Unlock Reports:
Industry-wide studies on consumer behavior from the Cohley Insights team.
Any business can understand the importance of brand awareness. If customers don’t know about your brand, then it’s going to be hard for you to consistently get business. Brand awareness can be a simple thing to learn, but a difficult thing to master, which is why we’ve put together a guide that you can use.
Read on to learn more about what brand awareness is, why it’s important, some ways to increase brand awareness and more!
Brand awareness is a marketing term that describes the degree in which a consumer recognizes a product or business based on their name. The more brand awareness that a brand has, the more people recognize it purely based on aspects such as their name or their logo.
When done correctly, a brand can use brand awareness to distinguish itself from its competition. You can utilize brand awareness to make your brand stand out in a crowded marketplace and identify it with defining features and characteristics that can associate your brand with certain feelings, thoughts and emotions. When done correctly, this is perhaps the most effective form of marketing possible.
One of the main reasons why brand awareness is so important is because it is the very first step of your brand’s marketing funnel. If people don’t know your brand, how can you expect them to want to do business with it? However, if you are able to make people both familiar and comfortable with your brand, they are far more likely to do business with you — especially when compared to an unknown competitor brand.
Brand awareness is the main foundation to any plan you may have to acquire customers. This is why it’s so important that you spend time and effort building your brand awareness through a variety of channels. This will increase your brand equity — the commercial value that derives from consumer perception of the brand name, rather than the product or service itself. The better you cultivate your brand equity through campaigns you design around brand awareness, the more trustworthy your brand will seem, which will make it easier and easier to attract new customers and retain current customers for a long time.
Digital marketing is one of the best ways to increase brand awareness today. But how does it do so? There are five main ways that digital marketing can have an impact on your brand awareness and brand equity:
In order to first make people aware of your brand, you have to get in front of them. And these days, if you are looking for attention, you have to do so on the internet. So many people spend a majority of their day interacting with the world wide web, so it’s important that your brand has a presence online that potential customers can refer to.
Plus, the internet has a seemingly endless amount of platforms and channels for you to use to spread your brand’s message, and more ways to engage are emerging every day. Whether it’s a YouTube channel, an Instagram account, social media ads or something else, there’s a way that your brand can be seen and heard online — you just have to find the way that’s right for you.
In today’s day and age, the internet is the first place people go in order to find information. So, you’ll want to make sure that your brand is showing up in a favorable light online. A strong, consistent brand presence online will add an immeasurable amount of credibility to the reputation of your brand, which is why it’s so important that you cultivate an identity on the internet for your brand.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, if your brand doesn’t have a strong presence online, it can be a red flag for certain consumers. Many people prefer to do a good amount of research about a brand before they purchase from it, and if they don’t have the option to do that online, then you won’t stand a chance against the competition.
The customer journey is a long one — will you be able to stick with it throughout the entire process? When making their purchase decision, a customer may want to weigh their options across multiple spectrums, and the internet will most likely play a part in that. Because of this, it’s important that you are able to help out via your digital presence.
For example, a potential customer may have some questions about your brand that they want answered. If you set up your digital presence properly, they would have a variety of ways to do that — they could look you up on Google or YouTube, they could send their question to you on social media or they could interact with other users of the brand to get their feedback. You want to provide customers with as many options as possible.
One of the most powerful things a brand can do online is create and nurture a community that falls under the umbrella of your brand. If you can get people to interact with other users of your brand in a positive way, it can work wonders on spreading your brand awareness to a plethora of potential new customers.
When done successfully, this can even happen on a global scale. Some brands have become so powerful that their name alone has taken over their entire marketplace (think Legos, Post-It Notes and Band-Aids). While this is obviously a pipe dream for most brands, it’s still a testament to just how powerful a strong brand awareness can be.
The most unique variable in running a brand awareness campaign digitally is the ability to gain valuable insights from your target audience quickly.
This can be incredibly valuable when making decisions about your brand and business. You can use the data that these sites provide you in order to make adjustments to your brand and create an optimal experience for your customers. Doing this will provide you with the best chance to form and cultivate a brand that your customers can resonate with, which will lead to more awareness and more dollars in your pocket.
