How Building Brand Awareness Rewards You Now and in Future

Consumers love when brands cater to their needs.

Think about any time you’ve spoken to someone who loves Apple. They tell you about their love for Apple products, often in more detail than Apple's website. These people spread brand awareness for Apple without even realizing it. 

Although consumer word-of-mouth is one of many ways brands can build awareness, it's the most crucial one. Your customers are present in areas where your marketing isn't and can help you achieve exceptional benefits in the long run. 

Many brands use media monitoring software to track customer sentiments in order to provide a delightful customer experience and build loyalty. 

Creating brand awareness is especially important for early-stage companies that aspire to capture substantial market share. It's also relevant for brands that wish to revamp their product and service portfolio or are promoting a new product line. 

Building brand awareness includes marketing distinct features and qualities of a brand to help it stand out from the competition. It helps a brand induce a psychological preference for a product or service in customers' consciousness, establishing trust and driving sales. 

Although it's tricky to measure brand awareness in quantifiable terms, it's not impossible. Before we dive into calculating brand awareness, let's understand why it matters for businesses. 

Why is building brand awareness important?

In today’s ferocious market, building brand awareness is crucial for every business that aspires to succeed with brand marketing. And what business doesn't want to be successful?

Brand awareness plays a massive role in the consumer purchase cycle. Without any form of awareness of your brand, there would be absolutely no reason a consumer would even know about you among your many competitors.

Building enough awareness helps your brand stand out among the competition and encourages customers to choose your product.

Spreading brand awareness is typically the first stage in any good marketing strategy. It's a reliable method to reach your target audience and encourage them to look at your products. Even if the buyer isn’t ready to purchase the product, building brand awareness helps ensure your company will be top of mind when the need arises. 

Sales numbers often trend upward when marketing teams give sufficient love and attention to building brand awareness. This is a result of brand awareness influencing website traffic, customer affinity and loyalty, and leads that ultimately convert into sales.

Brand awareness vs. brand recognition

Although brand awareness and brand recognition are casually used in place of one another, they are not the same in essence.

Brand recognition describes how well customers perceive your brand based on visual signs or your products. On the other hand, brand awareness is the extent to which customers know your brand's value, reputation, quality, features, specifications, and social status. For example, whenever you think of having a cold beverage, you think of Coco-cola.

Brand recognition strategy goes beyond using a memorable business name. It involves using color schemes, visual elements, logos, and even tone of voice. When a brand recognition strategy is executed correctly, your brand becomes synonymous with the products your target audience needs. For example, whenever you see Audi's logo with four rings, you think of premium cars.

Brand awareness is more focused on how a buyer can distinguish a brand from competitors. It involves connecting your company with the target audience so people are aware of your brand's tangible and intangible offerings and can use them to understand your value proposition. 

How to build brand awareness

You need to develop a strategy to create brand awareness when you're new to the market or revamping your brand. A brand awareness strategy will help you spread your brand's value proposition to the target market and help your customers remember your brand when they need a product or service.

The right time to start building your brand's awareness isn't after you have launched your brand. Ideally, it happens before the launch when you need to create an essential buzz around your brand to help you get website traffic.

There are various ways you can spread the word and get your audience excited about your brand's offerings. 

1. Focus on customer support and satisfaction

Nothing spreads as quickly as the negative experience of an unsatisfied customer. It's common to see people expressing their poor experiences on social media and other forums. 

If their experience was negative, it could tarnish your brand's image you worked hard to build. Your brand should focus on providing the best-in-class service and enhance customer satisfaction to prevent such unfortunate mishaps. 

When you provide a positive experience to your customers, they feel valued and will share it with their peers. Word-of-mouth marketing increases brand awareness in such cases.  

People also share their experiences online on review websites. Brands can benefit from them by optimizing their profile on such websites. It helps buyers understand the product offerings better and increases your brand's visibility and awareness.

