How to increase brand visibility without breaking the bank

From implementing search engine optimization (SEO) to ensuring a consistent social media presence and collaborating with more-established complementary brands, these are all ways to increase brand visibility. Investing in the right promotional products and a responsive website can also help.

If you're a business owner yourself, consider implementing all those brand visibility tactics, given that consumers will likely ignore your brand if they aren't familiar with it. As Exploding Topics points out, over eight in ten consumers must trust a brand to consider buying, and 77% prefer brands they follow on social media.

Fortunately, increasing your business's visibility is achievable with budget-friendly branding strategies.

What Does Increasing Brand Visibility Mean?

Increasing your brand's visibility means you're ensuring consumers see, recognize, and remember your brand. Online and physical advertising and marketing campaigns can help you achieve this goal. 

How Do You Measure Brand Visibility?

One is through customer surveys. It involves directly asking your target market about their knowledge and perception of your brand.

Another is using social listening tools. They're software programs that track and analyze online interactions and conversations across various platforms, including:

• Blogs
• Social media
• Forums
• News sites

With social listening tools, you can gain actionable insights into your target audience's perception of your brand. You can also learn about competitor activities and industry trends.

Web analytics tools, such as Google Analytics and Google Trends, can help measure your brand's visibility, too. Google Analytics provides data on various metrics, such as website traffic, user engagement, lead generation, and conversions. Google Trends tracks and counts how often your brand name gets searched online over time.

What Are Cost-Effective Marketing Strategies to Increase Brand Visibility? 

According to America's Small Business Network (ASBN), early-stage business-to-consumer (B2C) organizations typically set aside 7% to 12% of their income for marketing. Such expenses include branding, advertising, and promotional materials.

If your business's marketing budget is on the lower end, consider prioritizing the following cost-effective strategies to enhance brand reach and visibility. 

Implement SEO

With SEO, your goal is to make your business's website and your brand's other online assets and platforms (e.g., your social media accounts or a blog site separate from your main website) more relevant and understandable to search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Doing so can help your online assets rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). The higher their SERP ranking, the more likely they'll get higher rates of organic (unpaid) traffic.

One way to implement SEO is to incorporate relevant keywords into your digital content, such as:

• Blog posts
• Videos
• Infographics

Building a responsive website (one whose content, layout, and formatting automatically adapt to the user's device screen and type) can also help with SEO. Search engines like responsive websites because they improve user experience.

Ensure a Consistent Social Media Presence

Another budget-friendly way to enhance brand visibility is to create social media accounts for your business and be active on them as much as possible. It won't cost you anything to sign up with Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or X. Neither will you have to pay to regularly post content or interact with other users (e.g., liking, sharing, or commenting on posts).

Collaborate With More Established Complementary Brands 

When you partner with a more established and trusted brand, your business can gain exposure to their loyal customer base. It's also a cost-effective approach to expanding your brand's visibility, as you can split the marketing costs with the brand you're collaborating with.

Invest in Useful Promotional Products 

Promotional items are giveaways that feature your brand's name, logo, or other identifiable elements. They can serve as "physical advertisements," helping spread awareness about your business and increasing its visibility and recall among consumers.

When choosing promotional items, consider products that offer excellent brand visibility and practical utility for users across various demographics. Some examples are branded refillable water tumblers, reusable shopping bags, and high-quality custom leather patch hats. 

Frequently Asked Questions

Is brand visibility the same as brand awareness?

Brand visibility and brand awareness share a close relationship, but they're different marketing elements.

Brand visibility is how often consumers notice or see a brand. Its primary focus is to ensure a brand gains as much exposure as possible to its target audience. Brand awareness, on the other hand, is the extent to which people know, recognize, and remember a brand.

Brand visibility is a pillar of brand awareness, considering that without it, consumers are less likely to know or "be aware" of a brand. The more aware people are of a particular brand, the more likely it'll become "top-of-the-mind." Ultimately, it can result in potentially higher conversion rates and increased profitability.

Why must you enhance brand reach and visibility? 

Enhancing your brand's reach and visibility is crucial to building customer trust. The more visible your brand is, the higher its likelihood of earning the trust of consumers. 

When customers trust your brand, chances are, they'll purchase your products or services and recommend them to others. Higher visibility also helps your brand become the "preferred" choice once consumers are ready to buy. Provided that you keep delivering high-quality goods or services, you'll remain highly visible, recognizable, and relevant to your target market.

What brand promotion mistakes should you avoid? 

Inconsistencies in your branding and marketing campaigns, such as using multiple logos, different taglines, and varying slogans, can confuse customers. If this happens, they may be unable to recognize or remember your brand. A lack of recognition or recall can make them unlikely to pay for your goods or services, resulting in many missed business opportunities.

Not having a clear unique selling proposition (USP) is another branding mistake to avoid. Instead, be proud of what makes your brand stand out and the customer problems and pain points it can resolve. Ensure that you communicate this clearly when developing your brand campaigns. 

Start Spreading the Good News About Your Brand

From SEO to social media, collaborations, and the use of promotional items that provide practical utility, these are some of the cost-effective ways to increase brand visibility without breaking the bank. Consider implementing them as early as today so you can start making waves and getting your target audience's attention. 

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This article was contributed by Next Net and published on cdapress.com as part of our contributed content program. Contributed content provides perspectives from businesses and organizations. These contributions help support local journalism through financial support, ensuring we can continue delivering trusted local reporting to our readers.