Brand is a funny thing for owners. You cannot hold it in your hand, yet it is the foundation- bread and butter of the organization. Branding increases revenue for the organization by 23%. Moreover, the top goals of 89% of marketers are nothing but branding.(1)
What Is Brand Awareness?
It refers to how well consumers and audiences recognize your brand. In general terms, it is about how ‘popular’ or well-known your brand is in the audience’s eyes. It is valuable to enhance brand awareness, especially in early establishment stages.
-
It Builds Long-Term Success
In a world where customers rely on reviews and others’ opinions, brand trust is what it takes to increase your sales and make your name in the marketplace. Once you succeed to build that trust, you would gain customers for life. Consumers tend to trust your brand easily when you put up a proverbial face.
-
Brand Awareness Associate Actions
It associate products with our everyday actions and consumer demands. Hence, the audience subconsciously puts your brand name instead of that action if your brand is well-recognized.
-
It Builds A Brand’s Value
Building a brand’s equity is important for the overall organization’s protection. Positive customer experiences and reviews build a brand’s equity and negative customer experiences build a bad reputation.
( Also Read: Benefits of Branding for a Successful Business )
34 Ways to Increase Brand Awareness
Increasing brand awareness means increasing customer’s loyalty, recapturing lost prospects and leads and overall growth of your business.
Having strong and solid is essential for one’s business to thrive. But if audience does not trust your brand, how would you increase your sales and customer base? Here are some innovative strategies which can guide you to know how to increase brand awareness.
-
Use A Unique Logo
Making your brand logo has many benefits. This is the best way to ensure that your audience remembers you and do not forget about you. Moreover, it is a good way to advertise your products and services in some way.
You can use the logo in your emails, banners, advertisements, social media pages, website, packaging, marketing materials, etc.
-
Wake Up the Guest Poster in You
There are many popular blogs online that allow you to publish your articles. Use your networking skills and publish your articles there. Not only would it help you get the brand’s name in front of tapped people, but it would also provide your expertise and authority.
-
Collaborate with Influencers
Search for authorities, brands, and influencers who work for the same niche as yours. Determine what you can offer in exchange for the brand’s exposure that they are willing to offer. Once you prove your credibility to potential influencers, you can increase brand awareness in no time.
-
Build Local Partnerships
Form as many local partnerships as you can by funding a local sports team or by teaming up with a non-competitive brand. If there’s an opportunity where you can partner up and promote each other products and services, waste no time in accepting the partnership.
-
Invest in Email Marketing
If you have a good mailing list, waste no time in sending out informational newsletters and emails. These types of emails help the audience to provide valuable information. Hence, proving your brand’s credibility and great customer care.
-
Give Mini Email Courses and Encourage the Customers to Open Your Emails
If your email open rate is low, you can give mini-email courses to your consumers and train them to open your mails for skimming and scanning. Not only would they save the reading time, but they would also be able to know about your upcoming promotional offers, product launches, etc.
-
Remarketing Campaigns
Remarketing is a traditional way of increasing brand awareness. Remarketing involves many processes such as showing advertisements to consumers who have visited your website. This gives out an indication that your brand is loyal to its consumers and has a much larger budget than it has.
-
Increase Brand Recognition with Real-Time Marketing
Organic or real-time marketing is getting difficult day by day. Hence, more companies are moving toward paid marketing. Facebook and Twitter marketing is relatively cheaper than traditional marketing options. Hence, you can target a wide base of audience by marketing on social media platforms.
-
Amplify Your Reach by Native Advertising
To win new consumers, native advertising is the most effective strategy. Native advertising helps you to reach people on sites where they are already engaging and reading posts. Not only can you increase brand’s credibility but build a brand reputation as well.
-
Use the Power of Affiliate Marketing
Many people earn their bread and butter through affiliate marketing. If you have enough budget, you can introduce an affiliate program. This could attract a lot of people with websites ready to display your product advertisements on their websites to earn easy money.
-
Run PPC Advertisements
PPC is a smart solution to have your brand seen on Google. By using the right SEO keywords, you can even appear at the top results of the Google search page. Even if the users do not click on your PPC advertisements, they would get impressed seeing you on the first Google search page.
-
Improve Your Content Through Search Engine Optimization
We live in a world of SEO. Your website cannot have high Google rankings if the content is not optimized. The online world runs on SEO. Try to optimize your website. This practice would not only help your rank higher but would also drive traffic to your website.
-
Focus on Content Marketing
Content is the foundation of branding. If there’s no content to display for your brand, you can lose half of the potential consumers. That is why your priority should be to focus on creating and curating compelling content to keep your website alive.
-
Video Content
Visual content is very essential for your website and the brand’s recognition. 80% of consumers get attracted by interactive visual content. In today’s’ world, it’s too hard to read the text. So, the audience prefers to watch the video.
-
Interactive Content
You can put up as much content as you want on your blog or website, but viewers or readers won’t respond unless it’s informational and creative. For curating creative content, have an informational tone and avoid jargon words.
Moreover, try to relate the content to your brand so that people could inquire about your products and services.
-
Carry Out Omnichannel Marketing
Omnichannel is a marketing approach that provides the customers with a short, seamless and complete shopping experience from the initial stage to the last stage. That means each buying channel of your platform works together to create a tone, voice, and message for your brand or company.
-
Optimize for Mobile
More than half of the population visits websites on their mobile phones. It would not be wrong to say that this is a mobile world. People are always on the go and they tend to gather information about any brand while doing chores or traveling.
So, create a mobile and user-friendly website. Desktops and PCs are obsoleting or are used for major purposes only.