2. Build social media presence

Social media is a goldmine for getting initial traffic on your website. Start growing your followers on social media websites like LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter. Share meaningful information about the products or services you're offering and how they can improve a buyer's life.

Participate in discussions happening in social groups related to your brand. Remember, ‘participate’ doesn't mean spamming groups with the same content again and again. Don't add to the noise that may drive your potential buyers away. Instead, be there to educate, brainstorm, and advise people who may need your brand's products or services.

While engaging in conversations, spread the word about your brand and how it can help people with their specific needs. Be subtle but objective at the same time to encourage people to take action and follow your brand on social media.

3. Create an email list

An email list goes a long way when it comes to getting early visitors to your website. You don't need a fully functioning website to start building an email list. You can set up a landing page, create a strategy, invest in email marketing software, and offer an opt-in incentive to help grow your list.

Once you start accumulating emails, engage with them regularly. It's best to have an email marketing strategy in place before you start building your first email list. This will help you engage and nurture your audience and avoid being perceived as spammy.

4. Reach out to publications

Publication houses have a keen interest in startups. When you want to build your brand's awareness early on, press releases can help spread the word. Publication houses may reach out at some time, but it's better to take the first step in telling your brand's story. 

Effective press release distribution helps you build an audience locally, nationally, and even internationally, building brand awareness across diverse geographies.

When you’ve gathered an initial audience, the next step is to roll out and execute multiple brand awareness strategies to connect with and engage more target audiences.

5. Adopt a referral program

A referral program is a celebrated method to reward existing consumers and incentivize new ones. Good referral programs reward customers for recommending products and services to others. 

Referrals are an excellent way to build a positive brand impression on the market. When decorated with lucrative incentives and rewards, they help you spread brand awareness.

Incentives in a referral program aren't limited to cash benefits or gift cards. They can also include free use of one of the company's services. For example, Dropbox offers 500 MB of free space to every customer who makes a referral, as well as the new customer. 

6. Invest in advertising

Ads are a powerful way to increase brand awareness when leveraged properly. Advertisements with the right messaging on the best-suited channels can yield beneficial outcomes. 

First, you need to define your brand's target audience and identify platforms or websites where your audience is likely to spend most of their time. For example, Twitter has a different audience base when compared to LinkedIn, and it's best to strategize your ad campaigns accordingly.

It's essential to research your target audience to spread maximum brand awareness in the right communities. You can use omnichannel marketing campaigns to spread awareness and drive visibility.

7. Start guest blogging

Brands should work on creating high-quality content in their niche to inform and educate their target audience. They can also reach out to other publications and write blogs on their site. Choose publications related to your niche as it helps your brand get visibility among the publication's audience. For example, G2's Learning Hub accepts guest posts that follow predefined guidelines and can help you reach nearly 1 million monthly readers.

Guest blogging helps your brand create awareness with engaged audiences of various publications.

Apart from increased visibility, guest blogging also helps you build quality links to your website that helps in search engine optimization (SEO) and increases referral traffic.

8. Create co-branding partnerships

Brand partnerships aren't just about increasing reach. They also help companies build trust. For example, if the audience trusts brand A and they partner with brand B, that audience will be more interested in learning about brand B.

Brand partnerships can happen by producing content, interviewing experts or influencers, or organizing webinars and events. These serve as a way to help brands build awareness and engage their target audience.

For example, rapper Kanye West partnered with Adidas to develop high-end footwear line Yeezy. Adidas' co-branding relationship with Kanye helped the company increase its net income by 19.5% in 2019.

How to increase brand awareness

Increasing brand awareness is tricky. Your brand might rest in the shadows until you increase brand awareness and bring it into the spotlight.

There are ways you can increase brand awareness and ensure it keeps trending upward.

1. Employ influencer marketing

Influencers can give your brand the visibility it deserves, especially when you're targeting a younger demographic.

But there's a catch. Most brands only reach out to influencers with tremendous followings, but it doesn’t produce the expected results. 

