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How WordPress can help you to build and increase brand awareness

How WordPress can help you to build and increase brand awareness

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How can you build and increase brand awareness with WordPress, and what steps are needed in that strategy?

In today’s day and age, there’s only so much you can do to achieve the best possible results for your brand. Knowing that the power shifting from us to our community and target audience, it’s a more significant challenge to maintain your good name and brand recognition. Luckily, there are a few pretty good allies to help us, and WordPress is one of them. But, before we guide you through, let’s take a few steps back, to the very beginning.  Just because our blog is for both professionals and novices, it’s always good to cover the basics. So…

What is a brand?

Before the Internet, building a brand and brand awareness was something only corporations or public figures were thinking about. Today, when we’re all corporations ourselves, and our own CEO’s, CMO’s and CFO’s, brand and branding has become something we need to think about all time. And pouting for that perfect selfie is hardly enough.

The American Marketing Association defines a brand as “A name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers. The legal term for a brand is a trademark. A brand may identify one item, a family of items, or all items of that seller. If used for the firm as a whole, the preferred term is a trade name.

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Apart from that, dr. Augustine Fou explains the difference that came with a customer-centric approach and holistic marketing when he says that branding can be divided into old and new.

Old Branding: Advertisers shouting carefully pedicured messages at consumers who don’t want to hear it.

New Branding: Advertisers humbly listening to what consumers tell others the brand is and back up with real action (like repeat purchases) and incorporating appropriate innovations, so their products continue to earn consumers’ loyalty and word of mouth.

See the difference? That’s the shift I mentioned earlier. The Internet changed everything, and it’s something we need to consider when talking about brand awareness today.

What is brand awareness?

Now that we know what a brand is, we can build it and implement our corporate, product, or personal mission and vision in it. Afterward, we need to spread the word about it and make people, especially our target audience, aware of it.

brand-identity-and-brand-awareness-with-wordpress-desk-scene

To do so, we should understand the different categories of brand awareness:

Brand recall: When customers can identify the brand themselves without any help. It is a qualitative measure that shows how well a brand name connects with a product type or product class by consumers.

Brand recognition is the extent to which a consumer can correctly identify a particular product or service just by viewing the product or service’s logo, tag line, packaging, or advertising campaign. It is developed by reach, frequency, and consistency.

Top of the mind brand: Any brand which a customer recalls without any help and is the first thing on their mind is top of the mind brand. Everybody wants to be the first brand, or product consumers think of in a particular category, to be the top of the mind brand.

Two more types of brand awareness essential to mention are Visual branding and Brand dominance

Visual branding is important because it tells your brand’s story while allowing you to stand apart from competitors in your industry through logos, images, design, and other visual means.

Strong brand dominance is evident when consumers can only recall the name of a single brand in the industry.

How can you build, track, increase brand awareness online?

Advertising

Advertising is the most powerful tool to create brand awareness. And it’s not highly expensive activity anymore. In many cases, all you need is a good smartphone to take a picture or shoot a video and edit in numerous photo editing apps we talked about earlier. Afterward, choose either Google AdSense or Facebook Advertising – or both!, and you’re on a roll!

Social media engagement

Talking about Social Media, you can’t afford not to be there. Recent research by Reuters Institute shows us that the majority of respondents use Social Media as a source of news. This goes as high as 70% in some countries. A segment in which WordPress can help a lot, but more on that a bit later.

social-media-icons-on-phone-illustrate-brand-awareness-with-wordpress

Responsiveness

Another essential feature that you need to think about is your website’s responsiveness. With the increasing penetration and use of mobile devices, this is a must if you want people to see your message, know your product/service – your brand.  Here’s why:

Influencers and Celebrity Endorsements

Not so long ago, the only celebrities were movie and music stars, sports persons, etc. Today we need to think about “ordinary” influencers, people who build their reputation online in a specific category and use this influence to create or increase brand awareness.

Websites & Blogs

With internet penetration increasing, brand awareness can get a considerable boost by writing relevant content on websites & blogs. That being said, can you think of a better way to do that than with WordPress? Having a site or a blog on WordPress gives you a way to inform the target audience who you are and what you do. Which bring us to the core of this story.

Building brand awareness with WordPress

What purpose or role does WordPress have in all this? Glad you asked. To choose WordPress as the foundation on which you showcase and promote your brand signals, you mean business. It’s what separates unsure from determined, doubtful from self-confident, uninformed from prepared. WordPress is so much more than „just another blogging platform,“ it’s a tool many build whole businesses on, it’s that much reliable and efficient and can skyrocket your brand awareness. How? Let me elaborate that a bit further.

A WordPress site or a blog

The core feature of WordPress is content creation; it’s literally built for that. If you know how to use Word and open a Facebook Page, the same level of knowledge is needed to operate WordPress. Not to mention, it comes with numerous tools such as plugins and widgets to further help you in building your business and brand awareness. Tailor your messages according to customer journey map and provide all the content they need through your site or a blog on WordPress.

Back in a day, when people wanted to buy or use something, they would go to a specific store or a company, and use or buy it. Today, each and every step of that elemental journey intersects with multiple other levels. People SEARCH FOR EVERYTHING before they choose if you’re the one that comes as a solution, an answer to that query – bingo! You’re that much closer in converting that person into your prospect, buyer, consumer. And what better way to do it than with WordPress as a foundation to your content creation?

WordPress landing page

Another great way to provide brand awareness with WordPress is through sales funnel – by creating a specific and well-targeted landing page. Now, we wrote a detailed guide on how to build WordPress landing pages that can help you understand the process better. As for now, let me just say that it’s the pillar of digital marketing, business campaigns, and lead converting magnet. And WordPress comes with some great Landing page WordPress themes you can customize to your needs and deliver clear value and CTA.

