Marketing Strategies That Work to Create Brand Awareness

REEFExperiential Marketing Blog
brand
Brand awareness is a strategy game. At launch, to maintain relevance, to reinvigorate public passion for your brand, you need strategy. Captivating an audience and generating positive talk is a critical mass game and an engagement game. The very best strategic approaches capture both. From a trickle approach to brand expansion and from small and segmented campaigns with high frequency, to making a major brand splash with an electric and high visibility campaign, the methodology behind the goal reaching measures is critical. Here are some components that will get you to where you’re going.

Using Influencers for Brand Awareness

The concept of influence feels new, but is really the oldest kind of marketing. We have always wanted to get our products into the hands of people that love to talk about what they love. The introduction of social media to these efforts has created a level of amplification that is unprecedented in the marketing industry. What was once exclusively reserved budget for high production value assets has quickly become a rapid fire word of mouth style strategy that sells. Perhaps the most notable element of influence is in our desire to have what they have, do what they do. It is in this vein that the keeping up the jones’ concept morphing into the most popular family in our digital culture “Keeping up with the Kardashians” shines a light on our need to have, perform, experience and showcase what our digital idols have. We deploy influencers into the marketplace in a variety of ways, but a critical mass of highly influential people experiencing a physical marketing installation at the same time and sharing that experience online is a rapid results generator.

Social Media Presence

Social media is the basic necessity of any brand marketing initiatives. If it isn’t on social, it didn’t happen. More specifically in 2019, if it isn’t on Instagram, who cares? Your social reach and growth can be organic and fast pending the right content approach and a clever alignment with brands and influential social media users. Accounts to capture major inspiration from include MVMT watches, The June Motel and other well branded and curated feeds with personality. It is critical that your brand conventions extend beyond your logo and originally designed assets, and blends into every facet of your identity as it is designed to be consumed. Consider the work we did for the Rose Picnic. This was a millennial centric event that needed to gain rapid digital momentum and had a lot of elements that could be the signature details to get it shared and often. Our social media lead-in was highly indicative of the event to come and the physical deployment delivered on instagrammable features that people wanted in their feeds. In year one we saw incredible share volume and year two had questions about previous event inclusions that weren’t featured in the second installation. That is how badly people wanted their social media to be flooded with our content. Think about social from the perspective of what lives on your feed, but also in how your content is going to live on the feeds of your attendees or viewers. How are they going to take your creative concepts, your brand positions, your signatures, and turn them into beautiful, shareable content.

Retail Experience for Exposure

Linking your successful online media campaigns to a physical, “real-life” event is a great way to solidify consumer support. Doing this in the retail environment is a double win. Retail events are often associated with pop-up shops and tastings, but they can be more. Consider these events any interactive experience, the more creative, the better! The most compelling part of a retail event is the fact that you are in the same retail oriented environment with your potential consumer. Consider the potential wow factor of an outstanding display, great point of purchase marketing materials and a strong visual and concept alignment with your brand. And then think about how that looks and feels to the consumers you are interacting with. Being memorable matters, being shareable matters more. With retail becoming more and more competitive, thinking outside the box will give you competitive edge; you want competitive edge. Hitting the right consumer market for your brand is a priority, but gaining ample amount of traction along the way is key for longevity. At Reef, we have teams of creatives behind the scenes that will work with your specific brand vision. Let’s get around the board room table and start thinking about how you’re going to change the landscape this year.