New brands’ mission-critical is getting people to notice them.
It can be harder than grabbing the attention of your junior high crush when they don’t even know you exist.
Alas, so much unrequited love…
But it doesn’t have to be that difficult to get your business some attention and love (in the way of leads and sales).
I mean, If you listen to the experts all you need is:
- A website
- A blog
- A Facebook Page
- To be a member of a Facebook Group
- An Instagram profile
- A Twitter account
- LinkedIn accounts (one for yourself and another for the company.
- A YouTube Channel
- A free offer to capture leads
- An email campaign
- A webinar
- A podcast
I can keep going if you’d like…
Who has time for all that? Not you, I bet. Not me either. How can you possibly tackle all that if you’re a new business?
Plus, which do you even start with? Good question.
Here’s the deal. Let’s get this prioritized right. Then I’ll share some tricks with you on how you can automate some of these tasks. That way, you won’t have to do them all on your own. Sound good?
Alright then, here’s what you need to do first:
Yes, you do need a website. Even if it’s just a simple landing page. You’ve got to have something that shows you’re legitimate. Depending on what your product or service is, you may need more than a page or two. Obviously, an e-commerce site is going to need product pages.
Here’s a trick for you. If you don’t have the funds for a full-blown website yet, just get a landing page set up. Feature your contact info, what you do and a form for them to contact you. You can state on the landing page that this is while your cool, new site is under construction. I’m going to share a piece of automation you can use with this landing page a little later.
Then, work on getting developing a blog page. This will enable you to showcase your area of expertise. However, you will have to have a full website (unless your business is being a blogger), that you are driving people back to so they can read your blog. The cool thing is there are a lot of sites that allow for automation to share your blog. Onlywire is a popular site that will submit each blog post for you to twenty different sites. Basically, write a blog, blast it everywhere. If you don’t have time to blog, then skip this for now. Just know that you can generate far greater brand awareness if you get quality content pushed out everywhere you can.
On to Social Media.
Let’s just lump all these bad boys together, shall we? You may or may not be familiar with social media scheduling and curating tools. Tools like Hootsuite and Buffer (and there are plenty more) are great to get your posts scheduled and then it automates the posting. You can write your own or “curate” content from other sites. Some tools will show you what’s popular inside the scheduling software (depending on your plan). I’m a huge fan of scheduling; I like to write up all my posts first, then get them all scheduled out. There’s another tool that will even recycle your posts, MeetEdgar. If you do this, over time, you’ll write fewer posts (assuming you want to post daily).
There is a built-in tool in LinkedIn called Sales Navigator and that will automate some of your prospecting. There are also a lot of tools to automate even more of your outreach. However, LinkedIn has been cracking down on profiles that are using that type of automation, so beware. It appears that LI is tracking Chrome Extensions, so do follow their terms of service. I saw someone post this in a FB Group I’m in about a warning they got:
Let’s move on to video. YouTube is probably going to be where you instinctively land first. There are a few things you can automate, such as your tags or a portion of your description and even sending out messages to other channels. I do not recommend automating any type of engagement as that will get you banned from YouTube if they see you are doing that.
“The problem is, YouTube gives you very little in the ways of analytics. If you spend money and time on developing a promotional video, it would be not to be able to measure its performance, no? “
When uploading a video to YouTube, you are effectively releasing it in to the ether. Even when you link to it on your site, you’ll be able to keep an eye on how many people watched it, and its like to dislike ratio. That’s about it.
That’s where video hosting platforms
come in. With a good video host, such as Cincopa, you will have access to advanced, yet easily comprehensible viewing data. You will know how much of each certain video was watched, who watched it, and whether a viewer left and then returned to watch it later. Based on the information you gather, you can automate emails to promising prospects. You can approach leads you know have shown interest in your business.
Now let’s move on to a Free Offer to capture leads. This goes hand in hand with email marketing (or at least when done properly). This is also what I was referring to earlier in the “website” section. Here’s how this works. You come up with a great free offer that has a lot of value. The type of value that will make someone want to give you their email to get that offer. Once they’ve done that, this is where the automation begins. And this is very powerful so pay close attention here. You want to write up an email series that adds even more value. This is a great way to build your brand. Then you drip that email series out over time. All email systems do this. And some allow you to use triggers or tags to get even more personal or specific based on what a user does. Check out Active Campaign, Hubspot, or even Aweber and see what’s best for you. This is a strategy you want to use.
There are also many types of “funnels” with different offers that have full-blown automation. Plus, software platforms that take care of all of that. That is a story for another day though as it’s too much to add in here.
Webinars are a great way to build your brand if you’re willing to put in the time. The cool part about this strategy is that you can totally automate this. Now, you really should run your webinars live first to make sure they resonate with your audience. But once you’ve got something solid, put that puppy on auto-pilot and offer webinars on-demand. It’s really up to you if you want to let people know they are recorded. Software like Webinar Jam and Ever Webinar make that pretty easy.
Finally, we get to Podcasts. You can’t really automate the creation of the podcast as you do actually have to speak of course. However, you can also have those scheduled out to play at a later date. Not everyone does their podcasts live. And if you don’t have an audience yet, it really doesn’t matter. At some point, you should strive for live podcasts so you can engage with your audience in real-time.
I’d recommend exploring Cincopa in this regard as well. A complete digital asset management solution, Cincopa’s platform can do to for your podcasts and webinars what it does for your videos. As your business grows, you will realize how important it is to maximize every inbound and outbound content channels in terms of lead generation. The more you know about how people engage with your webinars and videos, the better chance you’ll have of converting them when you approach them.
And there you have it my friends. These are some automation options you can use to build brand awareness for your business, no matter if you are brand new or been around for a while.
Author bio: Angela Moore is president of Six Degrees Digital Media. After working in online sales and marketing since 2000, she opened the virtual doors of Six Degrees Digital Media in 2010. Six Degrees Digital Media offers done for you services as well as courses and resources for those who want to take on marketing on their own. You can find out more at https://www.sixdegreesdigitalmedia.com
