As the web becomes increasingly saturated, breaking through the noise can be tough.
From scrutinising your competition for opportunities, to allowing customers a glimpse behind the brand, enhancing your reputation is crucial to standing out.
Below are five ways to ensure you do just that.
- Analyse your competitors
Competitor analysis is paramount to, not only, building a comprehensive strategy, but ensuring your marketing trumps that of your rivals.
By examining the efforts of your competitors and determining where their strengths and weaknesses lie, you can identify gaps and opportunities for quick wins of your own.
Learn from their mistakes by avoiding campaigns yielding low ROI, and use their successes to build something even better.
- Know your audience
Producing something of value to your audience is vital for building trust.
Use your analytics data, as well as insights gleaned from competitor research, to create content of worth.
Rank tracking tool, AccuRanker, recently launched their Google Grump index, which monitors fluctuations in Google’s algorithm.
Indexes similar to this do exist, but the team behind AccuRanker noticed that current tools didn’t allow users to filter by country and device, so wanted to build something that added value to their customers.
Perhaps the most notable improvement is the ability to sign up to notifications when rankings are fluctuating significantly. They clearly know their audience – of busy SEOs, committed to monitoring updates, but short on time – and so provided them with something useful.
- Design a unique logo
Not only are logos and mascots one of the easiest ways to ensure you’re remembered, they also help to humanise your brand; increasing customer trust and loyalty.
From animals, like the Frosties tiger, to robots, including the Android logo – even aliens (think Reddit) – if your logo has a face, it tends to appear friendlier, therefore more trustworthy.
Your mascot will become the face of your company, so dedicate time to ensuring it stands out. A poorly designed logo can have huge repercussions; customers aren’t big fans of change, as proven in the cases of GAP and Airbnb.
An audience will use your logo to try to understand who you are, so think about how you can integrate your core values into it. Fonts and colour choices might dictate wider business and marketing themes, whilst the logo itself will inevitably form a huge part of your brand identity.
- Invite people behind the scenes
It’s crucial for a brand to retain its humanity and allow customers to see those running it.
The best way to do this is by utilising social channels to offer behind the scenes access.
Audiences love knowing what the people they are talking to look like, are interested in, and what really goes on in the office.
Quick wins come in the form of documenting office fundraisers, team building events and jumping on viral videos (think Harlem Shake). But, long term, you need a game plan.
Digital marketing agency, RocketMill, regularly share office antics on social channels, including pranks, fashion faux pas and birthday celebrations; all of which help humanise, build trust, and allow them to stand out.
- Focus on quality, not quantity
The importance of quality over quantity is increasing as the landscape’s focus on content marketing grows.
As Google continue to work on improving search results and reducing spam, content needs to be totally relevant and applicable to your audience.
Competitor analysis, as mentioned, can identify gaps and opportunities, so take advantage of these and build something of worth, as opposed to a quick traffic driver.
Standing out from the crowd is getting harder as the web becomes increasingly diluted.
Ensuring you’re heard is tough, so by making your brand likeable and trustworthy, you’re on your way to building advocates and increasing loyalty, enabling you to stand out and be remembered.