How to Increase Brand Awareness? A Complete Business Guide
Table of Contents
You’ve started a brand, established your proposition values, reaching out to potential audience, and doing everything to increase your brand awareness. But this won’t be sufficient.
Increasing brand awareness means nurturing its value in the market. But how you can do this, what necessary steps you need to take to increase brand awareness, and why it is really important?
“Branding demands commitment; commitment to continual re-invention; striking chords with people to stir their emotions; and commitment to imagination. It is easy to be cynical about such things, much harder to be successful.”
– Sir Richard Branson (Founder, Virgin Group)
When your brand understands the pain points of your potential audience, it is where you begin to leverage branding and hence leading to increased awareness.
To dig deeper, we have curated this essential guide on how to increase brand awareness. Let’s first talk about branding and its importance, before we begin with practical tips.
What is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness is one of the most important elements that hold all successful marketing operations. It refers to the extent to which how many consumers are aware of and able to remember a specific brand in the marketplace.
Consumer familiarity with a brand leads to seeing the brand when making a purchasing decision. Even when the customer is not looking for the product or service, he or she tends to recall and remember a familiar brand.
In other words, without the foundation of brand awareness you can’t disrupt your market or grow among your target audience.
Although brand awareness cannot be so easily measured through the numbers like sales or website traffic, it remains one of those major contributors to customer trust and loyalty. Hence, this leads to business success.
Strong branding would lead to greater recognition of the brand, positive associations, and the resulting choices of customers to service the needs of your business over the competition.
Why is Brand Awareness Important?
The advantages of raising public visibility of your brand are huge. Here are some shocking statistics that indicate the strength of brand awareness:
- Customer loyalty has risen by 46% (according to Salsify), and a consumer is willing to pay more for the products or services from brands he trusts.
- It is seen that brands with the same branding and messaging come up with revenue increases of up to 33%.
- Recognition would take the average consumer 5-7 impressions before they would recognize a brand.
These figures show that brand recognition indeed has its merits. Investing in a brand will help you have increased customers, better revenue, and faster brand recognition.
Here are some more big reasons behind the importance of brand awareness:
1. Brand Awareness Builds Trust and Reliability
Today’s consumers lean on research and opinions from other people about something before they decide to buy anything. Hence, brand trust is very basic in this regard.
Consumers are more likely to repeat purchase with minimal hesitation after they build up a positive association with your brand. This means loyalty stems directly from trust.
When consumers believe in a brand, they are likely to remain loyal to that particular brand even as a number of alternatives exist in the market. Brand awareness is therefore paramount in creating such trust.
2. Brand Awareness Enhances Competitive Advantage
Man is naturally attracted to what he knows and understands. Human beings resist change, and this is what applies in a sales environment: people tend to go for familiar brands.
For instance, suppose you want to look for a sport shoes on Amazon. Amazon would give you a tremendous list of options from manufacturers like many other brands. However, you will most likely to see brands like Adidas and Nike that will catch your interest due to the value prepositions they bring.
This is the same for your brand too. If you are given this chance to raise brand awareness in such a noisy marketplace and be recognizable, you will take more business of your customers’ wallets.
3. Brand Awareness Attracts Equity
Brand equity refers to perceived brand value in the minds of the consumer. It is developed on the basis of a consumer’s experience, general perceptions, and feelings associated with the brand.
Building brand awareness is at the core base of brand equity. Once consumers are aware of a brand, it creates a probability to the following behaviors:
- Recognition of the brand: Even without assistance, recognizes the brand.
- Search for the brand: Look for the brand to buy.
- Like the brand: Instead of using a competitor’s brand, prefer the brand.
- Create loyalty: Such loyalty toward the brand leads to repeated purchases and word-of-mouth referrals.
When experiential experiences are continuously delivered and brand awareness is developed, you will be building rich brand equity, along with the benefits associated with such equity.
4. Brand Awareness Shows the Progress
Brand awareness is in the forefront of a good marketing plan. It cannot be directly measured; but if it were possible, that would determine to some extent the depth of success one may expect from his marketing efforts in total.
Every factor of your business supports brand awareness. Digital presence and customer service just as much as the quality of your products or campaigns include this plan and may influence one’s perception of your brand by consumers.
Brand awareness metrics can be tracked in order to monitor the effectiveness of marketing strategies. If your brand awareness is increasing, then that means your efforts are paying off; otherwise, if it’s not growing, that indicates there is a need to change some things.
How to Increase Brand Awareness?
With the highly competitive market today, building brand awareness does not become an easy task. With more brands to contend and reach in countless number of channels, what you really need is effective strategies that can make you stand out from the noise.
Build strong brand presence and catch attention through proven workable techniques to help capture interest.
1. Be Consistent with Your Branding
Consistency has been the name of the game when it comes to making the process of brand building effective. Consistency becomes an essential activity in creating brand awareness that is associated with a uniform and recognizable brand identity.
