Even if you’ve never heard the term “brand awareness,” you’ve been subjected to its results.
Whether it’s knowing what to expect when you’re interacting with a Walt Disney Company or understanding a Nike ad before the logo has even been displayed. Those companies have established a brand awareness so successful that consumers can recognize it before it’s actually announced.
Believe it or not, you can achieve success similar to that.
But how do you go about doing it? What steps can you take now to benefit you and your brand in the future?
That’s what we’re here to help you with. Keep reading to learn how to build brand awareness the right way.
What Is Brand Awareness?
You might know what brand awareness feels like, but do you know how to achieve that same feeling?
If successful, your brand has the power to embed itself into the daily lives of consumers and their purchase habits. It’s the marker for how familiar your brand is to consumers and your target audience.
Establishing brand awareness from the beginning can be valuable — especially when it comes to marketing and promoting your business.
Why Is It Important For Your Business?
There are several reasons why building brand awareness is crucial for your business. It’s something that’s fairly simple to establish, but it can be difficult to change.
Association
Once you start building brand awareness, your target audience is going to become familiar with your products, services, and what they have to offer. Eventually, they may begin to use your brand name in place of the actual action. So, “Have you checked online?” has the potential to become “Have you tried Googling it?”
Trust
When you shop online, you probably check the reviews. If it’s an important purchase, you might look to YouTube or other social media sites to see what others have had to say about the product or brand. People care about what others have to say nowadays, and establishing trust in your brand is a great way to make sure you’re landing in a solid spot with those review ratings.
You can do this by asking customers to leave reviews, or you can offer your products or services to influencers to try out. Keep in mind that they don’t necessarily have to post about your product if they don’t want to, and if you’re sponsoring them they have to disclose that information.
This is still a great way to get your brand’s name out there from the beginning.
Brand Equity
This term is used to describe your brand’s value by taking customer stories, or opinions, and overall experiences into account. There are a few things you stand to gain from positive brand equity:
- Higher demand and higher prices
- Raised stock price
- Social impact
- Business expansion
Basically, when you successfully establish brand awareness, consumers are going to naturally seek out your product or service. They have prior experience with it and they know they can trust its value. You’re establishing loyalty, and you’re ensuring that your brand gets mentioned time and time again.
So, How Can You Begin Building Brand Awareness?
Once you learn all the ins and outs of brand awareness, it’s crucial to decide where you want yours to start. There are different factors to take into account, but the biggest factor is you.
Get Real With Yourself
Whether your brand is focused around you, multiple people, or something completely different, it’s important to decide what parts of yourself you’d like to incorporate into its identity.
Maybe you have an anecdote about the event that changed your life and started it all. Maybe there was a chain of events that inspired you to make an impact somewhere. Maybe you just have a really cool idea that you want to get out in the world.
Write down whatever just came to mind. Once you’ve done that, read through it and attempt to identify parts of yourself you’d like to see in your brand.
If you have a business partner (or several), identify each of your strong points. You all came together for a reason — what was it?
When you’re able to tell your story and understand why it separates you from the crowd, it becomes easier for your brand to do the same.
Ask Others
Asking others is also an effective way to know what qualities others recognize within you. If people close to you have already seen it, then it’s likely that people who have never met will easily be able to see those same attributes.
When consumers see you (or your brand) as relatable, it becomes easier for them to see themselves using your product. If you have a luxury brand, then people may feel more inclined to save up and purchase your product.
Quality is important, but so is relatability.
Bring It All Together
Once you understand what you and your brand bring to the table, you can find your space in the market. You might find that what you have to offer has never been seen before, or that you bring a new perspective to the table.
Whatever it is, you want to be sure that your unique perspective is shared and taken to well in the market. Here are a few things you can do.
Make Sharing Easy
No matter what field or industry you’re entering, you’re going to be engaging in some level of digital marketing or social media use. It’s important to make sure your audience can share your content easily.
Whether it’s a blog post, YouTube video, or some other social media post, you want to make digital word-of-mouth marketing possible for your clients, and content is the easiest way to do that.
