The competition in marketing is fierce, and grabbing the attention of your potential customers is pretty important in promoting your business.
A bulletproof brand awareness program is the only security your company needs to continue staying in business. I mean to say it is crucial to your business’ success.
It is one of the most vital aspects of marketing campaigns. When potential buyers know your brand, its slogan, logo, and other marketing features, they are more likely to buy your products.
As such, you must introduce your products by using the right strategy through brand awareness. Doing so will leave a lasting first impression on your brand. Put differently, brand awareness can lead to your business’s success or failure.
In this guide, I will take you through all that you need to know about brand awareness.
What is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness is pretty self-explanatory: awareness of your brand in the minds of your target consumers. Without awareness, your brand remains your target consumer’s null set and is never considered or thought of.
Brand awareness shows how familiar your target market is with your brand, to which extent your brand is recognized by the target group or prospects, and whether is it properly associated with a particular product category. Sometimes it also reflects the consumer’s emotional connection to your brand and its loyalty toward you.
Brand awareness is an important metric to watch and very is to measure. We would touch on that later on in this guide.
What Purpose Does Brand Awareness Serve?
This question is as good as answered already but just to add to what is already known, I will go ahead and say brand awareness is the foundation all your marketing efforts have to lean on, from social media to SEO to email marketing and all the other forms of marketing.
It’s what helps put your product out there for people to know of its existence, so you can gain their trust and influence their purchase decision-making process, to get more sales and conversions.
#1. It Helps To Improve Brand Perception
Brand perception is an important health metric, and it’s not the same as brand awareness. It goes beyond how people know you but focuses on their impression of you.
It’s basically the next step from getting aware: you can have a lot of people know you about your brand, but if none of these people like you, that big crowd is useless.
You might think that before people form an opinion of you, they would have to interact with your business multiple times. That would offer you a good time between building brand awareness and boosting brand perception, right? You are wrong.
When building brand awareness, you are already working on brand perception. Simply because first impressions are everything.
So if you want to think ahead, create brand awareness marketing campaigns with that in mind.
#2. Brand awareness succeeds in terms of market share
Brand awareness becomes discoverable in the Google search bar. If people already know and love your brand, they won’t go looking for ”the coziest running shoes”. They will type in ‘Nike running shoes’. Good luck to your competitors struggling to rank on that.
Brand awareness and sharing of search are closely interwoven. In 2020, Les Binet, an expert in marketing effectiveness, tried out this theory in three markets: automotive, mobile phone handsets, and energy.
He discovered that the share of search tallied with the market share in all three categories. If a share of a search goes up, market share follows a few months later. And yes, the same goes for the share of a search when it goes down.
#3. It’s essential in building trust
The more people are aware of your brand, the smoother the road to building trust. Not only because people do not need to start from scratch getting to know your brand if you are always front-of-mind, but also because they will ask their friends.
If family, friends, and colleagues are aware of your brand, it will be easier for people to have confidence in you.
#4. It’s useful for lead generation at the top of the funnel
Don’t get me wrong: building brand awareness is not the same as lead generation. But if you are actively generating leads and want to step things up a little, look at brand awareness.
Bringing in high-quality leads becomes a lot easier if they have heard from you before and you pop up out of nowhere, having to introduce your brand, products, values, and great offers all at once.
#5. It drives quality traffic to your website
Strong brand awareness campaigns will help you drive organic website traffic. Branded search is one of the core players in metrics for measuring brand awareness.
Ultimately, you will need to move on from awareness and have prospects actually consider buying from you. If you are the first name that comes to mind when they have to buy something in your product category, they will head over to your website to check you out. That’s the moment you show your charm and can start converting them into loyal customers.
The more brand recognition you have, the more quality traffic you will drive to your website. One way to achieve brand recognition is to be active and engaged within your market.
Brand Awareness Strategy
The most valuable and successful brands are usually the most recognizable. Learn how to increase your brand awareness using the suggested strategies below.
#1. Tell a brand story
Your brand story is the account of your brand and how it got to be that way.
For a business owner, the brand story might be that they spotted a problem in their day job and created a solution to fix the problem.
For a larger brand, your brand story might be a conglomeration of your history and mission statement.
Every brand has a story, and people love to hear brand stories, tell yours. Use narrative to showcase your brand story through, for instance, customer experiences, or by marking key milestones in your growth.
#2. Create value beyond your product
A key way to build deep-rooted brand awareness is to create value beyond your product. Think about ways you can inform, entertain or educate.
Do you or your team have specialized skills? Don’t keep it to yourselves. Share your knowledge through a podcast, blog, YouTube channel, or newsletter.
This should not be about making sales directly. Rather, this is a relationship-building and brand awareness practice that generates more opportunities for audiences to get to know your brand.
#3. Create shareable content
Shareable is something we all want our content to be; the most shareable content not only gets you talking to your target audience but gets your audience talking about you and your brand.
A share gives your brand a broader reach and takes it to places that it would not ordinarily have gone to.
A share shows that an audience not only loves it enough to tell their circle but is willing to have that content reflect their identity.
Content that provokes a strong emotional response is twice likely to be shared. Whether it’s joy, excitement, hope, or nostalgia, emotion is key in contributing to the shareability of content. We believe that you need to motivate people to feel something before you can get them to think about your product, brand, or service, or take action.
#4. Run awareness ad campaigns
The social networks all know that brand awareness is a key business objective for many brands using their tools, which is the reason they offer ads that specifically focus on awareness.
Which targeting option is perfect for achieving brand awareness? The specific label may vary by platform, but it will always be termed something like Awareness, Brand Awareness, or Reach.
Brand Awareness depends on the consumer’s ability to recollect and recognize a brand and identify it with a particular product or service.
Brand awareness leads to trust, meaning the more recognition your brand has, the more successful your brand will be. It is the foundation of acquiring customers and helping them understand and become comfortable with your products— increasing your brand worth.
#5. Give Your Brand a Voice
Brand voice is what you say about your brand and brand tone is how you say it. Your tone may vary between target audiences, so it’s a great idea to document when to use certain tones in certain situations.
The cheerful way you announce a new product won’t be the same tone you take on when responding to a customer`s complaint.
Give your brand a personality and leverage it to identify with your audience. Having a unique tone and voice will help your ads stick in the mind of consumers.
Be mindful of your word choice. A good example is a slogan, which can help make you easily recognizable, or a smart combination of colors that are both eye-catching and memorable.
#6. Leverage the Advantage in Outdoor Advertising
Out-of-home advertising is a great way to put your brand out there. Billboards are a traditional method of advertising, but there’s a reason they have been around for so long.
They work, billboards placed strategically in high-traffic areas will expose your brand to thousands of new prospects each day.
Unlike commercials or digital ads, they are there 24 hours a day, exposing your brand to anyone who passes by them.
There are many ways to use billboards to promote your business and create brand awareness. If enough people see your branding on billboards, the more they can recognize and identify elements of your brand identity such as logo and color scheme.
Note that billboards aren’t just giant static images anymore. We now see innovative billboard features such as QR codes that direct users to your landing pages.
Additionally, smart and catchy messaging can garner social media hype, while smart billboards leverage both augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI) to change and optimize the user experience. There’s no doubt you can maximize brand awareness by leveraging billboards.
Conclusion
You know you are a marketer when you are sitting in traffic on the highway, it’s completely bumper to bumper, and all you can think about is “Why can’t I pull traffic to my website like this?”
Once you desire to drive traffic to your website, the first step towards that is to look towards brand awareness.
This guide has covered in great detail the meaning of brand awareness, why it is important for all brands, and the strategies to generate awareness of your brand.
