Increasing brand awareness among your target audience can help you stay in the minds of consumers after purchase and be the first option they think of when they need a product or service from your category. It is a crucial element for your success in the market. It influences every aspect of your business, including lead generation and customer acquisition.
This article will present this concept and how to generate a successful strategy.
What is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness is the degree of recognition customers have of a brand or product because of its name or distinctive qualities. Products and services that maintain a high awareness are more likely to generate more sales.
Establishing it is a powerful marketing strategy that leads consumers to develop an instinctive preference for a brand and its products. Consumers faced with a choice are more likely to buy a branded product than an unknown one.
This higher brand awareness rate can serve as an economic moat for dominant brands in a category, preventing competitors from gaining more market share.
It is a marketing term that refers to the ease with which potential customers recognize and remember your products or services. It means they do not hesitate to invest in it or think of a particular brand regarding everyday needs.
Benefits of Building Brand Awareness
We talk about the ability of consumers to recognize your brand and the connection they feel with it. Building it is also critical in promoting a new product or reviving an old brand. Ideally, awareness includes the qualities that distinguish the product from its competition.
Working on a brand awareness strategy can bring multiple benefits to the growth of your company, among which are:
1. Brand awareness builds trust
In a world where consumers rely on extensive research and the opinions of others before making a purchase, customer trust in the brand is everything.
Once consumers engage with your brand, they are more likely to repeat purchases without thinking about it, bridging the gap between trust and customer loyalty.
2. Create an association
Brand awareness associates actions and products with certain brands, subconsciously encouraging us to substitute common words for brand terms.
3. Help build brand equity
Awareness describes brand equity, determined by the consumer’s experiences with the brand and their overall perception.
Positive brand awareness can lead to higher prices due to higher perceived value, the ability to expand the business through product or service line extensions, higher social impact due to brand name value, and higher value of actions.
4. Place the mark on the first thought
The highest brand awareness is when customers first consider you when they need to purchase within your product category. Additionally, you can build it through repeated exposure and consistent delivery of a good product or service over time.
This is an excellent advantage in the market when customers enter a purchase decision process, and your brand immediately comes to mind first.
5. Promote customer loyalty
Suppose a customer sees your brand in the market and recognizes it. In that case, that familiarity creates a sense of security that the customer has chosen a well-established company they can continue to trust to meet their needs.
How to generate brand awareness?
Now that you know what brand awareness is and what its benefits are, we will show you how to promote it in your market through 5 strategies:
1. Give your brand personality
To get excellent brand awareness, you have to have a strong brand. Strong brands are memorable and have a personality and voice of their own.
Giving your brand a personality that is true to your values and resonates with your target audience is essential. This voice can be funny, witty, emotional, playful, intelligent, sentimental, or whatever nature you think will be consistent with your brand.
2. Use content marketing
Increase the volume of content you upload to your social media platforms and ensure it’s high-quality and resonates with your customers.
When your audience enjoys your posts, they are likelier to share them with others, driving more potential customers to your page. Increasing engagement through likes, shares, mentions and comments will increase your awareness.
3. Look for alliances with brand promoters
All social media platforms have influencers who create content focused on different interests and hobbies. These interests can range from food, fashion, cars, electronics, and much more.
You can use this as a tool to increase your brand awareness by identifying influencers within your industry to become your brand advocates.
It’s important to select influencers whose values and interests match those of your organization. This allows you to use their network to engage their large audience, who are likely to be interested in your products or services.
4. Participate in brand associations
If you want to increase your brand awareness, chances are other like-minded brands want to do the same, right?
Partnering with another brand does more than combining the reach of both companies: it also builds trust between both audiences. If they like brand A, and brand A associates with brand B, maybe brand B is someone they should get to know, too.
5. Do social media contests
Organize a contest on social networks in which contestants submit a photo or video, and other users vote for their favorites. Contestants will share the link with their friends and family to get more votes, building awareness of your brand.
Advantages of brand awareness
Let’s review the benefits that a strong brand awareness provides so that you decide to grow it:
- Increased sales: People tend to buy brands they know or recognize. The more customers know about a brand, the higher your market share will be. Firms with larger market shares generate more sales than competitors. This increases your income.
- Creating emotional connections: Brand awareness helps customer retention. A well-known brand creates a sense of confidence and optimism. This emotional bond makes customers buy from a brand repeatedly and pay more.
- Customer loyalty growth: Strong brands can not only build more robust market advantages, higher revenues, and create emotional connections with customers. They have another privilege: to make occasional mistakes and be forgiven.