-
Create Shareable Infographics
Infographics is a colorful and vibrant way to market using facts, statistics and useful insights. As infographics are shared quickly far and wide. The information provided on infographics is precise, short and always liked by potential consumers interested in your business.
-
Use Imagery Where Possible to Enlighten Hearts
Would a black and white website attract you? If no, you need to add a little imagery to your website to spice things up. People love image-based demonstrations and product guides. To attract customers by enlightening their brains and minds, use visual content as well.
-
Use Visual Content to Fast-Track Your Relationships with Your Customers
People love to interact on visual content, especially videos as they can comment, like or even share it. To interact with your customers and followers regularly, post as many videos as you can. Not only would people get to know your brand but you, as a brand would be able to target the right audience.
-
Gain Nuanced Marketing Understanding with Consumer Surveys
People love answering questions for fun. You can either create a survey on Twitter or Instagram or ask questions directly through a Facebook post. It’s the easiest way to get valuable input from your followers. Moreover, it improves user experience as well.
-
Consistent Branding on Website as Well As All Social Media Channels
There are hundreds of social media channels, such as LinkedIn that allow you to publish consistently. But how do you get people to interact on your posts? The answer is simple. By creating emotionally driven, relatable and informative content.
-
Start A Referral Program
Users spread the word about your business when they know they would get something in return. For example, upon referring to a friend, DropBox gives extra storage. This saves DropBox millions in advertisements.(2)
-
Launch A PR Campaign
If you have got important news on your business, make sure to share it in the local newspaper. For doubling the exposure, make sure to do a press release or share news on all social media channels.
-
Improve Social Media Presence
Improving your social media presence does not mean writing long essays and posting to spam your users’ accounts. Visitors must be able to identify that you are an active business by seeing your posts. The more valuable the content is, the higher the public engagement.
-
Use Eye-Catching Visuals
Social media channels like Facebook and Instagram are all about sharing image-based material. Sharing visual content does not only attract new users and consumers but also show the motive, purpose, and objective behind your brand and business.
-
Tag Others for Amplification of Posts
Tagging or mentioning others directly can bring attention to your table. You as many mentions, as you can, to grab influencers’ and bloggers’ attention.
-
Leverage Power of Hashtags
You can reach out to strangers on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram by placing hashtags under your post. For example, #throwbackthursday or #tbt is a very popular hashtag that you can use.
-
Use Social Sharing Buttons at The Point of Sale
As a social media marketer, you should give leverage to the users to share your post if they like it. It increases brand awareness and simultaneously improves your sales rate. The more people would know about your business, the more sales you’d make.
-
Amplify Your Growth by Reusing Best Social Media Content
Suppose you have paid a content writer to give you a beautifully written article for content marketing purposes. Are you going to pay him again for writing the same thing? Of course, no. You can use your best social media content (one that has the highest likes and engagement) over and over again in different ways.
-
Freebies
Everyone loves to get free stuff. You can distribute free giveaways at local festival events or the mall.
-
Sponsor Events
Sponsoring events might help you get in contact with big business names and leaders in the industry. All you have to do is sponsor an event and wait for your brand’s name to appear on top of the list.
-
Host A Podcast
If you have expertise in your industry, starting your podcast won’t harm your brand’s reputation. It’s a great way to tell people about your brand and relationships with other businesses.
-
Refrain from Calling Out Your Competitors
Even though controversies and healthy competition is good for branding but calling out your competitors can leave a bad impression on your audience.
Why is Brand Awareness Important?
It is necessary because it helps the consumers to recall their favorite products and services easily. If your brand has a good reputation, the first option that would pop up in a customer’s mind would be your product or service.
( Also Read: Brand Hashtag Strategy to Improve Brand Awareness )
How Do You Measure Brand Awareness?
If you want to measure brand awareness quantitively, here are some numbers that could help you do that:
-
Direct Traffic
This is an important metric to look for. It is the number of people who have searched you or have ended up visiting your website for purchasing or for gathering information. If they go directly to your website, it means that they are aware of what you deal in.
-
Site Traffic Numbers
This tells you an overview of how many people visit your website, read your content and check out your products.
-
Social Engagement
Social engagement refers to likes, comments, shares, retweets, reposts and much more. It’s a number that reflects how many people interact with you daily.
-
Searching Google And Setting Up Google Alerts
Doing this helps your brand to get recognized online as it would notify you of any mentions and news by third-party.
-
Social Listening
Social listening refers to managing and modifying social media management tools for engagement and organic mentions. Want to know who is mentioning you and on which channel? You can find out by using social listening.
-
Running Brand Awareness Surveys
This refers to getting direct feedback and answers to the questions by the audience. By providing surveys, it is easy to know what people understand about you as a brand.
Difference Between Brand Awareness and Brand Recognition
BRAND AWARENESS | BRAND RECOGNITION |
---|---|
Brand awareness is customers’ knowledge about your reputation, quality, features, products, and values. | Brand recognition centers around the ability of customers to identify your brand from its products and visuals like logo, slogan or theme. |
In brand awareness, people tend to recall the emotions and the knowledge associated with your brand. | In brand recognition, the only thing that matters is to what extend the customers can identify your brand among other brands. |
When it comes to brand recognition, businesses are focused on making customer/brand relationships strong. | Brand recognition focuses only on the eyes and minds of the customers. |
Final Thoughts
Brand awareness is a strong concept of the business world that can impact your marketing perceptions, consumer perceptions, marketing efforts, and profits. To build yourself a loyal community of consumers, follow the best strategy to increase brand awareness.