The more consumers trust and recognize your brand, the more likely they are to buy from you than your competitor.
Creating brand awareness keeps you in the good books of your audience and casts a spell that makes them want to invest in your product and be brand ambassadors by promoting them by the word of mouth.
What is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness is the ease by which customers recall and recognize your brand/business. The higher the brand awareness a firm has, the more audiences will be able to recollect/recognize and be acquainted with the products, logo, and posts.
Brand awareness is not just about furthering traffic and engagement but to provide an impetus to boost sales, enhance fresh prospects, and fathom audience perceptions to transform your marketing operations for the better.
Why is Brand Awareness Important?
Brand awareness is imperative as it makes consumers perceive, recall, recognize, and be acquiescent with your brand and your products. Establishing brand awareness with your target audience can help grasp the top spot and top-of-list brand recall when consumers go in for a purchase.
Brand awareness is customarily distinguished as the first step of the marketing funnel. Then you can begin to channel leads towards research, decision-making, and eventually to the buying verdict.
Brand awareness campaigns can be put to good use to scale your content and post across various channels — reaching new demographics and feed your funnel from various platforms.
Being active on social media could enable you to augment your social outreach through search advertising and SEO. Or then you could launch sponsored social posts that would promote your products and reach your target audience.
In lieu you can use native advertising to find readers and video viewers on the web. Or use strategies like influencer marketing or guest posting. Such strategies permit you to reach out to varied audiences in exchange for content created, payments, or free products.
Also keep your eyes peeled for new channels to engage at an early stage. When podcasting burst into the scene major brands, such as GE, McDonald’s, Sephora, and Marriott quickly launched their branding leads on this platform. As of now AR and VR is being utilized to promote products that gain traction among brands and audiences, and provides opportunities for experimentation with awareness campaigns.
How To Build Brand Awareness
Everyone is aware that blogs are an integral part of every website to build audience. But this strategy has its limitations. This is where guest blogging comes into picture. Here you write and post for other publications too.
Research for blogs and publications in your niche, also search for keywords and other guest posts to get them publish for you. There are other platforms which can aid you to guest post so as to increase your traffic eventually.
Check on the website’s blog, the comments and social media channels to understand their audience and how they engage with them. Make sure to provide content that is in par with what they have on offer along with a fresh take.
This opportunity can help you get access to new audience/industry too.
On Twitter, you can launch ‘brand-awareness campaigns’ by promoting your tweets and paying for impressions. You set a bid per 1,000 impressions and the campaign will be optimized by Twitter for its best reach.
Sharing of your content is crucial to reach new demographics on social media. This strategy ensures that your content has visibility beyond your follower base and can build organic reach in the aftermath of irritable algorithms. As in Facebook where algorithms favor shares from friends/families over posts from brands.
Inforgraphics are representations in a combination of graphics and text that visually represent information, data or knowledge quickly and clearly. They are visually engaging, easy to fathom, and cool to read than a regular article. Remember that the brain processes visuals 50,000 times faster than plain test. 92% of blog posts with visuals get higher engagement.
Search engine optimization (SEO) may seem baffling, but it’s easy to implement and imperative to a brand’s prominence online. It’s the process to increase organic traffic to your website via search engines and get placed on top in SERP’s. Use keywords to improve your SEO.
Focus on Keywords
These words are targeted by audiences searching to find products/firms like yours. When optimizing for brand awareness, focus on including informational keywords in your content. These keywords are that match searches of people probing more about products out there. Use tools to find vital keywords in your industry and among your competitors.
Build your content around these keywords – say you are a footwear retailer and realize too many folks are searching for ‘Nike Air Max.’ You could create a post, ‘7 reasons to buy the right shoes.’
Incorporate your keywords into the headline, body, and image titles of your post. Ensure keywords are mentioned optimally, then it becomes easier for Google to pick up your content. Don’t over stuff keywords above 2% as Google will penalize you then.
How to Increase Brand Awareness
Formula Native Advertising
Native advertising is intended to promote content (while matching the form and style) which would be similar to that of the platform it is on. This is quite an effective manner to increase brand awareness and win over new customers. As they fit into their surrounding content and borrow credibility from their hosting sites. Native ads reach audiences who are already available, reading and engaged.
They are not intrusive, scalable, and adaptive with a relevant message. Native advertising will capture 55% of digital display market this year and is forecast to garner $1.2 billion in revenue.
You can use content media platforms to increase brand awareness through native advertising. Your branded content like articles/videos are spread across top publisher sites on the open web. Hence you can launch niche marketing strategies that reach your target audiences and fill the top of the funnel with people who are already interested in your content and products
Social Media Ads
Most brands have social media presence, but they find it demanding to garner engagement and followings. You need content advertising strategies to launch ads on social media.
Incorporating brand-awareness ads helps you reach new markets where folks would be interested in your client’s brand and even target audiences based on specific behaviors and preferences. Ads also help brands circumnavigate harassing algorithms that handicap organic reach.
You can launch brand awareness campaigns on Facebook and Instagram to improve your reach and recall using videos and carousel ads (which include a series of media) to target users who might be interested in your messaging. Also target audiences by categories of age, location, gender, interest, and device. And reach ‘lookalike’ audiences who are similar to your client’s existing audience, especially those who are most likely to convert.
Consumers have the propensity to trust celebrity endorsements and influencers rather than traditional advertisements which were utilized few years ago. Hence you can reach your target audience through them.
Brands had a ROI of $7.5 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing in 2018.
Akin to guest posting you can start influencer-marketing campaigns by finding influencers in that domain and collaborate with partnership ideas. You can do this by searching relevant keywords on social channels and scrutinizing posts for influencer content.
You can also search the sponsored hashtags on Twitter and Instagram to see which influencers are ready to work with similar brands. Once you find the right influencers, you can either pay them to create content for your brand or provide the products to convince them of its usability.
Measuring Brand Awareness
If and when you use social media to build brand awareness, to get a picture of its effects you will have to track analytics on each individual social media platform.
And to know the effects of native advertising that you have undertaken, you’ll have to track metrics such as impressions, click-through rates, and website traffic.
And most consistently you will have to thoroughly monitor your campaigns to tweak/optimize according to your audience interests and habits, and painstakingly increase brand awareness in your target audience.
Conclusion Brand Awareness
Enhancing brand awareness certainly doesn’t have to be as intimidating as it seems.
- Brand awareness is imperative as it assists people recollect your products, your mission and your vision.
- Guests posts, blogs, and infographics are a remarkable way to get your brand/products visibility and your content trending.
- Social media platforms, native advertising, and influencer partnerships play a significant role to get the distribution moving in the right direction.
Finally, it’s important to remember that brand awareness isn’t a provisional arrangement. But it’s a continuous process to actualize a Midas touch on everyone who comes across your campaign and entrust them as an ardent lifelong fan of your brand.