In today’s competitive corporate world, brand awareness is the foundation of effective marketing plans. Building a solid brand presence is more important than ever as businesses fight for customers’ attention.
Social media sites are becoming quite effective instruments for increasing brand awareness at a time when digital interactions rule. This tendency is shown by Sprout Social research, which found that 89% of marketers said that using platforms like Meta, Instagram, and Twitter increased brand visibility.
This guide digs into the essence of brand awareness, including its definition, branding strategies, tactics for improvement, measuring tools, and real-world examples. Let’s begin!
What is brand awareness?
Brand awareness refers to how familiar people are with your brand and related products or services, just by name. Simply put, brand awareness indicates how memorable and identifiable a brand is to the target market, considering the company’s logo, name, products, or other assets.
Spreading awareness is also one of the best marketing tactics that works naturally in the favor of a brand. When a brand is already known to the audience, it becomes more trustworthy and has a higher conversion rate.
A well-known awareness makes your company stand out in a congested market. Therefore, consumers are more inclined to choose your offerings over others due to higher awareness of your brand in the market.
In the next section, we’ll have a look at how brand awareness defines itself in the market.
Brand awareness definition
Brand awareness is defined as people’s ease of recognition and recall for your company or product in a widespread market. The basic idea is to get your brand recognized by customers wherever they come across to any of your product or service offerings. The brand awareness strategy aims to make your company recognizable to the general public.
How to Increase Brand Awareness?
A successful strategy should build a deep bond between your audience and your brand. These are some ways to increase awareness:
1. Build Recognizable Brands
Primarily, the brand must be fundamentally recognizable before increasing its awareness in the market. You should clearly and cohesively define what your brand is and what it represents. Craft your brand identity, voice, aesthetics, brand values, logos and tagline in a way that grabs the customer’s attention. Establishing the brand’s fundamentals allows companies to present their brand across the globe freely.
2. Interact With Your Audience
You must regularly engage and interact with your audience in order to spread your brand awareness and enhance personalized connection. Regularly posting the polls, replying to their comments, post-Q&As, and using storytelling are some of the best possible measures to connect and engage with your audience. You should also take the customer’s feedback seriously and work accordingly, as it will spread a belief in the market that your brand closely listens to its audience.
3. Partner With Other Brands
Collaborations between companies with similar (or even opposing) target groups may increase your firms’ visibility. This holistic growth-based strategy helps your brand gain visibility across new customers and enhances your partnered brand’s authenticity in the market. To partner and collaborate with other brands, you can potentially use methods like influencer marketing, guest posts, co-produced films, and more to improve brand positioning.
3 Effective Brand Awareness Strategy
Following are the three strategies that can help increase brand awareness:
1. Create a Unique Selling Proposition
A brand must have a unique selling proposition (USP). It distinguishes you from the competition and explains why customers must choose you over others. It is one of the best strategic moves to create awareness. Make sure to keep your USP brief, simple, and compelling. Plus, it should also be aligned with your brand’s values and appeal to your intended market.
You can also create an evocative tagline to highlight your business’s USP. Using this strategy can enhance the effectiveness of your awareness campaigns. Overall, it helps you attract new prospects and retain most of them for your business.
2. Consistent Visual Identity
Increasing brand awareness requires uniformity of appearance across all channels. This entails adopting the same style, colors, theme and messaging on every platform. It is among the most effective methods to make others recognize your brand. Your brand elements – logo, colors, typography, and other design components should be exclusive to your company and used consistently.
According to the research conducted by the University of Loyola, the right colors can boost your brand recognition by 80%. Therefore, whether a prospective customer encounters your brand in a shop, on social media, or on your website, the consistency will keep it recognizable. Simply put, strong brand awareness requires that your brand be easily recognized and remembered, which is made possible by consistency.
3. SEO & Content Marketing
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can increase website traffic by potentially more than 1000% compared to organic social media growth. The SEO strategy will not only help in promoting brand awareness but also make it more credible in front of users because it is ranking on the 1st page of Google’s SERP.
To strategically increase awareness using SEO strategies, you must know what your target audience is looking for. SEMrush and Ahrefs are some of the best analysis tools to determine the appropriate keywords on which your website should rank. This is one of the most efficient long-term strategies to enhance your company’s awareness.
Brand Awareness How to Measure
Here we’ve mentioned three simple ways of “how to measure brand awareness?”
1. Surveys
Surveys are one of the most effective methods to measure your brand awareness. It allows you to know through which platform customers learn about your brand like email, website, or phone. This clarifies which of your efforts is most effective. You may also inquire from random individuals about their familiarity with your brand.
These surveys provide vital data on how well consumers recall your brand and how they learn about you. This way, you may determine whether your brand awareness initiatives are working and where you may need to make improvements.
2. Traffic & Analytics
Google Analytics or similar platforms can help you analyze your website traffic. It even allows you to know through which means most of the audience is visiting your website. The best-case scenario is when people find your brand through social media, input your website URL directly, or arrive via links on other websites.
These results represent that your awareness campaigns are running successfully. Moreover, the consistently increasing traffic to your website clearly indicates that your brand is reaching out to a wider audience base. Any decline or negative signs within these analytics can help you determine the areas for improvement.
3. Track Social Media Engagements
Many brands are popping up on social media nowadays. Because the audience is there, these social sites give every brand equal opportunity to increase their awareness and gain a loyal audience base. Moreover, these platforms also entail analytics to help brands measure their overall growth and performance.
Measuring your content’s likes, views, and shares allows you to know your customer engagement. In this way, you can effectively determine where your campaigns are performing well and require improvements.
Brand Awareness Examples
1. Starbucks
(Starbucks known as the main roaster and retailer of speciality coffee across the globe)
Starbucks is one of the top examples of brand awareness. For instance, whenever someone hears “coffee”, the Starbucks brand automatically comes to mind.
The brand has been using a smart strategy for a very long time. They have started writing customers’ names over the coffee. It has encouraged them to post photos on social media platforms. It has given vast marketing benefits to the brand in terms of spreading awareness.
2. Dropbox
(Dropbox – a cloud storage solution allows users to store, share, and sync files online )
Dropbox is another great example of a brand awareness marketing strategy. This brand has extensively used the freemium and referral program. Dropbox is typically a storage and service brand that offers 2 GB of free space for all users. The paid users can take advantage of 5 TB of space.
In their referral program, they have offered every user to receive 500MB additional space over every new user joining the platform. It has resulted in 3900% growth in brand awareness within just 15 months.
Conclusion
Brand awareness allows companies to attract new customers and retain existing ones. Every customer gets attracted to renowned brands like Apple. It directly represents the people’s status in the society. Hence, using the right brand awareness campaigns can substantially increase a company’s market image.There are several marketing strategies to spread awareness in the market. You can look at the brand awareness examples mentioned above. We hope this guide helps you gather essential information regarding your brand awareness.