What is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness is how familiar your target audience is with your brand and how well they can recognize it. Brands with high awareness are popular. Establishing brand awareness is valuable when marketing and promoting your company and products. It is the idea that resonates with consumers and gives them an emotional response to what your company represents.
Brand awareness becomes an integral part of consumers’ lifestyles and purchase habits. This article will give you an insight into brand awareness and how to establish it with your audience to build campaigns that allow it to grow and change with your business.
Why is Brand Awareness Important?
Brand awareness builds trust.
Consumers rely on research and opinions from others before making purchase decisions, and brand trust is key to those decisions. Once a bond is created with a consumer, the consumer will bond to your brand, and they’ll be more likely to purchase from your company in the future with little to no thought. This behavior bridges the gap between trust and loyalty.
Brand awareness establishes brand trust. Building a brand name creates an image of your company that consumers can trust. The brand awareness efforts your company portrays give your brand a personality to be sincere and open to feedback while telling a story. Ultimately, it’s about building a relationship with your consumers.
Brand awareness builds brand equity.
Brand equity describes a brand’s value. It is determined by consumer experiences with a brand and the consumer’s perception of that brand. Positive experiences and perceptions equal positive brand equity; the same goes for negative perceptions.
There are valuable benefits that come from positive brand equity:
- Higher stock price.
- Greater social impact due to brand name value.
- Expansion of business through product or service line extensions.
- Higher prices due to higher perceived value.
How does a brand establish and increase brand equity? By building brand awareness and consistently promoting positive experiences with the brand at all touchpoints. Brand awareness is the foundation of brand equity.
Brand awareness is essential because it establishes trust with your customers, creates positive associations, and builds brand equity, allowing your brand to become a household name and consumer staple.
Brand Awareness Creates Association
We all have associations with leading brands. If you have a question you Googled it. When you need to clean your ears you reach for a Q-Tip. If you need a reminder, you grab a Post-It Note. Brand awareness associates actions with products and particular brands subconsciously.
How to Build Brand Awareness
- Be a person, not a company. Be personable.
- Socialize.
- Tell a story or a narrative.
- Make sharing easy.
Be a person, not a company. Be personable.
When you meet someone and a relationship begins to form, you discover their hobbies, passions, likes, and dislikes. You also pay attention to their mannerisms, speech, what they like to talk about, and what gets them excited.
Like a natural person, your brand has traits that impact your audience. Your company has to define itself as more than a place that sells stuff. If your company were a person, how would it define itself? What words would you use to introduce your brand to a new friend?
Socialize.
All humans benefit from social contact and spending time with one another. It is how we stay connected, learn new things, accomplish tasks, and build relationships.
The same is true for your brand. If your brand only attempts to connect with others when trying to make a sale or get support, you’ll be known as nothing but a business with a singular intention.
To raise brand awareness, your company has to be social. Consider posting on social media things unrelated to your product or services. Interact with your audience by asking questions, commenting on posts, retweeting, or sharing content based on your company’s likes. Treat your company’s social accounts as if you were a person trying to make friends and build new relationships and not just a company trying to make money.
Greater brand awareness comes from online sociability.
Tell a story or a narrative.
When you build a story around your brand, it becomes a powerful marketing tactic. It gives your audience something authentic and relatable. A well-crafted narrative around your brand humanizes it and gives it depth. Adding your story to your marketing inherently markets your brand alongside your products or services.
If you are asking yourself what your story should be about, consider anything as long as it is true and authentic. Tell a story about your founder or how your company started. Talk about how your company’s first product and the idea behind it. People like hearing stories about each other. Your authenticity is impactful and can lead to a big boost in brand awareness.
Make sharing easy.
Regardless of your products, industry, or marketing strategy, you must make it easy for your audience to share your story with others. Sharing can include blog posts, sponsored content, videos, social media posts, and product pages. It can include all or some of these, but it has to be shareable.
The most authentic type of marketing and the most effective is word-of-mouth marketing. It is the fastest way to build trust and loyalty with your brand. If someone sees a friend or family recommending your product or service, others will take notice.
If you make it easy to share, consumers will raise your brand awareness by sharing your content!
Brand Awareness Strategy
- Advertise everywhere.
