How to use digital marketing to grow your brand

Taking advantage of digital marketing is a powerful way to grow your brand. These days it’s pretty much an expectation that your business will have a website and maybe also some social media accounts. But your digital marketing shouldn’t stop there. There’s far more you can do to be expanding your reach and developing strong relationships with your audience.

Digital marketing doesn’t have to be overly complicated or hard to do, but it does take some consistent and strategic work. But if you put in that investment, you can really grow your brand effectively.

What does it mean to grow your brand?

Growing your brand (at least by my definition) means one very important thing. Strengthening the relationship between you and your audience.

That’s not just a numbers game, either. By that, I mean it’s not just about the amount of people who know about your business. It’s the quality of the connection you have with those people.

Don’t just measure the number of followers or subscribers you have. Measure the number of leads that convert into clients. Measure the response rates. Are people engaging with your brand? Keep that in mind as we run through this strategy for growing your brand with digital marketing.

Create content that shares your value

This is where it begins. One of my core values — something I truly believe in, in my business — is making your value visible. It’s not enough to be good at what you do, or to be able to get amazing results for your clients. You have to be able to externally communicate the value that you provide — to people who aren’t yet clients.

Creating content is an incredible way to do this. And when we’re generous about sharing our knowledge, it frames us as go-to experts. It helps our ideal clients to find us, and for us to build trust with them.

The content you create could be in any medium or form that suits you. Blog posts, infographics, podcasts, videos, social media posts, the list goes on. Share what you know and use it to grow awareness of your brand. This first step is all about attracting people towards your business and introducing yourself.

Drive traffic to your website or landing page

Like I said, if you own a business, you should probably own a website. This website doesn’t have to be dozens of pages and thousands of words long. In fact, the simpler the better. (Check out my 5 tips for a high converting website design.)

What’s really important, is that it helps you convert traffic into leads. So all that content you were creating? You want to use it to invite people to learn more by hopping over to your website (or even a simple landing page).

Then the next step comes into play (continued below).

Establish a relationship using lead magnets

By lead magnet, I mean a free download that you offer in exchange for an email address. I’m a big fan of email marketing. There are plenty of fancy marketing tools out there, but I still think email continues to be a very effective way to keeping in touch with your audience.

By giving people the opportunity to leave their email, you have a chance to really grow that relationship with them, in a very direct way. But people aren’t going to hand over their email for no reason. We’re not here subscribing to “newsletters” or “promotions and updates”, right? We want something more concrete and relevant — and so does your audience.

Create a lead magnet that promises to help your ideal clients with a problem. It’s a step up from your freely available content, and a taste of what it might be like working with you.

(I talk a little more about lead magnets in this post: How to generate quality leads to your service-based business.)

Nurture your audience with email

Like I already said — I love email marketing. And email marketing doesn’t just mean collecting a bit, long list of contacts. You want to be regularly in touch with your audience, sharing more value, and — very importantly — inviting them to take the next step.

You can use an automated welcome sequence for all new subscribers, to introduce your business, what you do and how it relates to the struggles they have or goals they want to achieve. Use your emails to further the relationship you’ve been growing with them, and take it even deeper. You can get more specific about the services you provide and the exact pain points they solve.

Make sure you’re being clear with your calls to action (in fact, this is important at every step). If you genuinely have an offer that will help someone, you need to let them know what to do next. Book a call? Fill out an application? Make a purchase? Be clear and direct — don’t just assume your audience knows what you want them to do.

Last thoughts

So, what I’ve described here is a simple marketing funnel that you can use to strengthen the connection you have with your target audience — and therefore, grow your brand. It’s all about making sure your ideal clients can recognise the value of what you do, and bit-by-bit develop a stronger sense of trust with your brand.

In each of these steps, you should be consistent with the core foundational pillars of your brand — What you stand for. What you help people with. The voice and style of your brand. If you want some help figuring out what those core pillars are for your brand, check out my free branding workbook — it’ll guide you through the steps to define and clarify your brand.