All businesses need to raise awareness of their products, but how this is achieved depends on the type of business you have, as well as how it is launched.
Target Audience
With any product or service launch, it is important to get the right message to prospective customers. You must convey to your target audience that your proposition meets a need or want that is currently unmet, or that it is better than what they currently have. It is essential to understand your target audience because you may find that the language, channels, and information you use to communicate with and appeal to one demographic is ineffective with another. By clearly defining your target audience, you can direct your marketing efforts, create more consistency in your messaging, and connect with your audience authentically. This allows you to mentally strike the audience, as they get hooked from the ad that completely appeals to them. But how do they see this in the first place?
Social Media
The more interesting the product or service, the more likely you are to gain genuine public interest, however not all products are original, some are simply successful as they exist as an upgrade to the competition. So how do we market this? Social Media is most likely your best chance to success in gaining product awareness. Being able to share images, product designs, news and updates, and release topics with just a few clicks is an extreme technological advance to the available resources 20-30 years ago.
This allows you to amass a large organic following, tell your followers when this new product will launch, what to expect from it, and really drag their attention to it, if done correctly. Of course, not all of this has to to be organic, all of the most popular socials do in fact utilize paid advertisements. So once you've decided your target market, you build your marketing around this (while matching your brand guidelines).
Grab your teams best ideas, designs, and concepts, and get that advert to be as pretty as possible to the people you're looking to reach, we recommend divulging into a professional marketing team to help you achieve this, (which, SME CofE does offer as a supreme packaged service) as this will be the pinnacle attention grabber from random potential customers. Using the paid ad feature allows you to reach a mass previously unavailable, and at a significant lower cost than that of a TV ad.
Of course social media doesn't just allow for product promotion, but you can keep your brand image and reputation at a high level with directed posts and PR management. For example, meat stick company Slim Jim has a fantastic social media presence and a fantastic PR based community on Instagram, which has grown drastically in the last couple years, going from 5k followers to a current (as of May 2022) 1.4 Million, which has no doubt driven Slim Jim sales up exponentially. The average age range using Instagram is 30.1% 18-24 year olds, and 31.5% 25-34 year olds. Knowing this, Slim Jim converted their page to fit a more comedic meme-based community, all while still promoting their product. This is exactly what drove them to be so successful so quickly, they took complete advantage over Instagram having an above 60% average younger aged audience, and directed their posts to be what would be attention grabbing to this audience - humour. And this is just on one social media - there are several, and the higher the growth on one platform, normally organically leads to a higher growth on the other platforms too - Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat etc.
Other uses of Social Media:
Further points of using social media to get your product awareness out there, is the fact of how easy it is to manipulate what the viewers can see of the product. For example, releasing a new soft drink product against a plain white background wont attract anyone's attention, but a green screen effect or an animation including it is certainly more attractive to look at and more importantly - talk about. Through spread of mouth, shares online, and paid ads, the product awareness possibilities are endless when utilised correctly.
However, we realise not everyone is a social media wiz, so here at The SME Centre Of Excellence, we offer a fantastic result driven marketing package, covering all organic growth needs, your social media brand image, and even your website design, as well as offline marketing strategies, all of which would be fantastic to boost the growth of your product awareness. To view this package, click here.
Or, to find out more over the phone, contact the SME Centre of Excellence here.