Your Brand Represents You, Your Employees And Your Stakeholders
Bringing attention to your brand is crucial for growing online. With the mass amount of information and content competing for your customers’ attention, it can be difficult to continually grab it. If you’re not properly able to catch your audience’s eye, you’ll never be able to grow.
When your customers aren’t paying attention to your content, it is easy to become discouraged. Before you just give up, try taking a moment to recognise why they may not be connecting with your brand. The disconnect may be in your marketing, not in your business strategy.
There are a few common mistakes companies make that may cause consumers to overlook their brands. If you’re guilty of even one, you may be missing out on significant opportunities. Here are four of the main reasons your brand may not be grabbing your audience’s attention, and what you can do about it.
1. You’re Not Structuring Content Around SEO
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is one of the best ways to bring new attention to your brand. The majority of users turn to Google and other search engines whenever they have a question, concern, or need for advice. Optimising your content to appear in relevant searches can help you get your content in front of your audience exactly when they’re ready for it.
Despite SEO being a significant benefit to companies, it takes time to implement. Search engine crawlers must find your content and connect it to the keywords you’re targeting. Don’t expect to see results overnight. This also means that it can take some time to identify if your SEO is hitting the mark.
Because an SEO strategy encompasses many different things, there are a few reasons why you may not be attracting attention from it. First, targeting the wrong keywords may prevent you from reaching your target audience. While you may rank highly for the keywords you’re targeting, if your customers aren’t searching those keywords, you won’t attract new leads.
Not fully implementing an SEO strategy could also be holding you back from grabbing attention online. Properly optimising your content involves more than just targeting keywords and putting them in the right place. To fully complete your SEO strategy, you need to consider all the on-page and off-page factors that encompass optimised content.
To boost your online visibility and start attracting more high-quality customers, fully dedicate yourself to creating an SEO strategy that is right for your company, industry, and audience. Do the proper keyword research, ensure you’re placing keywords in the appropriate places, and create content with which your audience is excited to engage.
2. Your Social Media Strategy is Boring
In today’s day and age, connecting online involves more than just sharing content and links. If you truly want to make an impression on your target audience, you need to create a one-on-one dialogue. This means developing a social media strategy that opens the door to a two-way conversation.
Many companies fail to attract attention on social media because they don’t consider the engagement their audience is genuinely seeking. Instead, they provide the content they think their audience wants. If you’re not truly listening to your target audience, your social media strategy will quickly become tedious.
An exciting social media strategy is incredibly critical to growing your online presence and attracting more attention. Because social media is one of the best tools for reaching new customers and drawing new leads, you can’t afford to have a social media strategy that isn’t resonating with your target audience.
While automation tools can make your social media strategy easier to implement, you want to use them cautiously. If you’re overly programming your posts, they can come across as robotic and unfriendly. When it seems like a computer is running your social media accounts, your audience won’t be inclined to engage. Instead, you should use automation tools but also ensures you’re checking up on responses and posting some organic information.
Listen to what your audience is engaging with online. If you want to use your social media to attract attention, you need to create a strategy that connects with your target audience. Engage with the same content they’re engaging with, share information that answers a problem, and focus on developing conversations. See what other social media marketing mistakes you should be avoiding here.
3. Your Content isn’t Interesting
Your content acts as the center of all your online marketing. As the information that fuels your social media, SEO, and other online marketing strategies, your content needs to be strong. Unfortunately, too many companies focus on just creating content, even if it isn’t the right content for their target audience.
Every day, there are thousands of new blog posts, infographics, videos, and other content pieces uploaded online. That means that if you’re contributing low-quality content to the mix, you’re going to get ignored. If you want people to notice your brand, you need to create content that is interesting and engaging for your target audience.
Just creating content for the sake of uploading new information will do little for the growth of your business. While fresh content is essential for improving your SEO, how engaged your audience is with that content will ultimately determine where your pieces rank in a search engine results list. If your articles get ignored, a crawler won’t want to put you at the top of their list, you will be deserted.
What content is considered compelling will depend on your target audience and demographic you’re trying to reach. While certain types of videos or posts may go viral more quickly, you need to ensure you’re creating pieces that will attract your target audience and bring them closer to becoming a customer. Merely drawing attention to your brand isn’t enough to grow your business.
Consider what fears, problems, or questions your target audience may have and what content may help them during their research process. When you create content that directly impacts your target audience in one way or another, you’ll be sure to grab their attention and nudge them in the direction of buying one of your products or services. See here for a detailed look at some content marketing strategies that drive results.
4. You’re Avoiding Influencers
If you’re creating high-quality content online and it is still getting ignored by your target audience, your problem may be that your audience doesn’t trust you. If you’re a new brand or you’re trying to expand your reach into a new demographic, you may need a bit of help getting noticed. One of the best ways to do this is through influencer marketing.
Influencer marketing is a newer style of marketing online. Through enlisting the help of influencers in your space, you’re able to get your content in front of a new, trusting group of individuals. When an influencer shares your content or promotes your brand, they’re showing their audience that you’re a trusted company.
If you do not include influencers within your online marketing strategy, you’re fighting an uphill battle to get noticed. When your target audience is looking for new products or services to buy, they will first look at items recommended by people within their community. While this used to be limited to friends and family members, the internet makes it easier than ever for celebrities, experts, and bloggers to provide recommendations.
How influencers will engage with your content will depend on your strategy. In most situations, you will need to pay an influencer to promote your brand or include your products or services within a post on their blog. However, in some instances, an influencer will pick up on your company on their own.
If you’re going to connect with influencers to help improve your brand online, you need to consider who your target audience trusts and cares about. While big-name celebrities may sound like a great promotion tool, if your target audience does not truly respect them, you may be wasting time and money. Instead, focus on niche influencers who can help you grow your online presence.
5. Your Voice Is Inconsistent
Your brand’s voice is an extension of how you want to be perceived in the market. You only get what you put out. An inconsistent voice on a singular platform will feel incongruous to your audience. This doesn’t mean you have to limit yourself to using 5 words over and over. Set up a lexicon of words that you want to shape your business around.
Think about your audience for each platform. Currently it is very popular for brands to have a laissez faire style voice on social media. This laid back approach works for brands appealing to a broad mass audience. For example check out how Wendy’s manages their sometimes vitriolic voice (and gets away with it).
Other mediums such as your online blog and email newsletter can have different tones
Remember That It Takes Work
If your brand is ignored online, it can feel impossible to grow your business. With online marketing being the most prominent way to promote your business, you need to have a robust digital presence if you want to be successful. However, with the mass amounts of competition, it isn’t always easy.
Don’t allow your brand to be ignored because you’re making careless mistakes. If you’re guilty of any of these four marketing mistakes, you still have time to turn your strategy around. Make the necessary changes, and you can improve your marketing and get noticed by your target audience.