You must have witnessed or heard people distinguishing themselves through their favorite brands. The best examples are brands like Apple, Gucci, Nike, and Adidas. When you say Jordans, it simply means Nike, While ordering a drink, you say Coke instead of Cola. These are prime examples of brand awareness.
Such brands or products have become a regular part of consumer lifestyles to the extent that they don’t have to think twice before purchasing a product from them. Well, you can also do the same for your brand. We’ll explain how to increase brand awareness of your products & services.
What is Brand Awareness?
The term brand awareness refers to the degree to which your brand is famous among customers and to what extent customers are aware of your particular products and services. In short, the higher the brand awareness, the more customers will be familiar with your products, messaging, and logo. They’ll return to your brand time and time again.
Difference Between Brand Recognition & Brand Awareness
So many people don’t realize the fine line of difference between these two terms. Brand recognition refers to when customers can identify your brand with only visual signs such as your logo, color, or style. For instance, when you see an eye-like logo with DQ in the center, without saying anything, you’d instantly recognize it as Dairy Queen’s.
On the other hand, brand awareness should be considered one step further than brand recognition. It includes not only name or logo recognition but also strong opinions and feelings for each step that the brand takes or is about to take.
Brand Awareness Example:
When Apple launches a new product, the actual product means more than its advertising, and marketing campaigns. If you are aiming for something similar for your brand, you must know how to increase brand awareness for your business.
Reasons Why Brand Awareness is Important
You can point out any business you like, it doesn’t matter how good their products are, how good their social media game is or how much they spend on advertising, there is no surety that they’ll survive after 10 years if they don’t have a brand awareness strategy to set themselves apart.
Think like this. “When your customers are so engaged that they’re able to recognize your brand and are eager to understand everything about your next product release, they are more likely to purchase your products even if competitors are offering a lesser price.”
Having greater brand awareness automatically results in the following things:
- Fosters people’s trust & loyalty
- Builds brand equity & perception
- Improves brand recognition
- Automatically Increases sales
- More influence on customers
- Improves brand perception
How to Increase Brand Awareness?
There are many possible ways to increase and maintain brand awareness, but here are some basic yet important points that you must always remember.
1. Create a Narrative
Storytelling is one of the most effective ways of advertising a product or promoting your brand. Why? Because it gives customers something authentic that they can relate to. Take KFC for example, people always remember the inspiring story of how Colonel Sanders found started KFC at the age of 65.
A narrative could be anything as long as there is truth to it. It could be any story about you as a founder, how you had your first product idea, or how your small-time business succeeded among the competition.
2. Socialize with the Right Intent
It doesn’t matter if you like spending time with others or not, the truth is, we all benefit from our social connections. All it requires is spending time with one another to learn new things and become approachable to others.
The same thing also applies to your brand. If the only reason you want to connect with your customer is to increase sales and earn some profit, things will go downhill pretty easily. Modern consumers don’t need much time to figure out a brand’s intentions.
If you want to increase your brand awareness, you should be social in the right way. Your daily post on social media shouldn’t only be about your products and services. Post something fun that’s not related to selling your products or services. You may even ask about how they feel about your recent launch.
3. Be a Person, While also Being a Company
As a company, it is always good to know what your customers want, it certainly helps you promote and advertise stuff that they like. But if you want to leave a bigger impact you should know to be more than a company that sells stuff. If you only post your products and deals on your Instagram, customers will know and describe you as a business with only a single goal of profit.
Instead, start a habit of posting and retweeting content that you like, as questions to your audience, reply to their comments. Treat your social platforms as a person trying to help his friends and not a business always looking to always make a profit.
4. Allow Easy Sharing to Reach New Audiences
One of the most crucial aspects of building brand awareness is making your content easily sharable on social platforms. This could be anything, your social media posts, product pages, videos, and social content. This makes sure that you are reaching new people every day.
If your product link is received by someone from their friend or family members, they’ll instantly check it out. They’ll find out everything about your brand and other products. So if it’s easy for people to share your stuff that they enjoy, it’ll automatically result in raised awareness of your brand.
How to Increase Brand Awareness for Small Businesses?
Starting a new business is no joke. For small businesses, it’s difficult to reach a higher level of brand awareness where you can just say Coke instead of a cold drink. However, there are some simpler forms of brand awareness that small businesses can always reach. For instance:
- Making sure that new customers of your fresh business know exactly what your brand stands for and which type of products or services you offer.
- Put some effort into your social media posts. Whenever customers come across your new post, they should always expect something funny. Not just a talk about your product or services.
- Achieve a standard where customers would choose your brand over others, even if cheaper options are available.
- Let your customers know at least a little about your new products ahead of time and make sure to respond to their opinions and take them into the consideration.
These are some simple steps that will make sure that the brand awareness of your small business increases every day even with baby steps.
How to Increase Brand Awareness with Social Media?
With all the paid or free options available, you may surely wonder, how to build brand awareness with social media? Well, you can pay social networks as much as you want to advertise your business and services. But when it comes to brand awareness, there is nothing more authentic than your organic social media game.
Ask yourself, is your social media post good enough that a follower would send it to a friend or at least tag them? Well, if all of your posts are made to generate more and more profit, the answer will always remain no.
On the flip side, if what you share on social media is authentic, and you’re open to having fun with your audience and listening to their opinions, likes & dislikes, it’ll generate an emotional response from them. If something adds value to their life, they’ll definitely forward it to a friend or family.
How to Increase Brand Awareness Through Digital Marketing?
There is no doubt that people nowadays spend a lot of their time online. That’s why you must not count out the internet if want to improve brand awareness. You can use the following digital marketing tactics to track and improve the awareness of your brand.
1. Unaided Brand Recall Test
In this test, you’ll have to perform an online survey of your brand awareness. Present customers a survey of products. You can include several brands and competitors with your products in this test. As genuine questions regarding your products and services but don’t give any clue.
Customers will select brands and you’ll know how many of them identify your brand correctly. After the survey is completed, calculate your brand recall.
Brand recall = No of people who identified your brand correctly/Total participants * 100. You’ll know the misconceptions regarding your brand and make improvements.
2. Track Your Website Traffic
Use Google Analytics to know the direct traffic to your website. Direct traffic simply represents the number of people who are intentionally typing your brand name or website. This way you’ll know how much success your advertising campaign is having to attract customers to your website.
Besides Google Analytics, various other digital marketing tools help businesses track their website traffic, products that customers are looking for, and time spent by customers on a website.
3. Google Alerts
Turn on Google Alerts to keep track of how much your brand name is being discussed on the online ecosystem and for what reason. You’ll get alerts whenever a third-party press talks about your brand on online platforms.
4. Guest Blogging
It is always good to run your own blog posts and build your own audience from the scratch. But there is a limit to how much mileage you can get this way. You should be ready to advertise yourself with the help of another publication.
This is what guest blogging is all about. It is the practice of writing and posting blog posts on another publication that advertises your brand products or services. The publication that you collaborate with should be relevant to your business & services.
So, How to Increase Brand Awareness?
Well, building awareness for your brand or product isn’t as complex as it may seem, especially if you take the mentioned steps. Remember that brand awareness is something more than brand recognition. Guest blogging, collaborating, and socializing with the right intent.
In the end, brand awareness is not something that you would achieve and get done with. Keep testing new methods and see if something makes a bigger impact.