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Brand Awareness… In the current marketing world, even a week old brand gets its point to the peak and gains customer attraction.
From the above line, do not just think that building brand awareness is a cakewalk. On the contrary, there are many brands that never left a trace of existence for years.
Maybe they might have a wrong answer for how to increase brand awareness. How many of you remember a brand with its calligraphy? If there are some brands, then they will not last long in your mind. And, it is not the proper way to build brand awareness.
So, what is brand awareness and how to improve brand awareness? Let us unveil the answers and solutions for many unsolved problems.
What is brand awareness?
According to many new businessmen and entrepreneurs, brand awareness is somewhat they do with the customer’s attention and attraction. But, it is not the same phase.
Even the most popular brands regret launching failure products. Let us consider the below image. Do you think they have not marketed their products in the right way? It is all because of some giant brand awareness mistakes.
If people don’t know who you are, they probably will not take the next step in the purchase phase. Brand awareness happens in a minute when a buyer remembers your brand when they encounter a thing similar to your brand or logo. Building awareness is somewhat keeping a plum on the cake. It helps you to attain new customers and retain old customers to stand ahead of the competition.
Let us take the discussion about how to increase brand awareness further. When the customer learns and recognizes your business name, the next goal is to give them in-depth knowledge about your products, services, and other business feelings.
For instance, you can probably recognize Google’s logo a mile away. Or, you might get attention towards the MC Donald’s logo while driving down the highway. In the case of Google, though Google has regretted many products, a lot more Google products have reached an unforgettable place in the people’s mind.
Before your customers reach the brand recognition phase, you will have to build brand awareness. It will allow you to target the customers and generate leads. It eventually lets you increase your sales ratio too.
Why is brand awareness important for a business?
While defining brand awareness on behalf of your business, many of them confuse it with the notion of recognition. Conversely, brand awareness enables customers to go synonymously with the brand’s decisions.
In the chicken and egg type scenario, undoubtedly, brand awareness comes first and creates an associative mind among the businesses and marketing campaigns. Keeping things in mind, you can also surmise cultivating brand awareness and make it viable and consistent. Brand awareness is not just targeting customers instantly. Instead, it helps in achieving an outstanding marketing ROI even without having a vastly superior service or product.
According to ISPO News, around 90% of all purchasing decisions have been made subconsciously irrespective of their purchase mode. Either it may be online or offline, people ought to purchase things in haste.
Many transparent brands have a consistent identity and considerable awareness. They are also capable of evoking impulsive and emotive actions from the customers. You can also put the relationship between brand awareness and recognition phase in between.
So, how can you do the same transparent awareness among your customers? Let us discuss it.
How can you build brand awareness for your business?
As per the popular saying, Rome was not built in a day. Neither is brand awareness. People may not know your brand or logo without your strategy. You have to work on it to establish a proven strategic bond between your brand and your customers. It also helps you to earn customers’ trust and make your presence on multiple channels.
In order to build brand awareness for your business, be sure of your strategy. Try to make it unique and creative. It helps you to beat out the competitive race and make your brand stronger in the buyer’s mind.
On the surface level, it is necessary to build a strong brand awareness strategy and focus on brand recall and customer engagement. If you are a newbie who has launched your brand recently, then it is necessary for you to define your target market and develop buyer personas. When you focus more on the audience, you will eventually engage with your brand.
Pro Tip: Before starting on brand awareness, focusing on brand recall is the core of building brand awareness. Consistency is the key to brand recall.
To start with the proven strategies to increase brand awareness, make sure you pick up the best marketing tactics that work out for your brand. Exclude the remaining.
10 Proven Strategies for your business to increase brand awareness
When a client lacks brand awareness, either they might have so many things to consider or they might have considered an irrelevant option.
While building brand awareness, use repetition, and relevant exposure as your greatest weapon. Every businessman wants their business name to show up and catch their target audience. It is a good idea where it increases the viewership and likelihood of engagement.
With all the inbound and outbound marketing strategies, your brand awareness strategy should not over annoy your audience. Keep a close eye on it. Let us go into the proven strategies to increase brand awareness that you have been waiting for.
