Brand awareness and link building; how they work together

Brand Demand is the volume of searches for the primary brand phrase over a set period and is essential to understanding if your brand is more or less in demand, than in previous years. For ecommerce brands, brand search is the most valuable source of traffic, with the highest conversion rate. However, across a broad range of sectors, brand demand is down. This is particularly noticeable within fashion and ecommerce, as more emerging brands enter the scene.

During this trying time, it is imperative that when brand loyalty is at an all-time low, and consumers have shorter attention spans, brands put a focus on consistently making use of building their brand awareness, using link acquisition.

Digital PR and Outreach could present a solution, due to its ability to work on raising brand awareness, while simultaneously building links that will benefit the brand’s visibility.

What Is Brand Awareness, And What Can It Do for Your Brand?

If done correctly, and utilising a multitude of channels and verticals, it can create brand loyalty, despite there being increasing data to suggest that customers nowadays are not loyal to any one brand.

What attributes to Brand Awareness?

Above the line activity has always been the spur for brand awareness. However, today’s customers have a very different journey to those of a decade or two ago, which can mostly be attributed to social media and the way people digest content in general. A customer’s journey is now more varied, while the target audience is more diverse and segmented.

Brands now have to work harder to compete in their sectors and while people have become ‘thriftier’ in their shopping, there are a variety of influencing factors that brands can do to build their brand awareness:

• Organic search visibility: It’s proven that people tend to click on the top search results when using a search engine – appearing in the top 10 on the first page will always be a focus for brands and digital marketing agencies alike.
• Social media: Statista predicts there to be a steady incline of social media users for future years, projected to increase from 2.65 billion in 2018 to 3.1 billion users in 2021.
• Paid media: Although a competitive space, there are a variety of ways a perfectly executed paid media and paid social strategy can create awareness, particularly around a large shopping event such as Black Friday.
• Influencers: Influencer marketing has steadily become a popular choice for many brands, however, there must be a suitable ROI.

Although many fashion/ecommerce brands have been focusing heavily on influencer marketing in recent years, research for BBC Radio 4 revealed that 82% of people admitted they weren’t always sure when an influencer had been paid to promote a product.

Organic search can help brands cut through the noise when their brand demand and brand search slips and make up for the rest through organic search rankings and therefore, is always the hidden gem a brand can have in their marketing toolkit.

For example:

If you have a perfume brand which no one is searching for by brand name but people are searching for particular types of perfume, link building and onsite SEO can help your brand to rank for those non-brand terms, such as ‘women’s summer perfumes’ but a particular product such as perfume, organic can help.

Once started well, the brand’s reputations typically end up speaking for themselves, but it should never be the be-all and end-all of a campaign.

Link Building Through Outreach

When brand demand is low, Outreach helps get your brand in front of the right audience, introducing them to a brand they may not know of/have considered, or reintroducing them to it if they have forgotten about it, while simultaneously building links to help SEO from an offsite perspective.

An offsite SEO strategy that incorporates link building and brand PR is the way forward

Gaining links organically to product pages and category pages can be a task that takes some time to achieve, but this is where the Outreach/Digital PR team excel with a flawless link building strategy, that helps improve rankings for our B2B, B2C clients.

Link building is a big factor behind boosting your page’s ranking for both branded and non-branded search terms and can ultimately help improve overall brand awareness. This may not be the primary KPI for a PR team, but it is always a factor that is considered, along with the types of publication links that are secured.

If you want help with your link building strategy, our Digital PR and Content Marketing Specialists can help you develop an award-winning plan. Get in touch to find out more about how we can work with you.