Marketing for startups is not for the faint of heart.
After all, it’s one thing to develop exceptional products and services, and it’s another to prove it to consumers. There should be a way to gain potential clients’ trust even if you’re the newcomer, right?
Fortunately, there’s an effective strategy to grow your leads, conversions, and revenue sustainably. If you’ve hit a sales plateau, it’s time to boost your brand authority. Read on to discover how it can help you take your business to the next level.
Importance of Brand Authority
Brand authority refers to the trust consumers bestow on a brand. Ultimately, the goal is to become a thought leader in your industry — a person or entity with an outstanding command of a particular subject.
Naturally, megacorporations like Apple, Louis Vuitton, and Nike are thought leaders in their own right. Apart from earning massive profits, these companies enjoy the power to impact behaviors.
Think about it. Every time these brands release a new product, fans from all over the world fight tooth and nail to get their hands on it. They will spend thousands of dollars just to sport the latest phones, purses, and athletic shoes, whether they need them or not.
When you have this degree of influence even on a niche group, you can enjoy various benefits, including:
- Increased consumer trust: Your brand authority makes customers feel that you understand their pains and that you can solve their problems. Even if your competitors offer similar products or services, people will choose your brand if you’ve established a reliable reputation.
- Loyalty: A loyal fan base can be the game-changer you need for your business. Applying the 80-20 Rule in marketing means 20% of avid brand fans make up 80% of your sales. These individuals spend more on your products or services, leave good reviews, and tell their family and friends about you.
- Enhanced SEO efforts: When you establish your top-level knowledge of a subject, you not only impress consumers but other companies as well. Creating thought-provoking, emotion-inducing content can help you gain backlinks, which helps search engines determine that your site is a dependable information source.
Brand Authority Tactics
There are many ways to improve your authority, including traditional and digital marketing strategies. However, given the cost-effectiveness of online tactics, they’re more suitable for startups.
Below are some foolproof ways to enhance your reputation as a trustworthy brand.
Determine Your Ideal Market
Many business owners forget that targeting is one of the most crucial factors in marketing. A good targeting strategy can be the difference between wasting resources on uninterested audiences and allocating portions of your budget to capture quality leads.
Knowing your audience involves determining their demographics, including their age, gender, location, online habits, and so on. However, it also pays to dig a little deeper with questions like these:
- What pain points do potential clients have?
- Can you address these needs?
- How will you communicate your unique selling proposition (USP) to them?
- Which content type will attract and engage them?
- Which online platforms do they frequent?
When you gather this information, your strategy won’t just be a shot in the dark. Instead, you can set targets and allot budgets accordingly.
Use Social Proof
Social proof is when your clients tell other users about your brand through platforms like online review sites. If you’re wondering how effective they are, let these online review statistics do the talking:
- Online reviews affect the purchase decisions of 93% of consumers.
- A whopping 31% of buyers are open to spending more on items with good reviews.
- Nine out of ten B2B purchasers are likely to try products or services after reading a positive testimonial.
- On the flip side, bad reviews have stopped 94% of consumers from completing a purchase.
- Only 13% of consumers will interact with a brand with a one or two-star rating.
Find ways to ask satisfied clients for honest reviews. This simple notion can do wonders for your credibility.
Practice Content Marketing
This branding article shares a jaw-dropping fact: A typical consumer sees anywhere between 4,000 – 10,000 digital ads daily. Because of all the digital clutter, your potential clients are usually in noise-canceling mode. They have developed natural filters that allow them to ignore irrelevant messages.
So, how will you stand out in this saturated environment? The answer: content marketing.
Content marketing — the process of creating valuable materials for particular audiences — has become the gold standard of digital marketing for startups. It’s an ideal way to stand out in a sea of competition even if you don’t have virtually unlimited budgets like multinational organizations do.
If you need content marketing inspiration, check out RedBull’s YouTube page. It’s an energy drink brand, but you won’t see them posting boring, repetitive, and irrelevant information such as ingredients, calorie content, or health benefits. Instead, they produce exciting videos that epitomize the word energy.
You can use various content types to attract quality leads, including videos, blogs, social media posts, ebooks, newsletters, etc. Make sure to develop high-quality materials to boost interest and social shares.
If you don’t have a dedicated team to develop a content marketing plan, consider hiring experts. It’s the fastest, most convenient way to reach new heights.
Grow Your Business Now
One of the best things about the internet era is that it gives organizations of all sizes and industries a chance to captivate their target audiences, no matter their budgets. If you play your cards right, you can grow your business by enhancing your reputation.
With dedicated marketing specialists on your side, you can perform industry research, inspire social proof, and create groundbreaking materials.
At TheSchuck.Agency, we develop a custom content plan that guarantees results in 60 days — at one-third of the cost of an employee.
