Getting your brand noticed isn’t super complicated. Improving your brand visibility boils down to picking the best course of action for your business and showing up. However, I do understand that it can be tricky or intimidated to get the ball rolling, especially so, if you’re blanking on new ideas to try out.
That’s exactly why I’ve put together 7 different ideas you can try right now. I’ve even created a part checklist part workbook on working through any of these 7 suggestions. It’s a free printable too! You can download it here.
I do want to make one thing clear. This article aims to help you improve your visibility and grow your audience and community. This isn’t about effective marketing tactics to close a sale. It’s about letting more people know that your company exists and remember your name!
1. Create a referral and reward program
What you want to consider doing is coming up with a reward program for referrals and recurring clients. You can give discounts or offer extra services free of charge, as a bonus. Publish the program details on your website. Make it known! A rewards program works wonders for recurring clients. It lets them know you appreciate their business and are willing to, well, reward them for it. Tell about your new rewards program to all your current clients (especially those near the end of their services with you). Additionally, include it as part of your client offboarding process!
A referral program is different because it gives a monetary incentive for anyone to send a client your way. It can be a percentage of the sale, like 10%. Or, a fixed amount like $500. Once again, publish this on your website and tell everyone! In the past, I looked for posts on Facebook about collaborations or referrals from women in complementary fields such as copywriters, marketers, or web developers. I’m serious, tell everyone (just don’t spam)!
Consumers are 92% more likely to trust their peers over advertising when it comes to purchasing decisions.
Joey Little
Do make the rewards worthwhile. Giving someone $50 on a $2,000 sale isn’t going to incentivize much. However, even $250 is most certainly worth the money, and it’s only 12.5% of the $2,000 deal. For starter, this is just one way to improve your brand visibility!
2. Create a free video course aka masterclass
Pick a topic that you can easily teach and create a short class for it. It could be a webinar, a masterclass or even a course on Skillshare. Pick your topic based on the type of people you’d love to follow you. Again, this is about improving your brand visibility and building up your audience. The pitch of these videos is to get more people knowing your name. They can be a set of 3 or 4 short, 5-minute videos. Or, a single 30 – 60 minutes one instead. It’s up to you. My only rule is that the video is valuable and useful.
These are great because you record it once and let people watch them over and over again. Make a landing page for the course where you give people instant access as soon as they give you their email. Here is my landing page for “5 step game plan to grow your business through your website”. These are great to promote in Facebook groups for freebie callouts!
At the end of the video, don’t ask for a sale. You can ask for a share or at the very least ask to book a free consultation. The video isn’t meant to sell anything; it’s to help promote you and boost your brand visibility!
3. Be a guest
Be a guest speaker at an event, meet up or conference. Be a guest speaker at a YouTube show, Facebook Live or a podcast. Be a guest post author. The idea here is to reach out to other business owners who have a platform that reaches the kind of audience you’d like to reach too!
You don’t have to aim big either. All power to you if you can book yourself on MarieTV, but you can also do a lot with a lesser know show too. It’s about the quality of their platform and their audiences. Again, scour Facebook groups for collaborations. Do some research on what platforms you’d love to appear and pitch them. Michelle Kulas did a fantastic guest post for ProBlogger about guest post pitching! So meta.
Last month I recorded 4 podcasts, including on with Tali Love on how I couldn’t find work for 9 months. I also had a guest post published on Elley Mae’s blog about how to build a magnetic brand as a blogger or influencer.
A huge general audience might have a small percentage of people who are interested in what you have to say. A smaller audience of people who are following a specific topic that you happen to be knowledgeable about, however, will give you a larger percentage of active listeners.
Kai Davis, owner of Double Your Audience
I highly recommend you download the free printable I’ve put together for this post. It’s part checklist part workbook. It walks you through each of these ideas step by step, including how to boost your visibility by becoming a guest!
4. Collaborate and partner
This idea for boosting your brand visibility builds from the last one. It’s all about collaborating and partnering with others! Now, this could also mean being guests on each other blogs and podcasts, but I have something else in mind. Consider working on something together, aka collaborating on creating new content. The most common way for businesses to partner is to run a give away together! That’s a fantastic idea because you both get access to each others’ audiences. However, it doesn’t have to stop there.
Strategic alliances are probably the most overlooked form of offline marketing and, yet, they’re one of the most meaningful. Two heads are better than one and, in many cases, two companies are better than one–especially when they combine resources or share expertise in order to build new business.