Sharing doesn’t only mean content, though. It also means allowing space for your customers to share their stories. Interacting with them on social media is a great place to start.
You want to make sure you’re not simply trying to get them to buy your product, though. Make space for dialog to take place, and for a community to form around your brand. If you do this well, people are going to be naturally inclined to support you in any way they can.
Create Content
We’re going to round our way back to content creation, though, because it’s important in today’s digital age. Consumers enjoy art in any medium, and if you can create something that’s worth engaging in, then you’re going to attract attention.
This doesn’t mean starting a blog if you don’t want to, though. It can be through videos, photos, sponsored content, and even podcasts – which is a huge industry on its own.
Podcasts
Did you know that more than one-third of Americans 12 and older regularly tune into podcasts? It’s no different than families gathering around the radio to listen to different personalities before television was invented, but now there’s more to listen to.
The power of podcasts comes down to their niche. While you don’t necessarily have to commit to a niche, fitting your podcast with your brand is a great place to start. Companies like McDonald’s, Johnson & Johnson, and even Sephora all have their own podcasts.
It provides your audience with a different way to connect with you and your brand without them having to be blatantly sold an item from the beginning. It’s also a great opportunity for you to get to know your brand on a more personal level.
Socialize
Yes, digital marketing is crucial to building your brand. Whether you know it or not, even introverted people benefit from social interactions.
This goes beyond only attempting to engage with your audience when you want something from them — whether it’s buying a product or promoting it.
Casetify is a great brand to look to for an example of this and actually brings us to our next topic.
Offer Free Items
There are two ways to go about this — offering free items to consumers and offering free items to influencers. We’ll talk about influencers first.
Casetify is known for offering free items to influencers on YouTube all the time, not only when they’re sponsoring them. When a new iPhone comes out, they might send that phone over along with a few cases. When they’re releasing a new item, they’ll send that item, along with new phone cases.
If you come out with a new item, sending out PR packages to different influencers (both big and small) is a great way to promote your brand.
You can also do the same for consumers.
A lot of “free item” campaigns will offer that item, but the consumer will have to pay for shipping. It’s a great way for customers to try out your item because they feel like they don’t have a lot to lose. This also makes it more likely for them to come back and purchase your product if they enjoy the quality.
How’s Your Progress?
No matter how many steps you take, at some point, you’ll also have to measure the numbers that your brand is producing. There are a few ways you can go about doing this.
Social Engagement
This can refer to comments, likes, retweets, shares, how many followers you have, and more. There are tools you can use to measure this, or you can work with a marketing firm and they’ll track it all.
These numbers are a direct measurement of how many people interact with your brand, and its growth is easy to track over months at a time.
Traffic Numbers
There are two types of traffic numbers you can be looking at to measure here — direct traffic and overall site traffic.
Direct traffic comes from the people that physically type in your website’s name and visit from there. This is important to measure because it tells you how many people were aware of your brand before visiting.
This number can help you understand how effective certain marketing campaigns are, and also how many people are finding your brand through keyword searches and social media.
The other metric here, overall site traffic, is not quite as descriptive but is still effective. This number is going to tell you how many people are spending time with your content and your brand itself. It just isn’t going to tell you where these visitors came from.
There are other ways to measure your brand’s growth as well.
Average Word-of-Mouth
If you’re sponsoring an event and have a booth or team present, simply identify how many people walk up to your tent. If you’re selling merchandise, try comparing sales numbers from the year before to this year.
Comparing numbers from different time periods in your brand is a great way to measure your business’s overall growth within a certain time frame.
Building a Brand Takes Consistency
There is one quality we didn’t talk about before — consistency.
This quality is crucial in every aspect of building brand awareness, whether it’s for your clients or the business itself. It’s also important for your business partners and others you may hire to help you succeed in the long run.
You hold yourself and your work to a certain standard, and you deserve to work with people that understand your standards and can hold themselves to a similar one. Staying on track is key when it comes to marketing and building your brand, and that’s where Riserr excels.
If you’re interested in working with a marketing firm that believes in the principle and more when it comes to brand awareness, contact us today to get started.