- Consistency Across Channels: Ensure that your brand’s visual identity-with regard to logos, colors, and typography-is consistent across online channels, in your website or other social media pages you use, and even in all of your marketing materials.
- Color Psychology: Keep the psychology of colors in mind and use those colors that represent the personality and value you project for your brand. People will remember your company’s colors 81% more than its name.
- Brand Personality: Define a consistent voice that reflects your brand’s personality and character. This could be friendly, professional, funny, or whatever fits best for your target audience.
Maintaining consistency in all aspects of your brand is one critical way to establish a strong and recognizable brand identity for your target audience and drives brand awareness.
2. Understand your Audiences’ Pain Points
Nothing is more crucial for brand awareness and long-term relationships than understanding what your customers are expecting from your brand. In today’s competitive landscape, no other listening is more critical than the listening to your customers.
Social listening tools let you monitor conversations about your brand, products, or industry in real time. Set up two projects to effectively keep track of your online presence:
- Brand Monitoring: It helps you track brand mentions, products, and services and know about any customer concerns while still capitalizing on opportunities.
- Industry Monitoring: This will keep you up to date on all the trends, help you identify probable competitors, and inform you about relevant discussions to participate in.
Engage in active conversations relevant to the topic and settle the complaints of the customer, which would be able to influence the final decision of the latent customer in favor of your brand and draw customers away from competitors.
3. Establish Unique Selling Propositions (USPs)
Unique Selling Propositions (USPs) in a competitive marketplace is the way you identify your uniqueness. There is something that makes your brand better than other competitors when it comes to satisfying specific consumer needs.
Here are certain tips to recognize your USPs:
- Self-Assessment: Analyze your company’s SWOT-the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats-to find out what will uniquely sell the product.
- Customer Feedback: Get feedback from customers so that one can know what the customers want to receive and what they accept.
- Competitive Analysis: Determine your competitor’s USP and how you can differ from them.
Your USP needs to be as concise, clear, and memorable as possible. It must speak to your target market and make sense within the larger branding message. Also, create a catchy slogan that communicates your USP and speaks to your target market.
4. Prioritize SEO and Content Marketing
The majority of traffic tends to fall on the first page of Google’s organic search (53%) according to Search Engine Watch; this is why ranking high can be rather significant.
Now, let’s talk about a business-oriented SEO strategy to create brand awareness. It’s time to know what people are actually searching for.
Here are a few SEO tips you can get started with:
- Find and implement brand-relevant keywords: This will heavily rely on conducting thorough keyword research so that you can identify the terms and phrases under which your target audience would look for products or services similar to yours.
- Create high-quality content: Content should be informative, useful, and relevant to the search intent of your target audience.
- Optimize a Web Page for SEO: You should have your content optimized to your target keywords by having them placed naturally in the headlines, sub-headlines, and body text.
- Do link building to increase authority: Link building will not just help you improve your website’s authority but also SERPS rankings when you have quality backlinks from other credible websites.
Consistently update your website with fresh and relevant content to maintain your search engine rankings. Also, keep track your website’s performance using analytics tools to measure the impact of your SEO efforts.
Doing this can help you improve your brand’s visibility in search engine results, attract more targeted traffic, and build brand awareness among your target audience.
5. Leverage Omnichannel Approach
Omnichannel marketing refers to the idea of reaching your customers at any touchpoint; thus, being visible in multiple channels is a part of it and follows pro-active strategies like social media marketing or content marketing and reactive strategies like customer support or social listening.
Here are certain tips you can follow:
- Keep engaged: Pay attention to what your customers are saying on social media, review platforms, and other channels.
- Quick reverts: Respond to customer inquiries, complaints, or feedback quickly.
- Action on data: Utilize customer feedback in order to identify trends, improvements, and opportunities for enhancing your brand experience.
- Multi-channel approach: Employ an omnichannel approach to reach your target audience through the channels where they spend the most time.
Following an omnichannel approach not only gives you a seamless user experience but also enhances the brand visibility. It helps build a relationship with customers, as it listens to their needs and responds accordingly.
Just focus on bringing in valuable data about customer behavior and implement insights to optimize the marketing strategies.
6. Run a thought leadership program
It’s not just about having your target audience know who you are but also respected and credible in your industry. One of the most potent strategies to achieve this is the development of a thought leadership program that positions your team as authorities within their field.
Here are some key tactics for Thought Leadership:
- Industry Insights: Strong recommendation to have experts pen regular opinion pieces across LinkedIn and other relevant platforms.
- Thought Leadership Content: Develop whitepapers, industry reports, and other social media content types that deliver rich thought and analysis into the subject matter. It will position your brand as a source of trusted information.
- Public Speaking Opportunities: Encourage your experts to speak at industry events, conferences, or webinars where they can be a speaker or a panelist.