And whether you need a full website, or a blog, or just a landing page – feel free to go through our premium WordPress themes. All of them offer the highest code quality, are equally responsive and SEO-friendly, not to mention Gutenberg compatible. Test drive any of them seven days for free before making any decision, give it a try and see how they fit your brand and everything you built around it.

Bonus tip
Even a well design 404 error page can help you increase brand awareness. How? Just look at these cool 404 error page examples and how much exposure they receive! People love everything different, out of the ordinary box, and they love to talk about it. So, think of a way to be creative with that page, make people talk and remember you 🙂

SEO

Building brand awareness is all about potential customers being able to recognize your brand. And that’s precisely how SEO and WordPress can come in handy. SEO is about boosting the engagement and visibility of your brand through organic search engine ranking for which you need two things:

WordPress has it all, as you can read for yourselves in these two linked articles. Building your brand awareness with WordPress makes it easier and gives you more control over your content and its distribution. Google’s primary goal is to answer the search query. If you and your content are that answer, then you’re significantly closer into turning those searches into lead magnets and those people into your brand consumers. And doing it with WordPress, with its tools like SEO Yoast and similar plugins makes it that much better.

Social Media integration

Even mighty Google needs a bit of help when it comes to pushing the content higher on search results. Some would argue, but Social Media signals are something that shows Google the importance of content on blogs and websites. What I mean to say is that if your content is shared on Social, if people engage with it, Google notices it and – depending on the volume – decides whether to put your content over someone else. WordPress can help you with Social Media integration, thanks to many great plugins that increase your visibility and improve engagement. Make it easier for people to use, interact, share your content, which will result in more exposure and brand awareness.

Improve your brand awareness with these cool WordPress plugins

ARI Stream Quiz

wordpress-quiz-plugin-ari-stream-quiz

One of the ways to improve brand awareness is through trivia or quizzes, and ARI Stream Quiz is an excellent plugin for that purpose. Attract new visitors, make viral-worthy content, and enhance your exposure with this entertaining quiz plugin. Not to mention, it’s a reliable lead generator tool since you can collect email addresses to use for further marketing campaigns.

Blog2Social

blog2social-free-social-media-plugin-for-wordpress

Speaking of social integration, this is a great Social Media plugin that not only connect you to your accounts but serves as a Social Media auto post and scheduler as well! Improve user experience, visitor engagement, and automate some parts of your day-to-day work through one pretty handy plugin. And if by any chance, you’re not entirely satisfied with it, there are more useful Social Media plugins we covered in one of our earlier articles.

MailChimp for WP

mailchimp-for-wp-plugin

Email marketing still is one of the most effective ways to connect with your audience and raise your brand’s awareness. Luckily, WordPress has some of the best tools to do successful email marketing campaigns by using MailChimp. MailChimp for WP is one of those tools; it helps you grow your email list, plan and execute campaigns, and engage your audience. Just like we explained in our article.

Meks Easy Instagram Widget

meks-easy-instagram-widget-free-social-media-plugin

Show off your Instagram feed on your site with this cool free plugin that we made! Let people know about your visual branding and make them easier to interact with you across the Internet. Simply install the plugin and define whether you’ll show them your feed or a hashtag-defined content, and that’s all! While you’re at it, feel free to leave us a review – we’d love to know how you like it 🙂

And just to make sure we haven’t missed any more useful plugins, be sure to check out these we gathered in the must-have WordPress blogger plugins, as well.

So, how do we build and increase brand awareness with WordPress?

Include a brand color palette in your WordPress theme

Having a consistent brand color palette and all the visual elements within your site is a boosting feature of its own. You want your prospects to feel pleasant and comfortable, to have that connected feeling when they interact with your blog or website. Which is why it’s important to „dress your site“ in your brand colors, and these tools we described in our earlier post come in handy with that.

Have a solid content marketing strategy

It’s not enough to just post whatever it is you do and expect to have more visibility. You need a specific strategy, a thoughtful way of producing content that promotes and attracts the right audience. A strategy that links all the goals for your online presence and the ways to achieve them. That way, you’ll have a concrete plan and focus, and your work around building your brand awareness will be way more productive.

Optimize your content and align it with the SEO recommendation

What it is your target audience think about, what are their needs, their problems, their challenges? Knowing that and knowing how your brand comes in and help them is what will weave them towards you. And SEO is all about that. Research, planning, content creation targeted to answer your target audience, your prospects specific needs, intersecting them in every step of their customer journey map.

Dive in the social network pool

Social Media help spread your brand’s message, speed up the connection with the target audience, and boost your brand awareness, yes. And knowing that pretty much all people are using them, you really can’t afford not to be there as well. Your blog or a site is your home, and social networks are a party where you cherry pick the people you want to hang out with, let them know you better and interact with you on a deeper level.

brand awareness with WordPress Pinterest image

To conclude

Working with WordPress gives you more control and customization features. You get to decide about the theme, colors, fonts, widgets, and plugins, and the overall Brand Visual identity. So, whatever it is you do with your brand offline is doable and moldable online. Sure, you can do many similar things with other CMS’s, just not as good and professional as with WordPress. Not to mention WordPress enables you to build an excellent SEO strategy since it’s SEO friendly and further improves visibility and awareness of your brand.

I hope this article helps you understand a bit better what it takes to create and improve brand awareness and which tools to use. Feel free to let us know your thoughts and more tips even in the comment section and share some love across the social 🙂

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Ivana Cirkovic

Ivana is a Digital Marketing, PR and Social Media consultant with over nine years experience in the field. She is also a WordPress enthusiast and an active member of WordPress community who lives online almost 24/7. In love with Twitter, WP, photography and NYC.

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