- Hire a face or create a mascot for the company.
- Try co-marketing.
- Guest blog on other niche websites.
- Choose an image or symbol that represents you.
- Create a short, catchy slogan.
Advertise everywhere.
Exposure to your brand or products is still one of the best ways to get consumers to find out about your brand in an unobtrusive way.
You should consider starting with online advertising, which includes paid social media. Learn where your consumers are and which channels of communication they use most. Relate to your target audience in a way that makes sense to them.
Hire a face or create a mascot for the company.
If you have the budget, consider hiring an actor or a spokesperson to represent your company. Think about someone who embodies your company’s personality and humanizes your brand.
How you represent your company doesn’t have to be a person. Consider using an animal or fictional character to make your brand relatable.
Try co-marketing.
Co-marketing is an excellent way to build brand awareness because you’d be taking advantage of another’s brand audience.
Consider how Lego uses licensing rights to popular cartoons, movies, comics, etc., to unlock its brand awareness.
Guest blog on other niche websites.
Utilizing the traffic already arriving at another website to get more exposure to your brand is one of the best ways to increase brand awareness with minimal effort. Please make sure you make your content helpful and relevant to your audience. You’re not just pushing out your product or asking for a sale. You are building new relationships and must be a human first and a company second. You should consider publishing sponsored content on niche websites related to your company or product. Think about using social media influencers in particular genres to promote your brand.
Choose an image or symbol that represents you.
Though it can be a part of your company’s logo, consider using a symbol that you use in all of your marketing. A symbol that your consumers will recognize and remember, and it should be included in all of your marketing. Also, consider how this symbol can be used in your product packaging and design.
Create a short, catchy slogan.
When you hear, “Just do it.” you automatically think of Nike. Creating a short motto or slogan is a way to build strong brand awareness.
Creating a slogan is difficult as one has to consider how to represent your company with a single phrase or sentence. Your slogan must explain what you offer, how you are different, and why customers should choose your company over others.
How to Increase Brand Awareness
- Create free content.
- Offer Freemium.
- Produce a podcast.
- Sponsor events.
Create free content.
Content is a fun way to raise awareness of your brand because it’s the easiest way to show personality and share opinions and positions on issues or concerns. Content doesn’t have to be only in written form. You can create infographics, videos, podcasts, animations, and more. The content can also come from guest content creators or sponsored content that provides opportunities to get in front of new audiences that diversify the type of content you create.
Offer Freemium.
Freemium is a business model that offers a basic product or product line for free, only charging for any products deemed premium. It’s a popular pricing strategy for software companies. Offering a freemium option allows customers to taste your product and brand before making a purchase. The try-before-you-buy approach can be unlimited or limited to a trial period.
Produce a Podcast.
Podcasts have been growing in popularity. Unlike written or visual content, podcasts allow you to connect with your audience authentically through sound. Podcasts give you a way to inform, educate, entertain, or advise your customer building trust without overly pushing your products or services.
Sponsor Events
You may have noticed how brands sponsor many festivals, concerts, fairs, and exhibitions. Sponsoring events is a way to expose your brand to hundreds, thousands, or millions of people. Sponsoring an event allows you to promote your brand at an event that matches your personality, passions, and interests meaning customers will associate your brand with that event. It can also help your company by building brand awareness with a targeted or highly specialized audience.
How to Measure Brand Awareness
- Qualitative
- Quantitative
Qualitative Brand Awareness
- Run brand awareness surveys.
- This process involves getting feedback directly from your customers. It will help you understand who knows about your brand and their thoughts.
- Social media monitoring.
- There are software tools used to monitor organic mentions and engagement with social media platforms. The software will tell you who is tagging your brand or mentioning it in the comments.
- Google alerts.
- Doing this step will alert you to any news or mentions by the press about your company or brand.
Avoid:
- Not agreeing on what brand awareness means to your company.
- Establish measurable metrics and timelines.
- Trying to make your content achieve too much.
- Have attainable goals.
- Your content has to reach a large number of people.
- Choose a few key metrics, not all of them.
- Not ensuring your brand awareness campaigns are influencing the bottom line.
- What sales or leads are coming from your campaign?
- Expecting quick results.
- It takes time to build trust.