- Acquisition through referrals: Strong brand awareness will likely bring you referrals. People emotionally invested in a brand would recommend it to their friends, colleagues, and family.
How to Measure Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is not a metric that can be calculated with a formula. However, you can judge it by other indicators. There are three of them that you should be aware of:
- The volume of mentions in traditional media and social networks will help you understand the notoriety of your brand.
- Reach is the number of people who can potentially see posts mentioning your brand.
- Engagement allows you to judge the effectiveness of your brand awareness.
Now we will present to you how to measure it.
1. Launch a brand awareness survey
Surveys are one of the best ways to measure brand awareness. To carry them out, you just have to select your target group (the people you most want to know about your brand) and ask them questions.
Online surveys of general consumers (rather than your customers) are your best bet to precisely measure awareness.
2. Check your followers on social networks
On a surface level, your social media following gives you an idea of your reach and how many people are aware of your brand.
Assuming that most people follow you because they care about you and like you, it gives you a pretty good idea of how much awareness they have of your brand.
Monitor the reach of your posts (i.e., the number of eyes your content receives) and use this metric to plan your posts for optimal brand awareness.
If posting at a particular time of day has a higher reach, keep that in mind for future posts.
3. Use brand tracking tools
Using tools to help you track brand is a good and reliable way for marketers and business managers to measure brand awareness among consumers.
For example, we can understand users’ emotional impulses to make product and business decisions by monitoring the brand experience with tools such as the Net Promoter Score and sentiment analysis.
4. Check your voice share and impression share
Brand awareness should be measured alongside that of competitors. A 25% increase in awareness is excellent, but you need to go one step further if your competitors are doubling it.
An excellent tactic to measure this is to look at your voice share and impression share over time. While brand mentions focus on how many people are talking about you (and what they are saying), this measure also considers that those people are talking about your competitors.
5. Control the performance of your content
Analyzing your brand awareness campaigns is not only about counting the people who know your brand but also knowing which blog posts, videos, and social media content have worked and how they have contributed to the increase in awareness.
That can be as simple as seeing people’s reactions to your content.
How to increase your Brand Awareness
Increasing your brand’s visibility is a complicated process that can encompass many strategies and tricks to further your goal. We have compiled six ways to increase your brand’s online and offline visibility to help you in this process.
1. Give your brand a personality
This helps your brand stand out from a line of look-alike competitors. Second, a well-formed brand personality increases customer trust and engagement.
Your brand should have an easily recognizable color scheme, tone of voice, and main traits.
Another way to get your brand noticed in terms of personality is to hire a brand ambassador: look for a celebrity who fits your brand’s values and tone of voice.
2. Focus on values and emotions
Consumers may be rational, but they make final decisions with their hearts, not minds. People unknowingly consider their favorite brands an extension of their individuality.
To increase brand awareness, ensure your brand articulates its values clearly and consistently. It’s possible and easy when you have a well-formed unique value proposition. If you are struggling to define your brand identity, start by answering the following questions:
- Why was your brand created?
- What future does your brand want to create?
- How will you achieve this goal?
Give short answers to these questions, and thus you will form the mission and identity of your brand. The latter should be concise but clear.
3. Celebrate and attend events
Both big and small brands adhere to the promotion through celebration, attendance, or participation in events. Event marketing provides you with an opportunity to create proper business connections.
And what’s better, events help brands build deep personal relationships with customers. If you want to attend events as a brand, choose niche occasions that bring together the public most interested in your products. At the event, be proactive and prepare a short speech about your business.
4. Use social media marketing
Social media marketing is one of the best ways to increase brand awareness. Facebook, Instagram, and other networks provide access to a vast audience. Also, remember that people research products through social networks. It’s no wonder that more than half of online brand discoveries occur in this channel.
5. Collaborate with influencers
Sometimes a single recommendation from a thought leader is all it takes to double or triple your brand’s visibility. Working with bloggers helps businesses reach an audience that isn’t available through other channels.
6. Position in search engines
The company’s place on the results page, for example, Google, is crucial. The further away your website is from the top positions, the less chance you have of attracting attention.
The tactics listed above can be used in companies from various industries. Their usefulness changes depending on how you implement them in your marketing strategy.
Measure your brand awareness now!
If you want to know how much your target audience knows about your products or services, remember that you can use our brand awareness survey template just by creating a free account.
For more information about our advanced tools, do not hesitate to write to us through our online chat to find out your needs and offer you the best option.
