How do you increase brand awareness then? Well, it’s hard to make sales when nobody knows about your brand. When a consumer sees your ad, they don’t know whether they should go for the purchase, or to ask themselves, what in the world is this? Can I trust this company that I am seeing for the first time?
If they’ve already seen your brand name and logo or have interacted with your site, they’ll think more about the products you offer and not about whether they should trust you.
That’s why brand awareness is so essential in digital advertising.
What is brand awareness?
A good example of a brand with great brand awareness is Coca-Cola. Even if you’re not a big fan, you probably know this brand. A brand with near-zero brand awareness is one that nobody knows about yet.
When marketers talk about brand awareness they are referring to potential customers being aware that your brand exists. This often happens through either seeing an ad or company name in some other context. Apart from that basic concept, there are four stages to increase brand awareness.
Source: LinkedIn
The recognition stage means consumers can recognize your brand among several competing brands. Brand recall means consumers can recall your brand when prompted.
When your brand is one of the top choices of a customer, it’s called top-of-the-mind in this categorization. Preference is when consumers prefer your brand to others they can recall.
Arriving at the last two stages of this brand awareness pyramid takes the work of the whole company, especially the customer care and sales departments. It forms the basis of interaction with the company as a customer.
Brand awareness is a concept, not a metric. So to increase brand awareness needs to be a plan. Just as the concept of business success can be measured with sales revenue growth metrics, brand awareness campaign success can be measured, too.
The process is a bit more tricky, though. The best way to track it is to run a survey of consumers who are not your customers yet.
You can also use Google Trends to compare the search volumes of your brand and competing brands to see which has more brand awareness.
Importance of Brand Awareness
Furthermore to increasebBrand awareness is the key thing that a young business should pursue. In fact, 60% of marketers say it’s the most important thing at the first stages of building a business.
Here are the three main reasons why that’s the case.
Increase brand awareness and stand out among the competition
The most significant thing that a solid campaign does is help you to stand out among competitors. In short to increase brand awareness.
Imagine a situation where a user decides they want to purchase a pair of black pants. More so, they google it and see around a dozen different brands in the search results. If they’re not familiar with any of the brands they see, they’ll have to check every page.
If they have heard about one of the brands they see, they’re probably going to click on that brand first.
This is one of the most important roles of brand awareness. When a consumer knows about your brand, they see search results as a brand they know versus a bunch of random brands. This makes you stand out among the competition.
Create a starting point for interacting with your brand
Not all people who know about your brand will make a purchase immediately. Some people might continue interacting with your brand in some way or another. They might browse through your products, read a blog, subscribe to a newsletter, or to a social media account.
This why it is so important to increase brand awareness at first touchpoint with your brand. More so, a touchpoint that could be the gateway to something bigger than just being aware of it.
Increase brand awareness with loyalty and trust
Brand trust is the primary factor behind decision-making for over 80% of consumers, according to a 2021 survey of 1,000 consumers. Trust in your brand is built by many things, like showing authority in your line of work, providing a great product or service, and excelling at customer care. But it starts with building brand awareness.
A brand awareness strategy itself provides a basic level of trust for your brand. When presented with a few dozen unknown brands, people will be more likely to trust the one they’ve at least seen a couple of times.
In industries where business comes from repeat purchases, to increase brand awareness also fosters brand loyalty. This means your brand becomes a customer’s top pick when they have the desire to purchase something from the category that you’re in.
Increase sales
All of the benefits of brand awareness that you see above lead to one thing — an increase in sales. A decent level of brand awareness will also help with customer acquisition across all marketing channels.
Both paid and organic sales channels will start showing better conversion rates as consumers will be more aware of your company and have a basic level of trust in it, and might even know what you offer. That’s why remarketing ads see a 180% improvement in CTR — users who see them already know the company being marketed.
Better sales can come from online brand strategies, even without having to do marketing. If a consumer already is familiar with your brand, they might remember it when they want to buy something.
Effective Strategies to Increase Brand Awareness
Measuring is harder than finding ways to increase brand awareness. Moreover, this practice is so crucial that there is a set of best practices that will work for most businesses.
These are the six most effective brand awareness improvement techniques.
Focus on Brand Recognition
The first thing you should focus on is making your brand recognizable. The idea behind this is pretty simple — your goal with brand awareness is to stand out among the competitors. If you don’t differ from them, it’s harder to do that.
Focus on the key components of your brand:
- Brand personality and brand voice
- A memorable logo and slogan
- A matching color palette
- Website design
- Business mission and values
Making the logo memorable and unique, especially in the choice of brand colors, is especially important as more people will remember the color scheme of your brand than its name.
There are three main rules you should follow when creating these branding elements.
- Pick a brand personality that fits you and your customers, and pick everything else that fits that brand personality.
- Find the golden mean between being different enough to stand out but not so different that you don’t match customer expectations and common tropes of the industry.
- Be consistent in every aspect of branding.
