Are you a competition business looking to increase your brand awareness? Brand awareness is an essential part of any successful business. This blog will help you better understand brand awareness, establish brand awareness in your audience and build campaigns to grow your business. Let’s take a look!

 

What is brand awareness?

Brand awareness is the extent to which a brand is recognised by potential customers and correctly identified with its product or service. Think, when you order a drink at a restaurant, do you order cola or Diet Coke? You want consumers to think of you when they need something. Who has the best competitions and odds? You want to resonate with your audience and influence their purchase habits. 

For small businesses, brand awareness can be in the form of:

• • Consumers having knowledge of what your business is known for.
  • Recognising an ad on their social media feed. 
  • Customers and other users searching for your business on search engines. 

The importance of brand awareness

Branding recognition and brand uniqueness is key. Your brand has to set itself apart from the others. No matter how much you spend on advertising your business, your brand must offer consumers something different. Consider the consumer experience, what does your brand offer? Your brand packages up your company name, logo, offerings and content into an experience for your audience. A key part of brand awareness is trust and connection. Consumers only use businesses they trust and will reuse in the future.

Brand awareness also helps with association. It associates actions and products with particular brands, subconsciously encouraging us to replace common words with branded terms. For example, calling our vacuum cleaners “Hoovers”. The aim of the game is to create positive association and trust with your brand.

How to Establish Brand Awareness

Be aware, brand awareness doesn’t happen overnight. It takes consistency and multiple marketing efforts that go beyond trying to get paying customers. 

Here are some ways to establish a solid brand awareness foundation and make a lasting impact with your audience:

1. 1. Be a person, not just a company – to leave an impact on customers, you have to do so much more than just sell to them. Let your audience know more about you and show your personality. This gives consumers something to resonate with. In turn, this will help them pay attention to your social media posts, ads and email marketing.
   2. Socialise – don’t be afraid to connect with your audience. Communicate and engage with your audience in conversations other than sales. For example, posting funny social media posts helps you converse with your audience on a topic other than sales.Treat your audience like friends, not targets. 
   3. Storytelling – This gives consumers something to latch on to and is an incredibly powerful marketing tactic. How did you start your business? Who are the people behind the business? People love to hear stories and this can help your business become more authentic and trust-worthy. 
   4. Make sharing easy. The easier it is to share your content, the more likely consumers are to share it with their friends and family. 

How to Increase Brand Awareness

     1. Referral programs

Users will gladly spread word of your product or service when they know they’ll benefit from it.  Sites like Referralcandy can really help increase your brand awareness and give consumers an incentive to buy from your site. For example,  “Refer your friend and both of you will receive 25% off your order”. Not only are you making money from your new user, you are also exposing your brand to them and increasing their knowledge of you. 

2. Create interesting content

Interesting social media posts and blogs are great for raising brand awareness. There is so many options now for content, think outside the box and try videos, infographics and podcasts. 

3. Give your brand a personality.

Treating your brand as a person and defining your story and your brand tone of voice are the first steps to giving your brand a personality. You should convey your brand personality in all your marketing communications from social media posts to email marketing. 

How to measure brand awareness

The key performance indicators (KPI’S) that should be looked at can be separated into quantitative and qualitative measures:

Quantitative measures:

• Direct traffic.
• Site traffic numbers. 
• Social engagement. 

Qualitative Brand Awareness Measures: 

Qualitative measures can be harder to calculate however you can try:

• Searching google and setting up google alerts to find out what people are saying about your brand and any mentions related to you
• Monitor your social media and keep track of organic mentions and engagement. Who is using your hashtags or mentioning you in comments?
• Brand awareness surveys can help gain direct feedback from your customers and audience and help to gain an understanding of what they think of your brand and business. Platforms such as SurveryMonkey can help to do this.  

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