At the beginning of your startup journey, getting your brand out there can be one of your biggest challenges. So how do you get people talking about your product or service in a way that is effective, low cost and boosts brand advocacy?

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Here is a marketing expert’s guide on how to maximise press opportunities and boost brand awareness.

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Grow through your community.

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Building a solid community around your brand can help sustain a strong connection between you and your users, increasing brand advocacy. Word of mouth is still one of the most powerful marketing tools out there, so if you can build a community that can rally behind your product you’ll be ensuring marketing success in the long term.

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       1. Go back to basics

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Know what your purpose and goals are and what you are trying to achieve for your audience and prospective customers. A community focuses on shared values, common interests and exchange so it’s important to think about what your role is in that community and how you can add value.

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        2. Start a conversation

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A community is centred around discussion and reciprocal relationships. So how do you grow a community? By starting conversations and offering solutions to their problems through valuable content.

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       3. Know your customer

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Carry out 30-minute customer phone interviews, surveys and get really specific about what compels and converts your community from a human perspective. Figure out the triggers, emotions and challenges they face that bring them to you. Once you have these data points, as a startup, you are able to fulfil these needs and communicate your product's value.

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       4. Create useful content

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Produce content that provides answers to your community's questions as people will want to engage with things that benefit them. Create content that adds value such as, demos, educational resources and guides that reflect your customer needs. Not only will this boost your authority within your community’s space but it will also help increase conversion

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       5. Community management

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Once you’ve begun building your community, it's important to maintain it through community management as well as not forgetting your prospective customers on the outside. Balance the need of nurturing your existing audience and the need to constantly be bringing in new prospective customers to the top of the marketing funnel.

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Drive earned media through influential voices and press

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PR and marketing are not one and the same but are complementary. Marketing tells the world you’re amazing; PR is getting other people to tell the world you’re amazing. Remember, building trust and maintaining relationships with journalists and publications is just as important as providing newsworthy stories that are timely, useful and beneficial.

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       1. Have your story polished and ready to go

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You need to be able to articulate your product or service and messaging with proof points sitting behind them. Tell a compelling founder story, if this doesn’t come naturally to you, you can outsource an experienced copywriter. This is an important element of your brand strategy framework and will also add to your bank of content as PRs need to see what you’re doing.

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       2. Proof is essential

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Journalists trust PRs that can give them useful and factual information, think about your community and your social proof. Do video testimonials about how your solutions helped your customers, have you taken any surveys that provide relevant and useful insight and data. Show you’re an expert through evidenced qualifications, research and your credentials - show that your customers care about the world around you, this makes for a compelling story.

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       3. Make it easy for people to vouch for you

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How easy is it for your users to share your app or product, could it be more visual? By having a product that is shareable, you could take full advantage of your user networks to increase social proof and credibility, giving the press a fully formed story they can run with.

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       4. Find the right publication for you

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If your business is a food brand make sure you’re talking to a publication that is about food. Align your brand marketing by understanding the journalist's audience as well as your own and seek out those intersections to offer them something beneficial. When initiating contact, remember to speak to journalists on a friendly, human level - you’re reaching out to a person, not the organisation itself.

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Make the most out of your content

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The easiest way to make the most out of your content is by repurposing it across many different social assets.

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       1. Rework your content

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Think about how you can transform long-form reports into an email nurturing sequence or a ten swipe carousel post on Instagram. You want to create content that is reusable and has longevity - don’t create content that will be dead tomorrow. If your content is inspired by current events see how you can turn an event into a learning curve.

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       2. Test different headlines

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The copy attached to your post is your chance to hook your audience. Every channel requires a different strategy so it's important to a/b test different headlines to understand what grabs your audience’s attention in each space. Keep reposting every few days by scheduling your posts and see which piece of copy does best. Only 5% of your audience is likely to view one organic post so don’t assume that people will click through straight away.

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       3. Think EAT

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When creating content, think about what Google wants from you. Educational, authoritative and trustworthy (EAT) content rank best. Producing content that is data backed will put you at an advantage as this is how search algorithms and social networks rank and perceive content as valuable.

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       4. The power of three

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Write content in a way that is formulaic and concise in a format that is easy to replicate. Each post should have at least three key points that you can write about and emphasize across different social channels. This is a simple growth hack that can help build up your overall content marketing strategy.

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       5. Think about your customer journeys

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Essentially, your content is part of a pull marketing strategy so you want to make sure your content is relevant and of quality. You can do this by producing content that defines the problems of your customers and offers them a solution as they are coming for you at the point where they are looking for that exact solution.

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Use SEO to put yourself in front of the people you are looking for

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Create an SEO content strategy by researching keywords with low competition and a high volume of search that you know you need to rank for. Engage with your community and find queries and topics that pop up again and again and embed them into your keyword strategy and search engine marketing approach.

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People go through ten different touchpoints in their research journey so you want to make sure that you’re content there when they are looking for solutions. It’s important that your content is out there and is actually providing answers to their problems.

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It’s important to not forget prospective customers outside of your community so be sure to produce content that would also appeal to those at the very beginning of your customer journey. This will enhance your organic reach opportunities and support an overall long-term marketing strategy.

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To learn more about how to maximise press opportunities and boost brand awareness, check out this masterclass with Andrew McKay and Rachel Barber where we discuss how to build awareness without a budget.

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📺Click the thumbnail to watch the full video 📺

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For more expert advice on how you can build brand awareness on a bootstrap budget, check out: How to create content like a content CMO.

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