Following a thought leadership strategy establishes your brand as a leading house in the industry and can increase credibility among the target audience. Make sure you position your experts as thought leaders in their field while creating credibility and trust.
7. Begin a Referral Initiative
Referral programs can be accounted for as one of the strong ways to build brand awareness and then trigger customer loyalty. In fact, studies have shown that 49% of consumers prefer their brand-awareness information through friends and family as their top source.
This is a pretty big deal, as it shows just how much referrals can influence the visibility and growth of a brand. Referrals are considered an effective way to gain new customers who are likely to be a good fit for your brand.
One may offer incentives to ensure that your referral program is maximally effective. Here are certain ways to leverage it:
- Give discounts to the referring customer and the new customer to get them onboard on future purchases.
- Offer rewarded gifts or products or experiences.
- Early access to the products or content upon launch.
A referral program encourages your customers to become your brand advocates and amplify the positive word-of-mouth regarding your brand. The more incentives you provide to motivate the customers to build relationships, the more referrals tend to grow proportionally.
8. Keep Measuring and Optimizing
Your brand awareness strategy must be measured by how it has affected you. First, you have to track the changes over time. This can be done through comparing your current brand awareness levels and the results achieved after implementing your strategies.
There are useful ways of tracking your brand awareness:
- Surveys: There are surveys, which can measure aided and unaided brand recall.
- Customer feedback: Gathering customer feedback helps understand their perception of your brand and identify improvement areas.
- Key metrics: Analyzing metrics including reach, share of voice, engagement rate, and sentiment analysis.
- Trend identification: Data analysis against trends helps understand customer sentiment and where improvements should be made.
Use this information to enhance your marketing decisions, hence optimizing campaigns. Awareness of brands is a continuous process; just by measuring and analyzing the progress continuously, you can improve or tailor strategies and achieve long-term success.
Additional Brand Awareness Strategies to Implement
Above beneficial tips to increase brand awareness are very effective as they provide valuable outcomes for long term. To compliment these tips, here are additional strategies to consistently maintain your brand awareness in the industry:
- Social Media Ads
Create ads on social media platforms, targeting a specific geographic, interest, and behavioral profile. Use the customer data you already have to create custom audiences in order to reach similar users. Eye-catching visuals and compelling ad copy get folks’ attention, leading to engagement.
- Urging Reviews and Feedback
Utilizing user-generated content, such as reviews and feedback is a good branding strategy. Incent customers to write reviews and share their comments. Run a contests and giveaways where customers can win.
Your website and social media channels should display positive reviews and testimonials to help the customers develop trust and credibility with your brand.
- Use Remarketing
Use remarketing for users visiting the site without completing the purchase. This will help them target them with ads based on historical browsing or interests.
You should focus on building reliable and trustworthy relationships with interested customers and to keep them hooked with your products or services.
- Partner with Influencers
The rise of influencer marketing in the industry is dominating several industries. You should also leverage it and make your brand reach a wider audience.
Partner with industry influencers who respond to your brand values and also to your target audience. Allow influencers to create sponsored content or reviews to promote the brand in question. This should also be real and definitely reflect within the audience.
- Constant Interaction with Followers
Comment on, and message your social media communities-and engage within the discussions pertinent to your industry as well as the industry forums to which you’re subscribed. You’re sharing relevant information so that you can be seen as an authority in your field.
Leverage eSearch Logix Branding Solutions
Building brand awareness is a fundamental part of any efficient marketing strategy. Using these tips on how to boost the presence of your brand, you will gain credibility and trust from your audience as you also expand the business.
Remember that brand awareness is an ongoing process that requires effort and continual measurement in forming a long-term strategy. That’s why you need professionals like us!
eSearch Logix is one of the leading digital marketing firms, as we offer a comprehensive services portfolio in the area of branding. We can really prove to be great for a business to establish the right kind of brand identity – one that is strong as well as memorable.
Our expertise and novel approach can really elevate your brand’s visual and emotional impact a thousand times.
- Brand Strategy: eSearch Logix would help develop a strong brand strategy with your business goals and target audience at its core.
- Brand Identity Design: Our creative team can help create an appealing brand identity for a logo, palette of colors, typography, and style guidelines that leave indelible marks on the branding efforts.
- Brand Messaging and Storytelling: eSearch Logix will assist you in building persuasive brand messaging which will communicate your value proposition to your desired audience.
- Brand Guidelines: We will make sure that comprehensive brand guidelines are created so that your marketing materials and touch points speak with one voice, helping bring consistency throughout.
- Brand Activation: eSearch Logix can help you bring your brand to life through effective brand activation campaigns with your target audience.
This partnership with eSearch Logix could unlock the power of good branding and work towards bringing your business to new heights. Our digital branding expert and innovative solutions will help build a strong and memorable brand and resonate it with the target audience and drive growth.