When brands become a household name, they replace generic terms and become a product name. It’s called proprietary eponyms. Do you want a Band-Aid? Or let’s fedEx! Do you need a Coke? Are just some of ways people refer to things they wanna do or have.
Even though it requires years of hard work to penetrate so deep into the market, it’s not impossible to reach there with correct strategies and understanding of Branding. Brand Awareness is the Apex of marketing your business for recognition and trust.
Let’s dive into the understanding of Brand Awareness and how it impacts the growth of business.
Let’s Dive Into The Understanding Of Brand Awareness & How It Impacts The Growth Of Business:
What is Brand Awareness?
The probability of a consumer to have prior knowledge about a product or service is defined as brand awareness. How well a consumer can recall the said product according to the niche market also plays an important role. It’s called Brand recognition. When bogged about a brand, the consumer recalls the brand and the product to associate with it, it’s called Brand Recall. Both of which are a part of Brand Awareness.
Let’s dive deeper into it!
Brand awareness is the first step for a business in the industry or a niche market. Brand recognition on the other hand, is a step further. It involves recalling the business name, product and the general feeling one got while entailing its servicing. Brand awareness elicits feelings of emotion among its consumers.
Importance of Brand Awareness
Brand Awareness can be an extremely important process especially in the early stages of marketing. Every part of the brand package process from the company name, logo, design, packaging, colour palette, the content will all transform into an experience for your consumers. Thus, utilizing brand awareness as a marketing strategy is a wise choice to make. The unique brand identity will set your business apart.
1Fosters Trust: People today are smart. They rely on extensive research on products and services they want to buy. They listen and pay attention, and that builds trust. When you put efforts in creating a personality, engage in customer feedback and take reviews seriously it sends a positive message to your consumers that you care! And that builds a customer/brand relationship.
2Creates Alliance: We often replace generic terms with brand names to refer to activity, item, or service. We more than knowingly interchangeably use brand names, which is a by-product of brand awareness. These actions create an association with brands, and before we know it those actions and words do the marketing for us.
3Builds brand Equity: Brand awareness is the foundation of brand equity. To establish brand equity the brand needs to build awareness and consistently promote positive experiences with the brand. Once a consumer recognises your brand, brand-product they seek out to make a purchase and once the loyalty has been established, it inspires recommendations to other people.
And that’s why brand awareness is so important. It speaks for itself. With correct implementation it allows your brand to become a household name.
Benefits of Brand Awareness
There are endless benefits of building brand awareness. Let’s talk about some major one’s-
1Customer Recognition: Any customer making a purchase recognises the brand. People are far more likely to buy a certain product or use a service they are familiar with. And that’s a result of brand awareness.
2Customer Loyalty and Shared values: Acquiring new customers is a costly process but retaining existing customers for the long term is a critical process. Once the customer makes the purchase, there is a sense of trust that builds among the customer and the brand. Brand awareness plays a huge role in retaining those customers. Do you keep up with your existing clientele through vouchers, coupons, newsletter? That’s how you create a relationship and shared values of customer loyalty.
3Competitive edge in the market: When your customers recognize your brand and back your brand by buying products, it creates a competitive edge in the market for your company. This is built by brand awareness over time that elevates your competition in the market.
4Introducing new products: Any company that already has a customer base finds it easy to introduce new products at a much lesser advertising cost. The initial anticipation is met with the existing customer base.
Strategies to Build Brand Awareness
1Give your Brand a Personality: Giving your brand a unique personality is a sure-fire way to gain awareness. Giving life, quirkiness, some out of the box features can put your brand in a different league. Not only does this change of tune make your brand or certain products memorable it also creates general awareness around your brand name.
2Branded Packaging: Designing custom packaging for your company products is an experience on its own. From logo, colour, wrapping and packaging, it all creates a positive impression. Companies today understand that unveiling products do not alone create an impact, it starts with the unboxing. The way brands display their products, design and how they forge connections through branded packaging creates an emotional connect. It’s a great opportunity that brands should leverage for a great customer experience.
3Share content on Social Media Platforms: Leveraging social media platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Pinterest, is a great way to get your message out. Sharing content relevant to your brand identity and weaving stories around it creates a connection with your consumers and followers. Create unique posts and engaging content to get yourself going.
4Increase your Visual Content: Visual content brings more engagement and forces your consumers to wait and watch. Using engaging graphics, templates and unique designs can help marketers create posts on social media. A Study from Facebook shows that engagement is 2.3 times more with images than without. So get your imagination out of a paper and use those ideas to create brand awareness more effectively.
