Did you know that the average person has exposure to over 5,000 brands every day?
Brands don’t become household names without a lot of effort and a lot of strategizing in brand awareness; in fact, it takes years for a brand to become as well-known as many of the ones you would recognize today. Even so, that doesn’t mean that you can’t start enhancing your own brand name today to become the next Nike or LEGO years from now.
Are you interested in creating a more engaged audience? Do you need to improve your marketing campaign strategies, but don’t know where you should focus your efforts next? Brand awareness may be the answer you’re looking for.
Keep reading to learn what you should know about brand awareness and how your business can benefit from it.
What Is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness refers to whether or not the target audience understands and recognizes your brand. To establish this, you need to first figure out what your target audience is and what they are looking for.
A lot of brands are easily recognizable (such as McDonald’s, Starbucks, or Walmart), but this takes time and energy. It also takes marketing skills, which we will discuss more below.
In short, you want to have brand awareness because it helps you promote your company as a whole, but also any products or services you offer. This is crucial at the earlier stages of business development.
Become Trustworthy
Brand awareness will help others trust you. When it comes down to it, consumers rely heavily on other peoples’ opinions and their own research (AKA Google) before they make a purchase. After a consumer finds your brand, looks you up, sees that other people like you, and decides to purchase from you, they are more likely to make a repeat purchase later.
In addition to that, your brand will have more personality and accessibility. People will know what to expect from you, but they will also know that you engage with your customers and are authentic as a business.
Build Brand Equity
Brand equity is important to building the value of a brand. This is determined by the experiences of a consumer and overall judgments of the brand. Nice, positive experiences mean positive brand equity, while negative experiences mean negative brand equity.
You want positive brand equity because you will have:
- More opportunities to expand your business through extensions in product lines
- A higher stock price
- Better prices due to perceived value of products
- More social impact
You can increase your brand equity by building more brand awareness and associating your business with positive experiences and good quality. After consumers know your brand, they will start to associate it with good things, buy more products, and establish loyalty. In turn, they may also inspire their friends and family to prefer your brand over other brands.
Create Associations
When you’re reaching for a tissue, you’re probably reaching for a Kleenex. When you’re dealing with a cut, you probably put on a Band-Aid. In reality, however, you may just be using a regular tissue or a regular bandage – not those specific brand names.
Instead of cola, you say you’re having a Coke. Instead of using a search engine, you’re Googling something.
Brand awareness helps associate specific actions or products with brands instead of with the actual words we would normally use. As you build more brand awareness, people using your terms in this way creates a desire for people to use these specific products, and it actually is a way to market your products without any extra effort.
How Does It Impact Sales?
As we mentioned, brand awareness can help you promote your products, services, and anything you want to sell, so it is a way to connect with your target audience before anything else. By building this connection, you can expect an increase in sales because people will want to buy from a brand they recognize.
Think about it this way. When you’re looking for something to purchase, would you rather purchase from a brand you’ve never heard of or from a brand that you know you’ve liked before (or that others have liked)? It makes sense that you’d prefer the brand you know because you already have a preconceived idea of what the quality will be before you receive or use the product/service.
Establishing Brand Awareness
It takes a lot of time to build brand awareness because you need people to build strong associations with your actual brand. This isn’t something that will happen from a single SEO campaign or business marketing strategy; you’ll need more than that to get customers to trust you.
You want to make sure that your brand is approachable and seems more like a personality than a company. You want to showcase what your brand likes or dislikes, what they enjoy, and what they care about. This is what gets the conversation started and shows people that your brand cares about more than just making money.
In addition to that, you need to be sure that you start connecting with your audience on social media platforms. Talk about your products or services, discuss content you enjoy, and even ask or answer questions periodically.
Make sure that you provide easy ways for your customers to share your content and create a story with the content you’re creating. You want a narrative that makes your brand seem more human and relatable than other brands like it.
Start a Loyalty Program
Alright, let’s face it. All the work you are doing for brand awareness will be nothing if there are no sales for you. All efforts would go in to vain right? So, what could we do extra to make sure if one effort is not working, we’ll have a plan B for backup? I’ll tell you what we can do. Every business is online these days and if you are not, you should be as soon as possible.
If your business is products based, there are various options for you to get online. You can easily create your store online on platforms like Shopify, WordPress etc. Shopify is the best as it offers great help for ecommerce business owners. All you have to do is to sign up to one of their programs and create your store. Once your store is set up or if it’s already set up, you can start a customer loyalty program.
This is a great way to acquire customers to sell your products as people love discounts and offering discounts and special deals will reward people to buy now rather than later.
This will also help in getting people back again and again, which boosts sales. Shopify also offers various apps that will help you with the loyalty program and one of the best apps available is TADA. Tada is a spin the wheel app that allows your store visitors play a fun & engaging game to win various discounts in exchange for their email addresses. All you have to do is to add Tada’s Gamified and full-screen pop-ups to your ecommerce store and it will help you increasing your subscribers by 500% and sales by 135% instantly. You can find more information about the same on Tada’s official website.
Offer to Sponsor Events
If you’ve ever gone to a concert, sporting event, fair, or festival, you likely have noticed that brand sponsorships are literally everywhere. These events wouldn’t happen to the degree that they do without brands backing them up.
Not only will you get free advertisement with your brand logo all over the place, but you can also further associate your brand with something that aligns with your interests.
Let’s talk about Tito’s Handmade Vodka; it’s a liquor that many people outside of Austin, TX may have never heard of if it hadn’t been for all of the brand awareness efforts they’ve put into place over the past few years. They sponsor a wide variety of events, including concerts, film festivals, music festivals, food and wine events, marathons, and even the PGA TOUR as of 2021. They are spreading their name far and wide to reach anyone in their target audience.
Create a Personality With Your Brand
Think about the GEICO Insurance gecko or Flo from Progressive Insurance. Have you ever heard of Jake from State Farm?
These are all personalities that have been carefully crafted over time to represent these brands. People associate these “identities” with brands because of consistent and constant exposure. When you mix this in with regular marketing strategies, it creates a balanced picture of what you want to present to your audience.
Your brand will gain more traction as people start to remember these instances, and you’ll seem more personable (as a business) when it goes well.
Make a Podcast
Did you know that over 33% of Americans over the age of 12 listen to podcasts on a regular basis? Clearly, this is an area of media where you can target a wide range of people all over the country.
Creating your own podcast used to be extremely difficult, but now, anyone with a microphone can have their own show. Releasing a podcast is just as easy as uploading a video online with podcast hosting sites!
Doing this will help your brand awareness by providing another way for you to connect with the audience in an authentic way. Instead of promoting your business solely through social media posts or through advertising, you can also educate, inform, advise, or just entertain your audience with a podcast!
Choose the method that most authentically demonstrates the type of personality you’re going for, and create even more trust with the audience by building on this.
Increase Your Sales With Strong Brand Awareness
As you can see, brand awareness has huge potential to skyrocket your business and increase sales over time. It takes effort and strategy to do it well, however, so you need to make sure that you know what your plan is before you get started.
Brand awareness is all about building trust, creating a story, and building your brand’s personality. In addition to that, you can focus your digital marketing strategies to increase your brand awareness even more. Eventually, you’ll see increases in your audience engagement and sales as a result.
Did you find this content useful? If you did, you should check out more of our business-related articles for additional marketing insights today.