Don’t underestimate the last one. If you create a great brand but don’t follow through, your brand personality will look one way on the website, another way on social media, and quite differently in display ads. At that point, you won’t have a brand but just a lot of clever and confusing messaging.
That’s why businesses that have consistent messaging enjoy 20% greater growth and bring in 33% more revenue.
Establish authority in the niche
After following the steps above, you will actually have a brand that consumers can recognize. Whatever values your brand embodies, there’s one value that every brand should strive for — authority. When consumers don’t just know your brand exists but also believe you know what you’re talking about, the level of trust becomes much higher.
One of the most effective brand awareness tactics for doing this is to rank in the top ten for both transactional and informational keywords.
Ranking high for keywords used to find products to buy doesn’t just positively impact sales. Even if a person doesn’t go to your site to make a purchase, they’ll see it in the search results and assume Google trusts it to be among the best picks, so it’s authoritative.
Ranking high for informational keywords will show consumers you’re eager to share your knowledge. And if you do rank high, it’s likely that you know what you’re writing about and are a professional in your field.
Source: Google
Besides, reading an article on your site can serve as one of the first touchpoints with your brand that will leave an impression of you as an authoritative brand.
To have more chances of ranking high, and thus increase brand awareness, use a SERP analyzer tool to understand what competitors are doing to rank. Try and form a powerful strategy to outrank them. A tool like that can show you a list of competitors for any keyword, evaluate the type of content that ranks for those keywords and show SEO metrics of pages that rank there.
This gives you all the information you need to form your own strategy.
Be Present on Different Platforms To Increase Brand Awareness
Apart from trying to get your websites higher on search engine result pages for certain keywords, you should consider other modes of communicating with your audience. Social media, in particular, can strengthen your brand, as this medium lends itself to authentic communication and lets the brand be a bit more personified than what you’d get with ads.
First, you’ll have to figure out what platforms to use. You need to choose the ones where your target audience is.
LinkedIn would be better for B2B brands. If you run a jewelry store, Pinterest or Instagram might be good picks. TikTok might be good if your B2C business is geared towards a younger demographic and would benefit from viral video content.
Focus on one or two platforms and create content that is in line with your brand identity and might lead to larger brand awareness. This means not the type of content that’s likely to make you a sale but content that’s more likely to be shared a lot.
Create content that strengthens branding
Content marketing is one of the components of an effective brand awareness strategy, but what type of content should you produce?
There are three main types of content that will benefit branding, but no matter what you do, content should follow these two rules: it is likely to attract viewership, and it showcases the most important parts of your brand personality.
That said, the first type of content is simply regular helpful content. It could be guides or how-tos on your website blog or condensed variants of that for social media. It could also be masterfully done photos of your product posted on a social media platform.
Despite it being rather straightforward, consumers will be interested in it, discover it (with proper content distribution, of course), and will come in contact with your brand — which is exactly what you’re going for.
The next noteworthy type of content that can help build and increase brand awareness and trust is content centered around the people who use your products.
Source: Instagram/Yeti
Sharing photos your customers make improves brand loyalty for existing customers and shows your target market two important things: there are plenty of people happy to use your products, and you respect them enough to showcase their photos.
Lastly, you could do brand storytelling. This type of content focuses on your brand, the people who work at your company, your values, and your brand story. It might be more difficult to find ideas for it, but it shows your human side and builds trust with the target audience.
Relationship-Based Link Building
Link building is vital for SEO as it helps all of your pages rank higher, so it does influence brand awareness in an indirect way. However, it can influence it directly, too.
Just like social media influencers do collaborations to introduce themselves to each other’s audiences, so can businesses. What you have to remember when looking for businesses to partner up with is they have to be as popular as yours, and preferably a bit more so. It’s best if your values are aligned or at least don’t contradict each other.
Getting a backlink or a mention from another brand doesn’t just serve an SEO purpose, it introduces their audience to your brand. It also does so in a favorable light and shows your brand as relatable and authoritative.
The easiest way to get a mention is to write a guest post for another business blog. You can also find businesses interested in reciprocating this, and link to their content as well.
If you enter a partnership like that, make sure to extend it to social media. That way, you’re maximizing brand awareness efforts for both of you.
Become a Sponsor for Events and Organizations
Getting a big sponsorship deal is a way to expose your brand to millions of consumers. That’s why major beverage and sportswear brands sponsor the NFL. But you don’t have to bankroll a Super Bowl commercial to take advantage of this.
Sponsor small local events, online events, or social media influencers to get exposure. The main thing is to make sure the audience of those events and influencers matches your target audience.
A marketing agency could sponsor a networking event or a webinar for your potential customers. If you sell healthy snacks, sponsor an outdoor influencer or host a tasting event at a local climbing gym
Summary
A good brand awareness strategy can mean the difference between rapid growth and closing up shop. It helps your business convert better in traditional marketing channels and even make sales without marketing, as consumers take note of your business and come back later when they decide to order something.
Create a strong, consistent brand image for your business, and look for opportunities to show it to users by any means necessary, from organic social media presence to sponsorship deals.