Growing your organization’s brand awareness can help you further expand your business. But even the most creative of communications professionals can find it quite challenging to continually come up with new and innovative ideas that resonate with your customer base.
You may be at your wit’s end trying to think of a new creative idea that hits all the marks while growing your organization’s brandawareness. To help, 13 members of Forbes Communications Council, below, share below some of the creative strategies they’ve used to drive their organization’s brand. Here’s what they said:
1. Constant Campaigning
We have adopted a “constant campaign” modus operandi. Constant campaigning is not simply relying upon broad organic advertisements with a brand or a slogan that appear in every direction, rather a campaign with context, which is constantly targeting different stakeholders seeking readership for awareness. Key tactics for gaining attention include amplifying all third parties responsible for discussing our capabilities, publishing reports or writing articles. – Patrick Corcoran, Luxoft
2. Proprietary Marketing Research Reports
I have had success creating proprietary marketing research reports for our industry. We were not only able to create the marketing report for lead generation, we were also able to pull top stats to pitch to the media for additional coverage. We also repurposed the report into infographics and slideshares for further exposure and backlinks. – Moira van den Akker, Trimble Inc
3. Referral Partnerships
My team and I set up events and meetings to bring realtors into our offices. I then teach the realtors ways to market themselves and their business. It works because we create referral partnerships. When the realtors can grow their buyer leads, they will send those buyers to us to get pre-qualified. – Ellicia Romo, Peoples Mortgage Co.
4. Community Content Platform
When it comes to brand, particularly within the hospitality space, we choose to let our customers speak for us. By leveraging social proof through user-generated content, we’ve been able to drive our brandgrowth online. We deployed a community content platform that not only allowed us to engage with customers in social channels, but also to repurpose their content across marketing programs such as email, display and on-property signage. – Craig Olinger, Diamond Resorts
5. Marketing Center Of Excellence
I spend a great deal of my time focusing on a marketing center of excellence in order to streamline the firm’s robust content and thought leadership. This leverages this content through multiple marketing and media channels, and allows for greater and deeper reach to our clients and prospects, all while increasing brandawareness in key markets. – Beth More, Mazars USA LLP
6. Intentional Listening
Two words: intentional listening. It’s not particularly original or creative, but it has been a strategy we have paid special attention to throughout the past year, and it has helped us establish stronger relationships with our clients and gather a deeper understanding of what is truly important to them when it comes to their financial and personal lives. – Natalie Atabek, AFS Financial Group, LLC
7. Engaging Video Content
Today’s customer, no matter if business-to-business or business-to-consumer, is extremely time poor and overwhelmed with advertising. To cut through the noise, we started communicating a lot with video content that should not be longer than one to two minutes. The content needs to catch the viewers’ attention within the first seconds. If you keep it short and to the point, you will see great engagement with your content. – Marcel Hollerbach, Productsup
8. Smart Programming
We have found smart programming to be a hugely successful way to drive brand currency. For example, we host a series of roundtable dinners that focus on driving discovery and dialogue around a transformative idea or theme that is influencing business or culture. The key to these dinners is bringing together a dimensional group of people that can challenge one another’s world views and expose each other to new ideas. – Liz Keen, Sherpa Capital
9. Value Proposition Alignment To Customer Needs
When it comes to building a brand, it’s all about getting very clear on your company’s value proposition as it aligns to what customer find relevant and critical to their business. If you are not making a difference to their biggest challenges and their bottom line, your brand is going to be meaningless to them. Once you are clear on the value you provide, and you are the best at providing it, building the brand has to do with persistent, consistent messages, visuals, and proof points that emphasize your value. – Marie Hattar, Keysight Technologies
10. Translating Brand Voice To Different Markets
We have found that the best and most difficult strategy in global high tech is to adequately translate your brand voice to different markets across the globe, and to find appropriate communication channels. – Andrey Podshibyakin, Xsolla USA Inc
11. Publish A Magazine
We are due to launch our healthcare magazine soon. By creating this publication, we have opened the doors to many opportunities which will work hand in hand with the Urgent Care Centers. – Yaakov Landau, KāMIN Health Urgent Care Centers
12. Account-Based Marketing
Account-based marketing is a comprehensive go-to market strategy. When done well, ABM coordinates the activities of sales and marketing teams around a specific set of accounts to drive real business results. Our marketing team saw its cost of generating a sales opportunity decrease by 56% since it started with ABM. At the same time, we have also seen the output of pipeline more than triple year over year. – Peter Isaacson, Demandbase
13. Community Event Sponsorships
An often overlooked marketing opportunity, especially in the nonprofit arena, is community event sponsorships. Supporting community-building initiatives is an excellent way to put your brandin front of an audience and demonstrate engagement with community interests. Low-cost sponsorship of a local music festival, while not affiliated with our area of expertise, demonstrated our support of the region while giving us extensive exposure to our target audience. – Lisa Guyott, College Possible