Whether you’re a small, independent business or a multi-national corporation – brand awareness is key to driving and maintaining a successful brand.
What is brand awareness and why is it important?
Brand awareness is a term used to denote how familiar your target market is with your brand. If no one has heard or seen your business, there will be zero recognition – therefore no brand awareness, and you will struggle to generate interest and sales. Conversely, if you have achieved a high level of brand awareness, your target demographic will be very familiar with your branding and services or products, fostering trust, reliability, and a high likelihood of conversions.
In fact, brand awareness has the potential to root itself so firmly into a person that a brand becomes habit. There’s no longer a question of which brand they’re going to purchase from for a specific product, instead they return to their chosen business time and again, building trust and loyalty exponentially. For example, people who would never dream of buying any tea other than Yorkshire Tea or any chocolate other than Cadbury’s. Of course, these are examples of brand giants with vast market saturation, however it’s also possible to achieve this kind of devout loyalty through brand awareness if you’re a small, independent business too – especially as consumers are turning away from international corporations in favour of supporting smaller businesses.
How do you boost brand awareness?
There are numerous platforms and strategies you can employ to generate more awareness around your brand, the most effective being Google and social media. These are vital tools to employ when building your brand as they allow you to directly reach your target market through specific search terms, hashtags, and digital habits.
Utilising Google Adwords is an efficient way of ensuring your brand appears at the top of the results when your consumers search relevant terms. This way, even if they aren’t clicking your website right away, every time they research your products or services, they are seeing your brand name – thus beginning to build a foundation of awareness. Even if you don’t have the budget to run Google Ads, you can still utilise the platform by being mindful of effective SEO practise, for example, by writing blogs and optimising your website using keywords your consumers are searching for.
Social media platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, have rapidly become fundamental to building and maintaining brand awareness for brands. They have the potential to allow you to reach your target audience, continually interact with them, build communities, tell your brand story, and sell directly. These are all examples of organic social strategies, however employing paid strategies allows you to take your brand awareness campaign even further.
When building a paid brand awareness campaign, it’s important to remember that your aim is awareness, not sales. If your ad focuses too much on a product or service, your consumers will only remember the product and not the brand, as well as potentially being deterred by a pushy sale on their feed. Your ad should be strongly branded, clearly portray your messaging and offering, as well as outlining your USPs. Remember to think carefully about who you’re targeting during your ad setup, so that you don’t end up spending money showing your ad to people who won’t be interested. Think carefully about location, age, gender, and interests to give your ad the best chance of reaching consumers who will respond positively to it.
Once you’ve laid these foundations, the next stepping-stone in a successful brand awareness strategy is remarketing. This means taking information from your initial campaigns (such as link clicks, landing page views or video views) and retargeting the people who took these actions, and therefore showed brand interest, to encourage them further down the sales funnel towards a conversion. In this way, you’re guiding your customer from initial awareness, to familiarity, to intent, to a sale – and then hopefully to repeat sales in the future if their journey was enjoyable.
How do you measure success?
It may seem like brand awareness is too broad a concept to produce measurable results but that’s not the case. Through the methods outlined above you can generate tangible data that will show you how effective your strategies are, from likes to follows to clicks, everything leaves a digital trace. You can also monitor how much your brand is being talked about, through social mentions, as well as elsewhere online, by setting up a Google Alert for your brand and using software such as Meltwater. It’s vital that you pay attention to all this data and analyse it over time to identify trends and thus adapt and improve your methods.
Figuring out the most effective strategy to build brand awareness for your business and target market can be tricky, which is why we’re on hand to help. Our marketing experts can create bespoke brand awareness campaigns based on extensive research to generate exceptional results. If you’re looking to boost your brand awareness and drive your business towards new goals, get in touch with our friendly team today.
