7 Ways You Can Build Brand Awareness for an E-Commerce Brand

Brand awareness is crucial for any brand but more so for an e-commerce brand. Since the competition is so cut-throat, you need people to know exactly who you are and what you stand for as well as your products. In today’s digital era, knowing how to start an ecommerce business is crucial for entrepreneurs looking to establish a successful online presence.

Having a recognizable brand helps with generating more revenue, hiring new employees, and getting potential investors on board. 

Here are 7 things you can try to build brand awareness – 

1. Add some free merch to the order

For your first set of customers or a loyal group of customers, you can try an approach where you offer them free company merch like stickers, hoodies, stationery, or other apparel that has your branding. This way, these customers then become your brand’s micro-ambassadors and let other people know about you. 

You don’t have to make a huge investment for this because there are many print on demand services you can try. A merch maker allows you to upload design files and recreate them on any number of objects. 

2. Do a giveaway

When starting out, giveaways can be the ticket to building brand awareness. Invite users to post about your brand and select one or a few lucky people and give them a free product. You can also partner with another brand and do a joint giveaway. Make sure you have a clear goal. Sometimes giveaways are also a way to increase sales. But if your objective is to increase brand awareness, look out for an increase in traffic and an increase in clicks for branded keywords. 

3. Work with an influencer

Influencer marketing is apparently going to be the way forward for a lot of industries. A lot of fashion brands have leveraged the power of influencers regularly and sold out products within minutes. If you recall the infamous Fyre Festival, you may remember the hype around the festival thanks to influencers and how everyone was talking about it. While you can ignore the Fyre festival’s inevitable failure, the brand awareness campaign was something people talked about for a long time. 

4. Send PR kits

If you want to get your products out there, another way to build brand awareness is to find influencers in the niche you are in and send them free PR kits. These kits can be used by them while doing a haul video or a review video. Even if they don’t necessarily like all your products, you can still get some social media mentions. 

5. Leverage social media marketing

Along with a strong organic strategy that includes creating content for the platform, the right hashtags, posting schedules, and visually striking templates, you may also need to pay attention to paid ads. 

For e-commerce brands with hundreds of products, it can often be quite difficult to target the right audience with the right creativity. Facebook Ads Manager allows you to set up dynamic ads as a workaround to this problem. You can create variations of the ad at scale and leverage the ad network to get it out in front of the right people. 

Other platforms like TikTok and now Instagram also allow you to run ads that appear in between organic content. For instance, Instagram now has Reels ads. You may see an ad pop up in between the usual content. You can also choose this as your objective when you are setting up the ad. Instead of looking at an increase in revenue, look at an increase in impressions and reach. 

6. Invest in content marketing

Any brand that is looking to build brand awareness needs content. While it may seem unorthodox for an e-commerce brand to be putting out content, it is not unusual. A lot of brands have started adjacent pages to increase their brand awareness. For instance, if you sell beauty products, your main page or another page can just talk about makeup and makeup trends and share valuable information with makeup enthusiasts. 

7. Try search engine optimization

Search engine optimization for e-commerce brands is a whole different ball game. There are hundreds of products usually, so that has to be taken into account, while the initial setup of the website has to have good technical search engine optimization. 

All of the product pages should be optimized for the right keywords and ensure all the basic on-page SEO items are ticked off. Since the e-commerce industry is a red ocean, you may also want to invest in off-page SEO, which is getting other publications to notice you and write about you or recommend your product(s) to their readers. 

All in all

Building brand awareness is a slow burn. It takes time, strategy and consistency to pull it off. It is best to have a branding guideline to ensure omnichannel consistency so that everyone on the team is aware of how to position the brand online. Your employees are also your biggest asset. You can create an employee advocacy program and reward them for sharing company updates.