30-second summary:
Mindshare is necessary to survive in an ever-changing digital landscape.
There are three ways to measure mindshare: collect data, evaluate the competition, and research psychographics.
Content marketing is the surest long-term strategy for increasing mindshare.
Co-founder of Ally digital media, Abhishek Shah wants to give a sounding board to check how well (or otherwise) brands are doing with mindshare in the current times.
In marketing, mindshare refers to the amount of popularity or consumer awareness a company, idea, or product has. It’s also referred to as mind share and bears some similarity to market share. Insomuch as both relate to how much of the market is aware of your existence and buying from you. But they are two different metrics.
While mindshare is consumer awareness—making it a little difficult to quantify—market share is simpler to define. It is a percentage of the market that your business, or your product, holds.
Why is mindshare important?
How memorable is your business? Your brand? If social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter disappeared this week, would your brand or business survive?
Will people remember who you are?
This is why mindshare is so important.
If people know your name, they will find you. It won’t matter where you are online, if your name’s worth remembering, your ideal customers will find you.
After all, if no one knows your business’s name, how can they find you? Buy from you?
That is why mindshare is an important part of any successful marketing strategy. It can be the difference between success in any landscape, or too much dependence of fads.
How to measure a brand’s mindshare?
While mind share is difficult to quantify, it’s not too difficult to measure. There are three methods you can use to measure your brand’s mindshare.
1) Collect data
When evaluating mindshare, you want to know how your prospective customers and current customers think. And the most reliable way to do this is by collecting as much relevant data as possible.
This data should be collected from various offline and online platforms, such as your social media channels. One way of doing this is with focus groups, another way is with polls.
There are quite a number of services and tools online that make creating and distributing polls a simple process. You should also conduct audits online.
The last two pieces of data you want to collect are your keyword rankings, and your competitor’s ranking data.
2) Evaluate your competitors
Conducting quantitative and qualitative competitor analysis can be a useful way of analyzing your weaknesses and strengths. It’s also a good way of learning if there are any available areas in your market that you can take advantage of.
The other advantage of evaluating your competitors is to learn what mindshare they have, and learning how to get ahead of them.
3) Research psychographics
Psychographics help you better understand the way your customers think. This is done by looking at your customer’s attitudes, decision-making processes and behavior.
If you can understand your customers’ psychographics, you will be in a better position to provide the solutions your prospective customers are looking for.
Pay attention to reviews you receive offline, and track when your brand is mentioned online to get a better understanding of how your business is perceived online.
Example: one of our beauty clients had an article on “How to get rid of pimples?”.
We took the feedback from the product experience team and found that most of them would ask how treatment can be faster? Can I get rid of pimples overnight? And that’s when we changed the topic to How to get rid of pimples Overnight?”.
By updating the article, they saw an increase in traffic on that page by almost 47%.
(Source: Branding Compass)
Why you want to prioritize mindshare over market share
Simply put: mindshare helps increase your market share. This is why you want to focus more on brand recognition. It helps put your brand, product, or service in front of more people. And when done properly, it means you aren’t relying on whatever platform is popular at the moment.
Your brand becomes recognizable enough that people will go looking for it. Which leads to more sales.
More sales leads to more market share.
Three ways you can win at mindshare using content marketing
Content marketing is one of the most effective long-term strategies to help improve your brand’s mindshare. Creating memorable experiences, increasing your brand’s footprint, and using strategy and data to get noticed, are 3 broad categories to help you succeed.
1) Create memorable experiences
One of the key benefits of successfully creating memorable experiences is increasing customer loyalty and satisfaction. This then helps to increase mindshare.
To increase mindshare, you first need to determine—if you haven’t already—your brand personality. Is your brand sophisticated, rugged, excited, sincere, competent?
Now, when we say competent it’s more than just knowing how to do your job. It’s about conveying your business as accomplished, influential, and successful.
The better you can define your brand personality, the better your customers will understand your brand. And with that understanding, you want them to be able to recognize your brand, trust it, and ultimately resonate with it.
When you achieve this, your customers will buy from you again and again.
Creating memorable experiences
One of the easiest ways to increase mindshare is by creating memorable experiences. One way of doing this is through social media content. Especially, if you can get decent influencers who are able to reach a large audience.
Your content should show the problem and how your brand is the solution. Regularly engaging with your customers by creating meaningful, education content is the surest way of gaining (and sustaining) mindshare.
2) Increase brand footprint
Your brand footprint is a statement of characteristics and belief. It describes an authentic and true area that your brand can own. And which aligns with who your audience is.
Using experiential marketing strategies can help increase brand awareness, as well as your brand’s footprint. Ideally, you want your content to reach as many of the right people as possible.
This content needs to help people know not just that your brand exists, but also your brand’s purpose. To do this you need to connect with your prospective customers through social media and other available media channels.
But it’s not enough to simply create content. You also need to regularly engage with your customer’s comments and content wherever possible. Not always in an overtly sales-y way. Rather, by answering questions and being generally useful without expecting anything in return.
This is a way of showing you genuinely care, and are interested in being helpful and useful.
3) Use strategy and data to get noticed
In gaining mindshare, you need to be strategic. With tens of thousands of pieces of content being put out by companies each day, guessing is not an option.
Everything from SEO software for optimizing blog content, to a social media calendar for ensuring you’re consistently creating relevant content is necessary if you want to win at mindshare.
Your own social media accounts will have data on what is and isn’t working. Your analytics will tell you what content is successful, and what needs reworking.
Using this data will help you to improve your content marketing. Which, in turn, will help you win at mindshare.
How to test your business’s mindshare
You can test your business’s mindshare the same way you measure it. By collecting data, evaluating your competition and researching psychographics.
Running surveys and polls to see what ideals and concepts people associate with your brand will give you a good idea of what your business’s mindshare is. This will also give you a good indication of what areas you either need to work on, or, more closely focus on.
Data is also a good way. An increase in organic traffic to your website and social media channels is also a good indication your business is gaining mindshare.
Win at mindshare using content marketing
If you are looking to significantly improve your mindshare, content marketing is the surest way to achieve this. Through strategic, data-driven content marketing you can gain long-term success irrespective of the current social media fads and trends.
If you would like to know more about winning more mindshare using content marketing, hit the comment button below!
Abhishek Shah is the co-founder of Ally Digital Media, a leading voice in digital media and marketing. He advocates for evidence-based marketing strategies to fuel the businesses. He can be found on Twitter @abiishek.
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