Improving brand visibility is crucial for building a loyal customer base. The initial step towards winning customer loyalty is to ensure that your brand and the products or services you offer are noticed by potential customers. Simply put, people cannot develop an attachment to something they are not yet familiar with. Therefore, enhancing brand awareness is a vital first step in cultivating brand loyalty.
But what are the best ways to establish your brand’s visibility, especially amid today’s digital clutter?
One especially effective way is to utilize public relations in the digital space to appeal to your audience in organic (and consequently, non-offputting) ways.
Through digital PR.
What is digital PR?
The world is very much connected to the internet now. According to a 2023 report by Statista, the Philippines is the leading country when it comes to internet consumption, so it’s no surprise that companies big and small will turn to it when it comes to publicizing their brands. That’s why the importance of local digital brand campaigns has exponentially increased throughout the years.
It’s a no-brainer for PR to move from relying on traditional means to finally entering the online domain. Digital PR takes advantage of online means, particularly social media platforms, to promote brands and their products or services. Of course, there are a lot of similarities between traditional and digital PR. Any company would do well to harness the power of both.
Many strategies used for digital PR campaigns rely on what’s on the internet: search engine optimization (SEO), influencer marketing, social media, and the like. It also employs content marketing through carefully-crafted but witty captions, humanized stories, relevant hashtags, and quality links. With an odious amount of digital work piled on top of everything a traditional company already does, some businesses turn to outsource their PR — digital or otherwise – to digital PR firms to help hasten and significantly improve a brand’s visibility among and even outside its target audience.
Here’s a glimpse of how digital PR works its magic to achieve high brand awareness through online means.
- Issue press releases – Major broadsheets, like those in the Philippines, have online counterparts as part of their full digital pivot. This keeps consumers and stakeholders at every touchpoint – traditional and digital — updated on whatever is going on with the brand, like new product releases or upcoming events.
- Gather online reviews and interviews – Called social proof, this establishes credibility and builds customer trust on the brand through other consumers’ testaments.
- Publishing online content (blogs, articles) for backlinking – This strategic network of links is twofold: the articles containing these links usually provide relevant knowledge to its target market, and by being the one to dole out the information, their authority in the field is established thereby helping them rank high on search engine results.
- Creating guest posts containing links from a brand’s website – Similar to the above, the benefit is also twofold, but the blog article lives on a website apart from your brand’s own. This helps drive up website traffic and boosts ranking on search engines, too.
- Collaborating with influencers – This relatively new marketing arm utilizes strategic partnerships with people that influence certain niches and help with increasing online mentions and attracting new consumers.
These are just some of the ways digital PR uses to get audiences to notice your brand and talk about you. Now, how can these tactics be implemented effectively?
What are the best PR tips to boost your brand awareness through digital PR?
How Can Digital PR Improve Brand Visibility?
The power of social media must not be underestimated when it comes to increasing brand awareness. With the help of digital PR, your brand can definitely see a spike in your brand visibility especially when it’s handled by experts.
Here are 7 strategies digital PR specialists employ to guarantee that your brand will catch your target audience’s attention!
- Ensure a consistent brand aesthetic – Brands have to stand out on their own to be recognizable against their competition. The easiest way to separate themselves from others is through their logo, which is composed of brand colors and brand font.
More than a logo that perfectly encapsulates the brand’s identity, its presentation must also be one of a kind. A good example is the local beauty brand, Kayu Beauty. Both the product color palette and the branding color palette exude everything it is to be kayumanggi. That’s consistency!
- Use correct brand voice – Brands must be extremely careful with how they present themselves on social media. If they happen to use the wrong tone, the audience will get turned off and the brand may even receive flak for it. Digital PR experts know which tone to use for every caption or post to ensure that the brand is represented well and that the target market is engaged at the same time.
For example, TikTok, the more laid-back social media platform, allows content and captions to be as casual or playful as needed. On LinkedIn, however, a more formal tone is encouraged.
- Create relatable content – If your customers’ experiences don’t resonate with the brand’s content, they will most likely ignore it. Digital PR experts explore trends to make sure that the content they put out is relatable and shareable by their target market. This guarantees audience engagement, especially when the call to action is sharing something or tagging friends on the post.
- Express brand values – A study by The Horizon Media’s Finger on the Pulse revealed that 81% of millennials want companies to contribute to good societal practices. BBMG found that it is important for Gen Z to support businesses that are vocal about social issues. In fact, Gen Z is willing to pay more just to buy from progressive brands.
This means that businesses must step up their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategies. Digital PR can effectively communicate a brand’s CSR and tell its audience that they genuinely care about a certain cause. Additionally, digital PR teams ensure that a brand’s CSR aligns with the interest of the brand’s target market, therefore encouraging them to support the brand more.
- Ensure consistency – There are thousands of pieces of content produced on social media every day. It’s easy to be overshadowed, so a brand must be consistently putting out content to always show up in news feeds and timelines. More than that, digital PR still takes advantage of email marketing, so constantly sending emails is needed. Regular updates keep your consumers hooked on whatever the brand is going to release.
- Increase collaborations – Digital PR is all about online interaction. Aside from getting organic attention from the brand’s own posts and audience, PR specialists also facilitate collaborations with influencers and other brands. This helps in increasing leads and sales as well as building brand credibility. These collabs feature website links where consumers can check out the brand’s website or buy directly from them.
- Launch social media giveaways – People won’t shy away from a reward! Social media giveaways are a surefire way to get more engagement and brand awareness. You can ask your audience to share their experience with the brand or mention multiple friends as an entry to your giveaway. This is most effective during holidays, especially when people are looking for gifts.
From a brand’s inception to its current state, PR will always be a huge part of its journey. The role of PR is needed now more than ever because of the volatility of internet trends and people’s movement on social media. If you want your brand awareness to skyrocket, you should definitely invest in digital PR!