Brand awareness is something marketers used to typically apply the most to consumer facing brands where buying is much more emotional. For tech and SaaS companies, the focus has been on B2B sales rather than branding and brand awareness. Now that selling has moved online and big decision making processes starts with a simple search, brand awareness has become extremely important.
Some of the biggest SaaS companies have recognizable brands and they stay top of mind as authoritative in their fields. Hubspot dominates CRM and marketing and sales automation. Shopify has a recognizable brand for e-Commerce.
With so many options for customers to choose from, staying top of mind as a brand is a key objective for product marketers. Especially with SaaS products, customers may search and explore products for a long time before they make a decision with their teams on what to implement. Having strong brand awareness helps your product stay relevant during that process.
Here are the 6 easiest ways to improve brand awareness:
Use your current customers to promote your product.
Getting your brand seen online can be extremely expensive. Customers have to see your brand normally 7 times to remember it. Any way you can reach your target audience organically is ideal. There are some little growth hack-y tricks your team can use and literally build into your product to get the word out there to the right target customer. One easy way is to include your product logo and watermark when customers create something or share something from your product. For example, when someone sends an email from Mailchimp (without being on a Pro plan), it says “Sent with Mailchimp”. Gmail and iPhone both did this to grow their user base as well. The end result you are going for is getting your users to share your product with their networks without any conscious effort required from them.
Apple adds their branding each time you send an email
Create a focused, informative company blog.
For SaaS companies, the likely place leads will begin running into you is through their research. To appear where people are searching, you have to be focused on creating branded content that is targeted for your ideal customer and valuable to them. You want your brand to be there with the answers every time they look up a solution to one of their pain points. The key is to be a step ahead in terms of what your target buyer personas are searching for and create interesting, engaging content around that. This is both creative and technical. You want to pay attention to trending search terms and keywords that you want to target and rank well for. Researching keywords is really simple using tools like SEMrush, SpyFu, and Google Trends to see what competitors are ranking for and what your target audiences are searching. Your content should be structured and your pages configured to support this. But additionally, it’s about getting in the minds of your target customers and creating content that is useful for them and catches them in the buying process to boost brand awareness.
Have a brand personality and share it online.
People are visual and we identify companies through their branding more than ever now that there are far more mediums than ever for companies to make contact with customers. With the additional of social media, we are even more aware of how a brand looks, sounds like, and how it makes people feel. Some brands are more serious and inspiring while others are casual and friendly. This carries beyond social media. We all have a sense of the “personalities” of top companies and they make sure that we don’t forget them. As a company, it’s important as you’re putting time and money into marketing and advertising to have an established brand personality. Some examples of what creates a brand personality are a consistent color palette and fonts, a tone or style of communication (think of Mailchimp’s conversational tone), and any other little details you include in touch points across platforms with leads and customers. A really strong example is Product Hunt’s use of GIFs, cat pictures, and emojis. You know when a post, message, or email is theirs.
Share micro-content via social media to stay top of mind.
It’s a little painful whenever you see a brand that is trying to use social media just to use social media. It’s purpose shouldn’t be to be a place where your team posts a new ad everyday. If you do use social media, you should choose platforms that make sense for your target audience and a frequency that makes sense as well. For SaaS companies, LinkedIn and Twitter tend to be the most viable. Next, you want to share content that is resourceful and interesting to your target audience that makes them want to keep following you. Anything overly sales-y and they will not want to keep in touch. Repurposing blog content and turning it into pieces of micro-content that you can share on social media. Examples of micro-content are short videos, infographics, quote posts, stats, tips, etc. Anything that can be quickly digested and informative. This helps position your brand as authoritative in your industry. Your social media should entice your target customers to stay familiar with your brand and revisit your site. Hubspot does an excellent job at this on their social pages, particularly on Instagram and Twitter.
Leverage the personal brands of key employees.
Online, it can be hard for people to connect and “get to know” your brand. Leveraging personal brands of those within your organization can be helpful in building brand awareness with real voices and faces. You can focus efforts of content for your key players like your CEO and CTO. Having them share their expertise, tips, advice, and predictions for your industry help position the brand as super relevant in your industry. People also love to know the story behind your brand. Sharing your story and growth overtime can help potential customers feel connected to your brand. The more people have an emotional reaction to a brand, the more memorable it is. People within your organization can share podcasts, personal blog posts, and regular posts on social media about the company and journey.
A few great examples are Brian Halligan (@bhalligan) and Dharmesh Shah (@dharmesh) from Hubspot who do a great job at sharing interesting info, personal posts, and company info to their collective 300k+ Twitter followers.
Use targeted notifications and emails.
This seems intuitive, but building brand awareness means keeping in touch. Once you’ve attracted potential leads and followers, you have to keep up to keep them aware of what’s going on. How you choose to keep them updated can either make you informative and top of mind or annoying and “unsubscribed” to. You want to reach users and potential users in a way that is intuitive and useful for them. When you do send update emails, they should not just be about sales and your product. Send updates for new useful content and resources for your audience. When you do send updates, make sure they are in an intuitive way.
Keeping users in the loop about product updates is important for keeping them engaged and onboard as your platform changes and improves for them. Beamer is perfect for keeping users in the loop with changes. Beamer is a news feed that sits within your site or your app where you can share announcements for just about anything in a simple, intuitive way. Beamer is a really visual way to share updates with pictures, videos, and GIFs. You can activate push notifications so that every time you post an update, those who have opted in get them sent straight to them. They can click back to your site or app and check the update our in the Beamer feed. This gets much more engagement than emails. You can also segment Beamer updates so that they are tailored for the demographic, location, language, and past behavior on your site so updates are super relevant. Staying informative, interesting, but not annoying is key to boosting brand awareness.
Improving brand awareness takes consistency and intention from your team. It can be time consuming but in the long run, brand awareness can separate you from competitors and bring you exponentially more leads. For an easy way to stay top of mind for your users, try Beamer on your site today.