A reasonable first step is to partner with micro-influencers who engage with followers using niche-specific content. Even though they might have limited reach, they have a higher engagement with their audience. 

Create your influencer marketing strategy and introduce influencers to the most significant value propositions of your brand. It will help you increase brand awareness and create a positive image.

2. Leverage content marketing

Content marketing can help tell people your brand's story and what it represents. It helps develop brand awareness by highlighting your brand's distinct qualities in the content you create to help people differentiate your brand from the rest.

Content marketing revolves around creating, promoting, and analyzing content (blogs, videos, podcasts, or graphics). It involves planning and deciding the type of content that will resonate with your target audience. As brands start leveraging content marketing, they provide the audience a complete journey where people aren't just aware of a brand, but understand what it stands for and why it's unique.

You can create blogs, articles, videos, or webinars to introduce and educate people about your brand. Your content marketing strategy will define how you want to take your audience from the awareness to advocacy stage, where they become vigorous promoters of your brand. Customers love to connect with a brand on a more personal level and content marketing is one way to build that connection.

3. Increase brand awareness with search engine optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization increases your brand visibility for search queries related to your brand. The audience views your brand as a credible source when it takes higher ranks on search engine results.

With SEO, your brand can drive organic (free) traffic, helping you increase your reach and awareness across varied demographics.

Your goal should be to rank for search queries related to your brand, product, or service portfolio. Your SEO strategy can target high-search volume keywords, long-tail keywords, phrases, and relevant questions to help the audience discover your brand.

4. Use remarkable brand packaging

Product experience doesn't begin when customers use a product, it starts with unboxing it. When you use branded packaging customers perceive it as a gift, providing a delightful product experience right from the start. 

You need to ensure the packaging's graphics and design resonate with your brand and the story you want to tell. It creates the first emotional connection with the consumer, which can stay with them even longer than the actual product. 

Providing a delightful product experience encourages your customers to become brand advocates on the street, helping you increase brand awareness and build a positive brand image.

How to measure brand awareness

Now that you know how to build brand awareness and increase it over time, let's dive deeper into ways you can measure it. Measuring brand awareness is crucial. You can't analyze or improve your strategies and tactics without it. 

Here are eight ways you can measure brand awareness in your organization: 

1. Media monitoring software: Media monitoring software provides users with up-to-date feeds of content and activity notifications from various media channels.
2. Social mentions: Tracking social mentions helps you gain a better understanding of how people interact with your brand. You can also perform sentiment analysis to evaluate whether audience sentiment is positive, neutral, or negative.
3. Branded search volume: Monitor how many organic searches have queries with your brand's name. This gives a good indication of your brand's awareness on the market.
4. Traffic: Increased website traffic is a good indicator that your brand awareness efforts are producing fruitful results. You can track traffic metrics week over week, month over month, or year over year to have a closer and more comprehensive look at overall traffic performance.
5. Increase in leads or revenue: An increase in leads or revenue can mean more people are aware of and interested in your brand. It's a high-level indicator but can be used by companies that mainly operate offline to track brand awareness. 
6. Social engagement: Social engagement in the form of likes, comments, shares, retweets, or views gives you a basic idea of a brand's performance online and how often the brand takes part in conversations.
7. Content performance: Content performance can be measured by calculating the total traffic a content piece gets, average time on page, bounce rate, and conversions. Although traffic is vital in measuring brand awareness, you must track and improve other content metrics to improve the audience's experience within your brand's content.
8. Video metrics: Track the number of views, shares, comments, and clicks your videos get to measure the success of your brand awareness campaigns.

From shadows to the spotlight

Building brand awareness helps your brand move from silent shadows to the sparkling spotlight with an audience that advocates your story, vision, and mission. Focus on increasing your brand awareness as you grow and measure what's working and what's not. 

Learn more about how to build brand equity and start increasing your revenue inflow as the brand matures.