5Infographics: The Colorful display of emerging data and studies through infographics engages people to your content. It makes mere number display more interesting and makes it a great way to connect to users. It’s a valuable strategy for the long term to create awareness.
6Develop a Website/App: Make your brand/business reachable. Invest in a good website/app development process for an engaging audience. It provides brand awareness like no other platform. Presence of a website entrusts your consumers of a sure address to reach you and gives you credibility. On the other hand, if your business demands for you to have an app, especially if you’re from a service industry, it makes purchases easier. If you are a small business with not a lot of capital a good website and get your work done. If you are flourished and demand the need for an app, that’s a great way to establish yourself too.
7SEO Research: Every day, billions of searches are done on search engines, like Google. We search for every small or big question to gain answers. With correct strategies and leveraging search engine optimization, you can help your website rank higher on google search. Being able to leverage that, it pays off in great brand awareness. It helps you reach your target audience in a much larger and effective way. With specific keywords, and targeting you can slowly win the race of effective SEO targeting. It’s a slow process but has numerous long term benefits.
8Pay-Per-Click Advertising: PPC is more like SEO. But where SEO is focused on organic reach, PPC is focused on paid results, those paid results dominate the search engine results page (SERP). PPC gives you the freedom to choose your audience, the location, even other filters like age, demographic, time, etc. PPC raises brand awareness much faster than SEO. Google’s display network reaches more than 90% of all internet users, thus it powers the reach of your ads across the web.
9Influencer Marketing: Getting in touch with friends and influencers that compliment your brand and visa-v, leverage their reach and contacts to create awareness for your brand. It will forge long term relationships and increase your reach in no time.
10Stay away from Politics: Unless your business revolves around that industry, businesses should stay away from explicitly talking about politics. According to a study done by SproutSocial, 72% users find it unnecessary and annoying.
11Stay away from unhealthy banter and competition: Nobody likes poking around, so stay away from belittling your competition. It not only makes you look insecure but also unprofessional. Nobody likes to see one company making fun of another for their work. So businesses should refrain from this kind of behaviour and focus on their growth.
12Get the conversation going: As much as bringing your brand to your niche markets important, engaging with your customers is equally beneficial. Hold contests or quizzes that directly engage you with your followers. Take feedback and opinions- both positive and negative it will only help you improve in the long term. Consistent engagement on a personal level makes your consumers feel valued and builds trust. So don’t shy away from a conversation! It’s great.
How to Measure Brand Awareness?
It’s very important to measure the growth of your brand, it helps you understand the trajectory and gives you time to plan.
1Direct and Site traffic: The overall traffic to your website, the general population that checking out your content counts for the site traffic. While direct traffic means people intentionally tying the URL or the keywords to reach your business, which also depicts prior knowledge. It’s important to know these data as it tells you how much your brand awareness has been paying off and how much more you have to work on marketing and at what scale.
2Engagement: Followers, likes, shares, comments, tweets and retweets are all social engagements that tell you how many people engage with your brand and content. You may not know their names, but it helps you understand your data.
3Google Alerts: Google alerts helps you keep a check on third party mentions. Every time somebody mentions you and your brand you are alerted. It’s a great way to quantify engagement.
4Social Listing: It’s a social media management tool for monitoring mentions and engagement. You can keep an eye on those mentioning you and using hashtags relevant to your brand. More the conversation around your brand, better results for awareness.
Deciding your way…!
Brand awareness is not only about choosing the best digital channels but a mix of all those at your disposal. Your brand awareness campaign will only fly when you leverage the best mix that suits your brand story. For a great campaign, you need to realise your brand identity and what you stand for. Define your goal. Do plenty of research before you utilize different tools because knowledge is power and only detailed research will prepare you for ahead. Always and always set your budget, even though you may start with very limited, gradually it may expand for you to utilize and leverage the digital space in a more massive way. Always start small and build up. Once you are up and running, keep your eye on the results, track your engagement, and traffic for a better plan ahead. Leverage from the existing customer base to reach a wider audience.
Brand awareness doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a great marketing strategy that is built over time. It may seem slow in the short term, but it will surely prove beneficial in the long term. Brand awareness in the short term will help you build recognition and trust. The current customer base will help you spread the word for you when they trust your service and product and that will act as an indirect marketing. Many businesses do not realise the power of branding your business and creating an impact, but it should surely be given more credit and importance. Because without Brand Awareness, recognition is not possible and without the former, the trajectory of growth is debatable.