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Whether it’s a home business you run or a side hustle, brand awareness is just as important for you as it would be for any corporate business with a lot more capital and reputation.

Even the smaller businesses and entrepreneurs can thrive, as there’s enough room for everyone when it comes to marketing and advertising.

If you’re looking to boost your brand awareness, what should you be looking to do? What methods work best when it comes to boosting your home business or side hustle? In this guide, you’ll learn all about the best strategies to improve your brand awareness for the better and hopefully convert more customers into sales as a result. 

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Create a website

Creating a website is definitely something that your business should do in this digitally dominant world. If you’ve not already got a website, then you could be doing yourself a disservice as a result.

Whether you run your business from home or offer a side hustle service like a handyman, for example, you should have a website to direct customers to.

Regardless of whether it’s word of mouth or through an online platform, having a website is an extra opportunity to promote yourself. Not only that but it legitimizes who you are and that you’re actually someone that people can trust.

It’s worth checking in with a graphic designer to have your website custom-made; that way, it’s recognizable as your own and not for anyone else.

Use relevant hashtags

Hashtags are still relevant and worth using. While not everyone uses hashtags nowadays, it’s still a great way of helping the algorithm recognize what sort of content you’re posting.

It’s incredible how quickly social media and the online world change. We may find that hashtags become obsolete eventually but for the time being, it’s worth using hashtags.

Be relevant in your hashtag usage, and try not to use anything that looks like you’re trying to keyword stuff the content you’re putting out into the online world. Irrelevant hashtags might mean your posts end up going somewhere that’s not beneficial for your engagement.

Develop your social media profiles

Social media profiles are something you want to develop as you build upon your efforts online. When you’re building a small business or home business where you might just be on your own, it’s worthwhile to find ways to be productive through social media platforms.

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Of course, you could always look to outsource this at a later date, but for now, it’s a good idea to start with just one or two profiles. That way, you’re not getting overwhelmed by what can be a lot of effort and work needed. Just maintaining one or two platforms can be tough, so you want to figure out which platform(s) are best for your business. 

When building your social media profiles, remember the need for consistency across your brand assets. That way, you’re likely to become more recognizable faster due to it taking several attempts for the average person to become familiar with any brand, new or household-named.

Engage and interact with your audience

Your audience is there to be engaged with, so make the effort to interact with them. It’s challenging to do it all yourself, especially if you’re just a one-person band. However, if you’re making the effort and going the extra mile to speak to your followers and customers online, then it’ll go a long way for your engagement and brand awareness.

Nowadays, customers enjoy being a part of the process that all small and big businesses go through. Having input or feeling like they’re a part of the process is definitely something that many customers and users alike will value, so it’s good to find ways of engaging with them as and when you can.

It could be a direct message or a comment, or even liking a comment they’ve put. Every little interaction helps!

Share user-generated content

Talking of showing off your users, why not use some of their content? Of course, you’ll want to ask for their permission to use it first. While there are a lot of influencers out there who are creating content on a brand’s behalf or simply to generate their own content, there are those who share their love for a brand just because.

It’s that type of user that you want to contact when it comes to creating content that includes one of your products, for example.

Sharing user-generated content, again, makes them feel more included, and to be featured on the grid of a business social media profile, is big. Especially if it’s on a profile that has become incredibly popular in recent years.

Offer freebies

Freebies are definitely something you want to offer to your customers where possible. Everyone loves a freebie, after all, or at least something that’s heavily discounted.

When you’re doing event work or showcasing somewhere that people are attending, it’s beneficial to have some branded merchandise available to give out.

From sticker printing to tote bags, there are plenty of ways in which you can get your business and brand name out there, in return for something free for your customers to make use of. It’s something that’s already been done plenty of times by businesses but when it’s not broke, why try to fix it?

Create valuable content

Content is king nowadays, which is why you want to create content that’s actually valuable to your users and customers alike.

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As a small business, creator, or side hustle enthusiast, it’s important to create content that’s meaningful and holds some value. Whether that be a video or blog post, everything should provide the user with value, whether it’s entertainment or knowledge - or both!

Think about what content you could create for your home business or side hustle for the purpose of brand awareness. Make sure that it’s always good quality and that you’ve thought about how this piece of content you’re putting out provides value to those engaging with it.

Optimize for local and general SEO

Search engine optimization is definitely something you want to make use of when it comes to improving your online presence. Google is one of the main search engines on the internet nowadays, not many will go elsewhere for search results.

Therefore, it’s Google that you’re looking ot impress when it comes to your SEO efforts. If you haven’t tried search engine optimization then think of it as efforts you could make to improve your chances of your website or webpage, hitting the first page or so of the Google search engine results.

The better you are with these practices and the more consistent you become, the more improvements you’re likely to see. Local SEO is also something to do so that you can get local traffic coming to your site, too. 

Get listed locally

Getting listed locally is important for any business, but it’s more important for smaller businesses that rely on local customers rather than those outside of your own city or town, for example.

Side hustles will often rely on those who are nearby or who order within fairly close proximity. It’s, therefore, useful to get yourself listed locally, and that way, you can hopefully land on the pages of those who are looking for a service or product like what your business provides.

Network with others

Networking is a helpful way of getting to know people and it’s also useful when needing to get your business out there. Even if you consider yourself to be a bit of an extrovert, it can be a great way to connect with people.

So, with that being said, try to network with more people when possible. Interact with other business owners online and try to find opportunities where you can meet up with other business owners or entrepreneurs. You might be able to learn something from these networking events, and who knows where that might take you and your business or side hustle?

If you’re not someone who necessarily wants to go anywhere in person, nowadays, online networking events are also a thing and are worth exploring for the purpose of meeting other people.

Be consistent with your efforts

If there’s anything you can take away from this article, is that you should remain consistent with your efforts. No matter what you do, if you’re being consistent, you’re more than likely to be successful as a result of that perseverance.

A lot of companies both young and old, big and small, will find themselves falling behind with the times or failing to achieve the success they wanted due to the lack of consistency in their brand awareness efforts.

Continue to make the right decisions to stay relevant and be consistent. That is what will help you improve your home business or side hustle’s brand awareness. The rest of it is just your natural talent or skillset, depending on what it is you do for business.