randy Frisch, Co-Founder, CMO & President, Uberflip
“Pick one differentiating facet of your brand and focus on it consistently.”
- Jay Baer, Founder & CEO, Convince & Convert
“Making the best use of content is an efficient way to create brand awareness. Create a webinar, YouTube video, Facebook video blog post, SlideShare, eBook and a podcast, building an on-demand library all from one initiative. This gives your audience access to your content where they want to find it.”
- Shashi Bellamkonda, CMO, Surefire Local
“Use social media marketing – such as Facebook – to build awareness for your brand. Engagement ads can generate engagement by serving your brand message to people who have a history of engaging OR a video view ad to people who watch videos. Both those can help expose your story to an audience (that you can target with great specificity). After all, marketing is getting the right message in front of the right person, at the right time!”
- Duncan Alney, CEO, Firebelly Marketing
“Companies often push uphill with their own finite resources to build brand awareness when they could be inspiring an army of community advocates, influencers, employees and customers to authentically participate in creating awareness at scale. That’s participation marketing.”
- Lee Odden, CEO, TopRank Marketing
“Brand awareness is preceded by brand relevance in relation to how it solves or addresses the core consumers problem, need or desire. Brand awareness is not “sticky” unless the brand is first relevant in a positive way.”
- Duane “DJ” Sprague, CEO/CMO, Digital Tactics, Inc.
“Instead of interrupting people’s lives with heavily branded messaging, share great content that they genuinely care about through channels that they naturally use.”
- Richard Sharp, VP of Marketing, Networked Insights
Communicators and marketers are increasingly focused on content marketing and thought leadership and the ways to distribute and amplify that content. The New PR is about storytelling: knowing the messages that will resonate with your audience, creating compelling content with that message, utilizing a network of influencers, ambassadors and journalists to spread that message and tying it back to the bottom line. Setting benchmarks and measurements to gauge success in your brand awareness efforts will help you report back to the C-Suite. But it all starts with creating differentiated content and telling a great story.
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