9 Ways to Increase Your Brand Visibility
Branding is crucial for every business. However, before you can form a strong brand image, you need to make sure that your brand is visible to the right audience. Visibility is a key precondition for generating engagement.
Visibility is obviously linked to awareness, but it’s important to understand that they’re two different concepts. In this article, we’ll explain brand visibility and why it must be a critical part of your overall branding strategy in 2022 and beyond.
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- What is Brand Visibility?
- Why is Brand Visibility Important for B2B?
- How is Brand Visibility Measured?
- 9 Ways to Increase Your Brand Visibility
What Is Brand Visibility?
In short, brand visibility refers to how much your brand is seen on different marketing channels. For example, a company that shows branded content to its audience once per week is twice as visible as another company that only shows branded content to its audience every other week.
While brand awareness describes how familiar audiences are with your brand, brand visibility is about how often you connect with them. Businesses with greater visibility also tend to have better awareness, but this isn’t always the case. You need a strong branding strategy in order to make your audience develop an image of your brand after successive interactions.
Why Is Brand Visibility Important for B2B?
Visibility is vital for B2B marketing because it helps build your credibility and trust in the eyes of potential customers.
If your first interaction with a buyer comes after they start looking for a vendor, you’ve already lost the brand visibility war. When someone recognizes a need in their business, they’re much more likely to reach out to someone they already feel familiar with.
With that in mind, visibility is an important investment for B2B brands that want to reach more customers. The more visible you are, the less you’ll have to work to convince leads to buy from your brand. That means lower ad costs, a higher conversion rate, and better long-term relationships.
How Is Brand Visibility Measured?
It’s critical to measure your brand visibility in order to better understand your relationship with your audience. While visibility can be measured in many different ways, it’s most commonly tracked with these metrics:
- Viewability: The percentage of ads that were actually seen by the intended recipient
- In-View Time: The average time a lead spends viewing your ad
- Video Completion Rate: The percentage of video viewers who watch until the end
- Engagement: The amount of people who engage with your brand across social networks
- Sentiment Analysis: An analysis of the temperament around posts about your brand
- Number of Mentions: How many people are mentioning your brand on a daily basis
Of course, the right way to measure brand visibility depends on your organization’s marketing goals. Over time, you’ll naturally come up with new ways to monitor brand visibility and identify strengths and weaknesses in your approach.
9 Ways to Increase Your Brand Visibility
Social media is one of the most powerful channels for brand visibility. Naturally, different platforms make sense for different companies, but virtually every brand can benefit from a strong social media marketing strategy.
1. Leverage Social Listening to Know Where You Stand
Social listening is a powerful tactic for today’s digital marketers. With the right social listening platform, you can easily monitor how social media users are talking about your brand. Data from social listening software can help you maximize engagement, analyze your competitors, and respond to negative feedback.
The first step to increasing your brand visibility is knowing where your brand stands among your competition and your prospects. Do people talk about you on social media? If so, what do they have to say about your brand, products, or services?
Social listening can help you understand and take the pulse of your community. Setting up a few queries around your brand name or topics that matter to both you and your customers can be a great way to get started. You can also use it to better understand where your competitors stand with your prospects and how much market share they dominate. From there, you can use the data to better inform your strategy.
2. Foster Community on Social with Regular Interaction
In 2022, consumers want to have more dynamic relationships with their favorite brands on social media. If you simply post weekly content and end it there, you’re missing out on valuable opportunities for further engagement.
Instead, try to interact more directly with your social media audience. This could include responding to questions, highlighting unique user-generated content, and replying to comments or replies to your tweets or posts. Your followers should feel like they’re interacting with you rather than merely reading your content.
You should also take it a step further: comment on posts that are relevant to your brand. For example, if you work in the financial industry, you might comment on popular posts about financial news in your industry, regardless of who posts it. When you comment on different topics within your industry , be sure to keep it non-promotional. Focus instead on adding real value to the conversation. That will be far more effective than spamming your solution into random conversations.
3. Use Employee Advocacy to Boost Your Brand
Customer preferences have changed dramatically in recent years. Today, many people are as concerned with a company’s culture and values as they are about its products and prices. Employee advocacy is a simple yet effective way to show that your business is an amazing place to work.
Like user-generated content, employee advocacy involves content that comes from outside your company. You’ll be able to reach a new audience and show them a unique side of the business. That’s why brands using employee advocacy generate 25-40% more engagement compared to those that don’t.
4. Focus on Video Content for a Dynamic Feed
One of the most common mistakes in digital marketing is failing to invest in high-quality video content. With today’s production tools, you can create professional videos using nothing but a smartphone and laptop.
Videos make it easier to catch the viewer’s attention, and they’re also the perfect form of content for social sharing. Even relatively small businesses should regularly publish video content in order to maximize their brand visibility.
5. Work with Influencers
Influencer marketing is a rapidly growing field that offers instant results to all kinds of businesses. People tend to trust messages that come from a seemingly independent source more than those from the brand itself.
When you work with an established influencer, you can take advantage of their existing credibility to build more trust with your target audience. Even better, influencers are generally paid based on pre-arranged performance criteria, so you won’t lose money if their campaigns fall flat.
6. Run Contests or Giveaways
What’s the best way to increase your brand visibility? Get your audience to share content for you. Contests and giveaways are straightforward ways to generate large amounts of social media traffic. Furthermore, the cost of a prize for the winner is usually more than offset by the free exposure you’ll get from social shares.
For example, you could run a photo contest for people using your products in interesting or unique ways. You might give social media users one entry for posting, another for following your page, and a third for sharing the contest with their friends. This is a particularly strong tactic for brands that are in the early stages of building a social media presence.
7. Implement a Referral Program
B2B sales are all about relationships, so it’s no surprise that referral programs are a great way to increase visibility and revenue. Even existing customers who are already happy with your brand may not think to tell their contacts unless you give them an additional incentive.
Considering the high lead acquisition costs of most B2B fields, referral programs are an efficient way to bring in new customers. You can use NPS (net promoter score) survey feedback to identify the customers who are most likely to make referrals.
One common mistake with B2B referral programs is failing to offer sufficient support. Landing pages, white papers, and other sales assets can help your partners generate more leads. Once a referral enters your funnel, you need to understand their position and connect them with the right person in your organization.
8. Develop Strong SEO Practices
Paid campaigns are a key element of digital marketing, but organic search traffic may offer a better ROI over the long term. While you may not see results today, tomorrow, or even next week, improving your website’s SEO will help make it more visible on Google and other search engines.
SEO starts with keywords, but you also need to consider your website’s backlink profile — in other words, the external sites that link to your pages. Trading guest posts with related brands is an easy way to drive traffic to each of your websites.
9. Partner with Like-Minded B2B Companies
Partnerships are crucial to any B2B marketing workflow. Building relationships with the right companies will enable you to reach new audiences and make more compelling offers. It’s even better if you and the partner operate in a similar field and can offer complementary services.
For example, let’s say you offer bookkeeping and start a new partnership with a tax firm. This could be a great opportunity for both businesses to share leads and collaborate on their combined services.
Final Thoughts
Most marketers understand brand awareness, but they may not be as familiar with the concept of brand visibility. It’s important to consider both of these key metrics as you connect with your audience through blog content, social media, and other digital channels.
It’s tough to increase your brand visibility overnight, but these tips will help put you in the right direction. Don’t hesitate to check out the Oktopost social listening platform if you need more help with your brand visibility.