There are plenty of things that you can do to increase brand awareness online — these are our seven tips that you can start out with!
Content marketing is referred to as “the process of planning, creating, distributing, sharing and publishing content to reach your target audience.” It’s an action you take to boost sales, reach, interactions and brand awareness. In order to do it successfully, it’s important that you’re creating content that works with as many different channels as possible.
In order to maximize your reach on the web, you’ll want to make your information digestible and shareable. A great way to do this is to utilize shareable infographics. Find some important information that’s worth sharing to a large number of people and then present it (or pay someone to present it) in an attractive and intuitive way that makes it easy for people to understand. This is one of the best ways to get the important information across and make it something that people stop and read whenever they come across it.
As of now, do you feel like your brand has a voice? A consistent brand voice is incredibly important to the process of spreading brand awareness. You want your brand to feel like something that people know and are familiar with. This is a much more comfortable experience, and it will also help you to come off as more relatable to your audience, making you a more attractive option over your competitors.
Do you want to generate excitement around your brand? If so, one of the best ways to do that is through a brand partnership or a giveaway. A partnership or giveaway not only makes people excited to interact with your brand, but it also adds a level of credibility to your brand. It’s the perfect way to get your brand noticed and put yourself in front of new sets of eyeballs.
If you want to get your brand in front of as many people as you can in an efficient and effective way, then you’ll have to utilize social media advertising. Every platform provides their own way to advertise, so you’ll want to come up with a strategy that fits your brand. Once you do that (and do it successfully), you’ll find that social media advertising is amongst the most cost-effective methods of advertising available!
Influencer marketing is one of the newest forms of digital media out there, but it’s already proving to be one of the most effective. Thousands of influencers have leveraged the internet to cultivate a massive following, which you can use to get your brand in front of new eyeballs.
You could also look into working with brand ambassadors to use social media and the internet to purposefully spread brand awareness across their own audiences. You can use them to represent your brand publicly and positively in order to reach a new audience.
UGC (user generated content) is a great way for you to connect with your consumers by telling relevant and engaging stories that will trigger a response out of them. This type of content is created by people rather than the business, and you can use it to share to your channels to boost trust within the brand. People are likely to trust other consumers, so cultivate as much UGC as you can to use to your advantage.
Here are a few examples of powerful brand awareness campaigns that have worked extremely well:
Branded hashtags have proven to be a great way to boost engagement and awareness for any brand. Whether you are directly launching your own hashtag (like Coke’s #ShareaCoke or Volkswagen’s #Vwvan) or you are participating with the unbranded ones that are popular in your space, using branded hashtags is a great way to not only participate in the conversation, but also start new ones.
Do you feel like you and another brand could mutually benefit from one another in a natural way? If so, you may want to look into forming a partnership! Brands such as Starbucks and Spotify have done this with a music ecosystem co-branding campaign, which proved to be positive for both parties. Try putting your heads together with another brand and think of what you can do!
Once you’ve looked into ways to measure brand awareness, you’re probably wondering what you can do to measure it. It can seem difficult to measure brand awareness, especially since it’s usually done with “vanity metrics that bear no relation to marketing ROI.” But, if you know what you’re looking for, you can find a way to see some results.
If you want quantitative metrics, you’ll want to look at the actual numbers. There are plenty of analytics you can look at in order to see if your brand awareness campaign is working, such as KPI metrics, volume of mentions, reach, etc. These are the cold hard numbers that you can use to see how your brand is stacking up against the rest.
A qualitative measurement is a little more abstract. This requires you to actually listen to what the conversation is revolving around your brand. Are people saying good things or bad things? What are your reviews like? Is the general consensus on your brand good or bad? Listen to these things so that you can understand and control the conversation regarding your brand.
Now that you understand the importance of building your brand’s voice, you can work on putting together a plan to build your brand’s voice. That’s where Cohley can help you out. We have plenty of solutions available to you that you can utilize to build your brand’s voice and increase brand awareness — learn more today!