Brand awareness is a vital part of marketing, as it measures how well a brand is recognized by its intended audience and can greatly influence customer behavior. It represents the extent to which people are aware of a brand’s existence, its name, logo, and other identifying features. It also represents its products or services.
Making people aware of your brand can lead to increased sales, customer loyalty, and a competitive advantage in the market. Building it requires consistent messaging and communication to keep the brand top-of-mind with customers, and is crucial in today’s crowded marketplace where competition is intense.
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The Mechanics of Brand Awareness
The success of a product or service largely depends on its brand awareness as it increases the likelihood of generating more sales. For instance, when a certain brand has established itself due to its effective marketing and advertising strategies. This has significantly increased its brand awareness. As a result, customers are more likely to choose that brand over others, even if the products are similar.
Why Is Brand Awareness Important?
The more customers are aware of a brand, the more likely they are to consider it when making a purchase. Thus, brand awareness is a critical aspect of building a successful brand, and there are three reasons why.
Establish trust
Making people aware of your brand is essential for building trust with customers. In a world where people rely on research and opinions, building brand trust is crucial. By creating a brand personality, receiving feedback, and telling a story, you can build trust with customers and establish brand awareness. Once a customer becomes loyal to a brand, they are more likely to make repeat purchases without much thought, strengthening the bond between trust and loyalty.
Make connections
Brand awareness creates connections or associations between products and specific brands. It encourages people to use branded terms instead of generic ones. For example, people tend to use the brand name instead of the generic term of the product. This creates a subconscious connection between products and their specific brands, which helps promote the brands without direct marketing efforts.
Positive brand equity
Brand equity refers to the value of a brand based on customer experiences and perceptions. Positive experiences and perception contribute to positive brand equity, while negative experiences and perception contribute to negative brand equity. Positive brand equity leads to higher prices, stock price, business expansion, and social impact. To establish and increase brand equity, a brand must build awareness and promote positive experiences.
Also Read: Four Roles of KOL (Key Opinion Leader) in Increasing Brand Awareness
Strategies to Create Brand Awareness
To increase brand awareness, you need planning and the right strategies to do that. There are several ways to make people aware of your brand.
Guest blogging
To increase brand awareness with little effort, guest blogging on other niche websites is an effective strategy. By providing relevant and valuable content on another website, businesses can attract new audiences to their brand without being pushy or overly promotional. Guest blogging allows businesses to establish their brand voice and present themselves as approachable and human, rather than solely focused on selling products as a business.
Co-marketing
Co-marketing is a powerful way to increase people’s awareness of your brand. It allows businesses to leverage the audience of another brand and showcase their products in the market. An example of co-marketing is when two complementary brands collaborate to create a joint marketing campaign or product. By doing that, it provides an opportunity to showcase products and services to a wider audience and establish beneficial partnerships with other brands.
Advertising
Advertising is a powerful tool for building brand awareness. Online advertising, such as paid social media and PPC (Pay Per Click), is a good starting point for those looking to increase it. However, for those interested in more advanced campaigns at a larger scale, programmatic advertising campaigns can be launched to ensure maximum reach. It means using software and algorithms to automate the buying and selling of digital ad space in real-time.
Hiring a face or mascot for the brand
Hiring an actor or creating a mascot to represent the company can be a great way to humanize the brand. It can also give customers a sense of the friendly and knowledgeable service they can expect. This strategy can be cost-effective and can help in creating a recognizable identity for the brand.
Creating an image representing the brand
Creating an image or symbol that represents your brand and using it everywhere in your marketing and advertising campaigns helps you build brand recognition and awareness. This symbol does not necessarily have to be part of your logo. It could also be a separate image that is incorporated into your product packaging and design.
Making a creative slogan
Making a short, creative, and catchy slogan is definitely an effective way to increase awareness. It can be challenging to summarize the brand in a single sentence. However, a well-crafted slogan can communicate how the brand is unique, what it offers, and why customers should choose it.
