What Are You Doing To Create Awareness Today?

Did you do anything to market yourself today other than think about it?

Marketing doesn't happen by itself.  You have to do it.

People don't find out about you on their own.  They won't bring up Google and search for you unless they have a reason to do so.

So what are you doing today to create awareness?

If you need a jump start, here are some ideas that might be relevant to your customers:

1. Offer A Discount
Sometimes the easiest way to drive traffic to your website, or to retailer locations, is to offer a discount or a coupon.  However, remember that spending money can be an incredibly emotional thing.  The right price, or discount, can drive a person to spend money "easily" without any thought.  5%-10% off might not be the ticket.  Don't be afraid to explore 20%, even 30-40% off.  If you're concerned about your margins, make it a limited or exclusive offer to a select group of customers.  Once they are in the door, they tend to buy more.

2. Hold A Product Demo Event
People love to research products, and price-shop online.  But at the end of the day, a consumer that touches the product, tries it, and likes it, usually ends up buying it.  Consider putting on a demo event in a location that contains your primary customer demographic.

3. Ask For Product Testimonials Via Social Media
Social media makes it very easy to connect with your customers.  It can be a customer service haven and nightmare.  One of my favorite uses of social media is testimonials.  It's as easy as this:  Ask users of your product to submit positive experiences of your product: video is preferred, text and pictures are great as well.  Incentives are a must.  Offer discounts off of new product, or free accessories to those consumers whose testimonial you choose to post.  Post one a week for 13 weeks - the length of a typical television or radio ad buy.

4. Participate In Online Communities
This fourth option can take the most work, but it can reap some of the largest gains for building your brand's credibility.  It's as simple as joining relevant forums and blogs.  Put your name and company in your signature.  Make it clear who you are.  Offer advice and sensible solutions.  However, you cannot blatantly advertise your product in your posts.  It's best to offer sound advice that may or may not include any of your specific products.  Over time you will see a few benefits:
- Community members will see you as an expert
- Community members will begin to explore your website and your product
- All of your posts will be indexed by search engines (like Google) and it will increase the amount of searchable, relevant content about you online.

It's a good idea to put one of your best PR reps or customer service representatives in charge of online community participation.  Your Social Media Director is a great fit as well.  You can take this a step further by becoming an advertiser in that online community.  This allows you to blatantly post about your product and any specials you may be offering.

These four things are simple, yet highly effective ways to increase Brand Awareness for little cost other than labor and time.  If appropriate, and if used in a focused manner, they are a great way to connect with current and future customers, and can provide a great ROI for a little marketing budget expenditure.

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It's about the content, not the algorithm

SEO. Search Engine Optimization.  For the past few years, no other term (other than Social Media) has owned the mindshare of marketers and business owners when it comes to the web.  It's almost a foregone assumption: if I build a website, I must perform SEO.  If I own a website, I must perform SEO.

The next big assumption is that performing SEO means either hiring an expensive "SEO Company", or getting a "SEO For Dummies" book and doing it yourself.  What exactly are you doing when you are "SEO'ing"?  Altering "alt" tags, meta data, headers, tagging images, keyword selection, link-backs...it's almost as mind-boggling as trying to guess how many letters there are in a can of alphabet soup.  Why are we putting ourselves through this insanity?  It's because we desparately want to be at the top of Google's listings.  We want to meet, beat, and even fool Google's algorithm at it's own game. 

It's time to stop the insanity.  Sure, having as much of your content indexable as possible is worthwhile.  Sure, you want to have good keyword selection and contextual page titles.  But lets get one thing clear.  No matter the algorithm, if you don't have relevant content, and others don't think you're content is relevant, Google isn't going to care either.

Google cares the most about relevant content.  If your content is actually about what you claim your website or webpage is addressing, then your content is relevant, or contextual.  If you title your page "Dogs", but you present information about cats, then it is not relevant.  Google and it's genius engineers have figured out how to "crawl" your website, examine your content, and rate it's relevancy.  It grades everything on your page that it can search, or "index.

Not only must your content be relevant, but it must be updated frequently.  Google will index your site on a set schedule once it "finds" you for the first time.  How often you update your content, or create new content, will determine how often Google "decides" to visit your site.  If you create a site, and never update it, then Google will eventually "decide" to visit your site more infrequently, and as a result, it will lower you in relevant search results.  But if you continually update your site, and continue to create relevant content, Google will raise you in it's search results.  Old and stale = forgotten and unimportant.  Fresh and exciting = relevant and important.

Even if you write relevant content, and keep it fresh, unless others also think it is relevant, then Google will not raise you up the search ranking results.  How do others make you relevant?  Link backs.  The more people, in contextual situations, link back to you, then your content is relevant.  What is a contextual situation?  Link farms are NOT contextual situations.  In fact, Google has clamped down on this practice; recently altering its algorithms to remove link farms from the equation.  So many people were "playing" the system with link farms and dummy websites that Google re-worked it's code to severely discount the influence of link farms and dummy websites.

What Google did was increase the relevancy of a website, with content relevant to yours, linking back to you.  For example, a blog post talking about dog sweaters, mentioning your comments about them, and linking back to your site, is relevant.  A series of forum posts on a public community forum site about dog sweaters, with links back to you in those posts, are relevant.  A series of social media posts on Facebook or Twitter, mentioning content about dog sweaters and linking back to your site, are relevant.

Google cares about content that others care about, and if they care about you, then Google cares about you.  So go ahead and optimize those page headers.  Make your site's content match your keywords.  Make as much of your website able to be indexed as possible.  But if your content isn't relevant, and if others don't care about your content, then Google won't either.

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