Content marketing and distribution
Content is the king. It is a pre-known fact. But, content is not only the king for SEO but also for brand awareness too. The more optimized content you produce, the more likely to attract your customers into the purchase chain. Here are the top strategies to use content.
Regular and Interactive content production
Blogging is the easiest way to create a whirl among customers. Also, the interactive content never fails in taking its place. Interactive content is highly shareable and drives an amazing conversion rate. You can use content effectively in different forms through the enlisted ways in the image.
The above-mentioned content types present more opportunities for engagement and provide a better UX for the customer experience.
Multimedia and Infographics
Many viewers and customers like to share infographics 3 times more than the other content forms. Likely, colored visuals always invite people’s eyes towards it. As mobile usage has been increased profoundly, converting the key information into an infographic lets the users save it on their phone or on their device.
Multimedia content included in videos, presentations, webinars, and other platforms brings a buzz among the customers to your brand. Yearly, you can make a trending multimedia content prevalent in the market. Be sure to utilize multiple multimedia tools available in the market. Stay ahead of the curve.
Remarketing and email tagline
Remarketing is nothing but targeting the visitors who are already aware of your site. Using remarketing, you can create a buzz among the audience and can understand what they expect from your brand/website. Instead of rough research, doing remarketing will eventually settle down things on the right track for brand awareness.
And, it also delivers your content to them when they indulge in searching the same query. Coming to the cheapest email tagline part, make sure that your website has a particular email signature. Apart from your brand logo, even your email signature catches the customers’ attention.
Networking
Networking is the other strategy to be used effectively in the brand awareness phase. Using networking strategies, you can bring marketing close to your home. Use your network effectively in creating and hosting events to make your business a household name.
Further networking strategies are discussed below.
Guest Blogging
You might have come across blogs and are aware of the guest blogging concept too. Guest blogging is an easy way to get your name out to get included in a new audience base. When your followers see your blog trending, it would create a great approach to your brand.
At the same time, there are high chances of the blog getting shared on social media. Try including it in your email blasts and social media posts. It may increase the possibility to reach the entire follower base. Around 3% of blogs put forth effort in publishing over 100 guest posts per month. Added, 3 out of 5 blogs publish guest posts from other bloggers on their blogs.
Referral programs and Industry Partnerships
Referral marketing never fails in increasing the sales ratio of the product. If your customer refers two friends to your site, he/she may get a coupon code for their purchase. Who hates these sorts of deals? When you wish to give away gifts to your customers who refer someone, make it happen. Referral marketing always brings fortune to the particular brand.
Next to referral marketing, the industrial partnership gives a kick to your brand. When you let your beneficial relationship to expand, you can feel the major impact on your brand.
Some successful industry partnership like Uber with Spotify and Apple with Mastercard has reached peaks. Why not try out the same track for your brand too?
Press Release
Make sure you have been sharing all your updates and launches with your customers. The press release is an amazing way to make the spread. It could likely reach your audience. Moreover, many publications have social media channels that may create and share your Press release as news or as a blog on their page. So, it is a win-to-win concept.
Pro Tip: HARO tool helps you to make your Press release easier. It has an extensive network of journalists and bloggers. So, it may handshake you with your brand’s press release.
Social Media
Every B2B and B2C companies find social media platforms as an huge opportunity to highly target the audience. Many brands have turned successful just through social media campaigns. You can take any social media platform for testing and experience the level of response through the posts and other strategies explained below.
Social posting and social publishing
Social posting does not mean posting every single happening. Instead, make visitors understand your business and make them have a look at your site. Add more valuable content and increase the chance of sharing.
Apart from other strategies, social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc helps in promoting your business. Social media platforms like LinkedIn offer a blogging platform that helps the users to write and publish. You can also bring your own content explaining your brand and spread them across channels. You can also use it to build your writers.
Contests and Giveaways
Similar to referral marketing, contests and giveaways has a huge response among the audience. Even your social media followers will become your customers once they hear about the contests and giveaways.
Compared to the other advertising and marketing options, the contests and giveaways seem easier and attention grabbing too. You can also request your audience to post the same giveaway contest on their wall too.