How Do You Increase Brand Awareness?
Increasing brand awareness may be hard, but it’s not that different from the strategies. These five ways listed below are also ways to increase it.
Freemium pricing model
Freemium can be an effective way to raise it among your target audience. This freemium is a pricing model used by software companies that offers a basic product or product line for free, while charging for premium or enterprise-level products. This allows customers to try the product before buying and can be a long-term option. The brand’s watermark is often displayed on public-facing parts of the product or service, which serves as free advertising.
Making free content
Creating free content is a great way to raise awareness as customers increasingly turn to the internet for information and DIY (Do It Yourself) projects. Every kinds of content allow brands to showcase their personality and share opinions on issues. Brands that don’t create content risk missing out on major brand awareness opportunities to connect with their audience and promote their brand.
Also Read: 6 Effective Strategies to Choose the Right Brand Ambassador for Your Company
Sponsoring events
Sponsoring events is an effective way to get your brand in front of your target audience and build brand awareness. Brands can sponsor festivals, concerts, fairs, and exhibitions by providing banners, flyers, water bottles, and other materials, thereby cementing themselves as leaders in the field. Consistent sponsorship allows brands to associate themselves with an event’s character and aesthetic, and build awareness among highly specialized and qualified audiences.
Incorporating a personality for brand awareness
Incorporating personality into marketing campaigns is an effective way to boost brand awareness because customers will not only take note of the product or service being marketed, but also experience the brand’s personality through the advertising. To give your brand a personality, it’s important to treat your brand as a person and define your narrative. Then, infuse this personality into your marketing efforts.
Producing podcasts
Creating a podcast can significantly help boost brand awareness as it provides an authentic way to connect with the audience, educate and inform them, and build trust. Brands can choose podcast topics related to their overall message and products or services. Podcasting is easier than ever. It can be a valuable marketing tool to reach a wider audience.
How Do You Measure Brand Awareness?
The effectiveness of brand awareness efforts can be measured using a combination of quantitative and qualitative metrics. Although brand awareness cannot be measured in a traditional sense, it can still be gauged by reviewing activities and metrics that help determine popularity and customer awareness. Quantitative methods use numerical data to measure growth, while qualitative methods measure subjective value.
Quantitative methods involve using numerical data to gauge a brand’s growth. Three quantitative metrics are direct traffic, site traffic numbers, and social engagement. Direct traffic measures the number of people intentionally typing in a brand’s URL and visiting its website, while site traffic numbers reflect overall site traffic. Lastly, social engagement includes various forms of interaction on social media, such as followers, likes, retweets, comments, and more.
The qualitative brand awareness measures are to gauge how many people are aware of your brand and what they think about it. You can use social listening tools to discover who is tagging or mentioning your brand on social media. You can also run brand awareness surveys to gather direct feedback from customers and audiences. Even if these measures don’t provide a numerical score, it can still be valuable in understanding your brand’s awareness.
More Ways to Increase Brand Awareness
Despite the decline of print media, targeted advertisements placed strategically in newspapers and magazines can still attract the attention of customers and increase awareness. Additionally, in-store distribution and advertising of impulse purchase products can be effective. Event sponsorship such as charitable events and sporting events can also make people aware of the brand as you can associate it with an act of goodwill.
Also Read: 7 Reasons Why Big Retail Industry Needs ERP Software
Conclusion
Brand awareness is an essential component of marketing because it evaluates the level of recognition a brand has among its target audience, which can significantly impact consumer behavior. It is a crucial factor that can result in improved sales, customer loyalty, and a competitive edge in the market. With so many ways to increase it, you can do them with the help of a retail software.
It can increase awareness by providing a centralized branding platform, personalizing customer experiences, integrating multiple sales channels, and more. These can increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, leading to increased brand awareness through word-of-mouth recommendations. Regarding which software to choose, HashMicro offers you its Hash Retail Software with its Productivity Solutions Grant up to 70%. For more info, you can contact us and apply for a free demo here.