Olga Mizirahi, What Teaming Up With Another Company Can Do for Your Business
You can also create content together such as a video series, a new YouTube channel, an online course, a book, printable resources, a planner… It’s up to you whether you’re interested in selling a product or giving it out for free. The bottom line is you’re teaming up with another business so that both of you gain access to each other’s audiences to build both of your brand visibilities.
5. Always have a link back to yourself
Go through all of your platforms and social media accounts. Your goal is to make sure you have a link back to your website or current promotion on every one of them. Including your personal accounts too. Scour Facebook groups and share your freebies, your blog posts, and services (when appropriate)! I’m part of many groups that do those rotating posts such as Twitter Tuesdays, and I must say it helps a lot! I’ve met many women on there, including those for whom I did all of my guest appearances. (I do realize I might have to write a separate blog post about the power of Facebook groups as they came up a lot today!)
Additionally, make sure to promote in your email signatures! This is crucial for your business email but throw it in your personal one too. You never know! In my email signature, I have a link to my website and a link to my most up to date blog post! For you, it could be your latest podcast release or a new webinar! Maybe an announcement about your latest collaboration?!
6. Become a sponsor
Sponsoring for smaller events can give you access to quality audiences. This is unlike larger events where the audience is more general. Smaller events also cost significantly less. It can be affordable especially if you’ve got a low budget! Although I’ve been using the term events here, don’t take it too literally. You can sponsor so many different things such as a podcast, a meetup or a conference (yes, actual events!). But, you can also sponsor a community project, a non-profit, a contest or even a retreat! Conferences and meetups often have sponsorship tiers where some include a spot for you in the event (such as being a guest speaker)!
Additionally, many organizations do take in-kind sponsorship. This is where you donate your services instead of paying cash. Just another option to consider. It all depends on how much you’re willing to spend.
Supporting a good cause not only provides businesses with convenient advertising, it also creates positive publicity that encourages potential customers to choose your business over not-so-generous competitors. The coolest part is that you don’t need a big budget to make a big sponsorship splash.
Drew Hendricks, How To Boost Your Small Business Through a Sponsorship
7. Create your own meetup group
Local meetups are super popular! I’m confident you can organize a monthly or weekly meetup in your community with great success too. It’s a fantastic way to meet new and like-minded people. Building an in-person community also counts as boosting your brand visibility.
People love feeling like they belong, to be part of a club and to, well, meet others! This is a great way to create your own platform and invite others as partners, sponsors, collaborators or guests! Hey, let them come to you too! Make it a club, make it a regular and consistent thing anyone can easily attend. This is a perfect idea for those of you who have a local service-based business such as a yoga or massage studio. Just to give you an idea, the meetups don’t have to be exclusively about yoga or whatever you do. It can be complementary or broader topic such as overall well being.
8. Protip: keep up an email list for brand visibility
Surpris! I’ve got a bonus protip for you as idea number 8!
Investing in social media is a good idea. It does help you grow a following, find new customers and the like. However, it is borrowed territory! A few years back Facebook did a rather consequential bate and switch. They encouraged every business to create a business page and gather as many followers and like as possible. Shortly after, they made those businesses pay to gain access to all those people they worked so hard to gain! Since Facebook owns Instagram, I imagine they will do the exact same thing soon. My point is that you need to invest in email marketing.
Email can be used thoughtfully to build loyalty and trust in your brand. Email marketing is important for building relationships with prospects, leads, current customers, and even past customers because it gives you a chance to speak directly to them, in their inbox, at a time that is convenient for them. Be friendly and personable. You are not invading their space if you have chosen your message and your recipient wisely.
Inbound Rocket, 6 reasons why email marketing is important for your internet marketing
When you collect emails, you’re building a following on your own platform of people who have given explicit consent on hearing directly from you. It’s the most powerful and beneficial marketing tool. There are plenty of statistics about this out there. If you want to learn more about the importance of email marketing, may I suggest reading about Paul Jarvis’ story? For every dollar he invests in email marketing, he gets back $120. You read that right. An ROI of 120%.
You are putting in a tremendous amount of effort into promoting yourself and improving your brand visibility. Use email marketing to capture the interest of these new people! It’s such an excellent way to keep a connection with your new and existing audience and community as you keep growing!
The takeaway
As you can see, there are many different ways to boost your brand visibility. I do hope that one of those piqued our interest. The bottom line is that whatever you do, you just have to stick to it. You can’t appear as a guest on a single podcast or host a single meetup, call it a day, and expect excellent results!
To make thing a little bit easier on you, I’ve put together a quick printable for you. It’s part checklist part workbook that will help you get started on your journey to better brand visibility! It’s filled with questions to help you think through how to get to most out of your brand visibility efforts!