Polls and surveys
Rather than annoying your followers with normal posts, you can conduct polls and surveys related to your brand. Do not forget to keep the topic close to your brand. Irrelevant topic though gains attraction, it may make your customers sway up their minds about your brand.
Other than that, people love to answer questions. So, conducting surveys and polls makes a huge difference between your normal posts. It also improves more involvement of your followers.
Mentions and Hashtags
Using mentions and hashtags, you can reach a bunch of strangers on every social media platform. Through a hashtag, your customers will also find similar content or post related. For example, Throwback Thursday is the popular hashtag. If possible, relate those popular hashtags with your brand to make it trending.
And, directly mentioning or tagging someone will notify them and bring their attention to your post. You can use mentions effectively in order to call out influencers for their brands and make sure that you are adding up value to them. You can use the below tools to find hashtags and mentions for your social media platform.
Tools for Hashtag tracking
- Mentionlytics
- Ritetag
- Keyhole
- Hashtagify
Tools to track Mentions
- Brandwatch
- Mention
- Social Searcher
- Awario
Top 3 Examples of smart brand awareness of popular brands
Brand awareness so far has taken you to a different phase that insists the level of your brand familiarity and its importance among your customers. Especially, it is highly important during a brand’s earliest days of formation and growth. You can take the below examples for the smart brand awareness of popular brands.
Dropbox
Dropbox, a free service, lets the users bring their photos, docs, and videos anywhere and share them easily.
Dropbox’s smart awareness move: Referral marketing
Dropbox made the move extra easier through referral marketing and urging their customers to refer their friends. In return, they would get sharing options for email and social media platforms. Users will also get more space offered by Dropbox after every referral sign up.
As a result, Dropbox’s sign ups have increased by 60%.
KISSMetrics
KISSMetrics, a web analytics solution, will help in increasing customer acquisition and retention rates.
KISSMetrics’s smart awareness move: Infographic creation
KISSMetrics earned around 2,512,596 visitors with 3,741 unique referring domains through 47 infographics. It also earned a huge traffic to its blog too.
Buffer
Buffer, a social media publishing tool, has also become a huge competitor by handling the brand awareness strategy correctly.
Buffer’s smart awareness move: Guest Blogging
Through 150 guest posts, Buffer earned around 100,000+ users in just nine months. It started up with smaller sites and increased its width. Buffer got its name through a valuable content creation. As a result, Buffer’s content marketing has accounted for over 70% of its daily signups.
How to measure the different stages of brand awareness?
So, now, you know the strategies to increase brand awareness. But, how do you measure your efforts? How do you know that you are on the right track?
Don’t worry! I will let you know the marketing metrics to measure during your brand awareness stages.
Your brand awareness can be measured using traditional sense too. Here are the few ways to gauge the brand awareness and learn to tweak your efforts.
Quantitative Brand Awareness Measurement
Through the quantitative brand awareness, you can measure the overall picture. Added, you can check the below two metrics under quantitative brand awareness measurement. You can also analyze your brand awareness using BrandWatch.
- Direct traffic
- Site traffic
Qualitative Brand Awareness Measurement
This is the step where your brand awareness will score a little high. The enlisted tactics will let you know how people are aware of your brand. In order to measure qualitatively, try to,
- Search Google and set up your Google alerts
- Start practising social listening
- Run brand awareness surveys
Through the quantitative and qualitative measures, you can understand how to increase brand awareness and reach your audience. Though it does not start with a perfect number, keep your pulse to measure the influence campaigns and stay connected with your audience.
Over to you now! Start building your brand!
Brand Awareness, a powerful concept, has given you a major impact on your marketing efforts, consumer perception, and revenue.
Ultimately, you can get an overview about brand awareness and ensure that your customers have been thinking about you all day. Grow your brand awareness in an authentic way and provide exceptional customer service. You can also invite your audience to the workshops and seminars.
Follow these techniques in order to establish and build awareness for your brand. When you follow these strategies to increase brand awareness, you will find yourself with a loyal audience set who recognize your brand among your plethora of competitors. The strategies will also lead you to choose your products time and time again with an effect towards referral marketing.
