In a world where intense competition exists, attracting customer attention is a must if you want your business to thrive.
According to research, 59% of consumers prefer to purchase products from brands they trust, and 21% say they buy new products from brands they like. When you think of the role of brand awareness, small businesses must succeed at market positioning.
So how can you build brand awareness effectively? First, let’s give you an overview of what branding awareness is all about.
What Is Brand Awareness?
Branding awareness refers to the level of recognition you receive from customers through your name, logo and other defining features of the brand’s image. This stage of your business is crucial because it is the first part of the customer’s journey. Furthermore, it helps consumers familiarize themselves with your brand before becoming loyal customers.
Companies with high brand awareness tend to outperform their competitors. They increase their product or service value, and it can be a significant asset to businesses.
How Brand Awareness Benefits Businesses
When you build brand awareness, it can significantly impact your business’s performance.
For instance, it can benefit your marketing efforts, enhance the design and provide a good reputation with your customers. The most promising benefit of it is that it can help increase your sales. Here are a few ways it can help you achieve this.
Brand Awareness Increases Trust
Trust is something that consumers rely on these days. When they receive recommendations from friends and family, they’ll be sure to research the brand’s products and services before making a purchase decision.
Brand awareness campaigns can help you reach that objective. When you establish trust with your consumers, they’re likely to return as repeat customers.
Brand Awareness Promotes Customer Loyalty
Did you know that it’s more cost-effective to retain customers than acquire new ones? You can obtain brand awareness by providing a positive experience when customers interact with your brand. In turn, customers will value your brand, which can help drive more customers when they share that with friends.
Brand Awareness Helps You Reach More Customers
Targeting the right audience at the right moment is critical to success. When you build brand awareness, you increase your customer base. As a result of becoming a well-known brand, you can spend less on marketing while simultaneously increasing sales.
How To Build Brand Awareness
The best approach to help you build brand awareness is by starting with a clear strategy. By having the proper plan in place, you expose your brand to the right people in the shortest time.
Here is how to get started.
Step 1: Understand Your Target Audience
To send the most powerful marketing messages, you need to know how to speak to them. The best way to gain attraction from an audience is to understand their pain points, frustrations, desires and preferences. Understanding all aspects of their viewpoint can help you capture their attention.
The best way to think of this is how to enhance their livelihood. Start by researching other competitive brands online, analyzing conversations, and engaging with past customers through surveys.
Step 2: Establish Brand Awareness KPIs
Once you establish your brand messaging, you’ll need to measure the success of your brand awareness activities. To measure success, KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) can help you track and measure efforts.
Here are the most common KPIs that companies use to measure:
- Website visitors: Tracks website activity such as new visitors, unique visits, time spent on a webpage and which pages receive the most traffic. By utilizing tools like Google Analytics, you can understand how well your brand is performing through upward trends.
- Social media engagement: Monitor your social media by tracking engagement, including likes, comments, shares and new followers.
- Branded search: Keep track of volume search data by understanding how many people use the search engine to look up your brand. Use various keywords popular within your industry to indicate which keywords to use in your content to boost brand awareness.
- Mentions: When your brand is buzzworthy, you can track comments across social media and online forums. This helps to measure conversations encircling your brand.
Step 3: Create Targeted Brand Awareness Campaigns
A brand awareness campaign is a marketing tactic that creates recognition regarding your brand, products or services. Here are a few marketing tactics to utilize to build brand awareness:
- Network and build relationships by engaging with customers online.
- Reinforce your message by sharing content on social media. Boost brand awareness by creating ads and promoting branded hashtags.
- Promote customer testimonials on social media and your website.
- Partner with social media influencers.
- Utilize SEO (search engine optimization).
- Use remarketing campaigns (paid advertising) to strengthen your message with past website visitors.
- Invest in a referral program to spread word of mouth.
- Partner with local businesses.
Step 4: Use Omnichannel Marketing
Once you build a brand awareness campaign, it’s time to determine which channels you’ll use for marketing. Using more than one marketing channel is excellent for reaching a wider audience and expanding your brand.
For instance, social media can expose your business to a broader audience. In fact, 58% of marketers believe that social media is “very important” to their overall marketing strategy. It allows you to promote your brand by sharing content and engaging with potential customers.
Another popular form of a branding campaign is native advertising. Relevant target audiences can discover your brand on high-quality websites. The most impactful benefit of this strategy is that audiences are open to finding new content, and the ads provide a non-disruptive experience.
Step 5: Track and Optimize Campaign
After implementing your brand awareness campaign, you can begin to track and measure your ROI (Return on Investment) in the process.
Tracking and optimizing your brand awareness campaigns are a little more tricky since they don’t include measurable quantitative figures like sales or leads. However, you can utilize the KPIs from step two to measure your ROI. Once you’re able to measure the success of your campaign, you must make adjustments accordingly to achieve your desired results.
For instance, suppose your targeted advertisements on social media aren’t performing well. You might need to make new adjustments to your target audience or the message you’re sending to potential customers.
Building Brand Awareness Successfully
You don’t need to have a big name to succeed when building brand awareness. However, many companies use brand awareness to reap the benefits of increased sales. To make your brand stand out, follow the simple steps above and repeat the process when implementing new brand awareness campaigns.
About The Author
Cooper Adwin is the Assistant Editor of Designerly Magazine. With several years of experience as a social media manager for a design company, Cooper particularly enjoys focusing on social and design news and topics that help brands create a seamless social media presence. Outside of Designerly, you can find Cooper playing D&D with friends or curled up with his cat and a good book.