Improving your brand awareness should be one of your top priorities if you want to build a successful business. It is an important part of any brand promotion and marketing campaign.
Brand awareness is important because it gives you the opportunity to turn strangers into customers. When people don’t know you, they can’t buy from you. But when they do, they will not only buy from you, but also spread the word. This is all well and good, but how do we actually build brand awareness? What can we do today that will make a difference in the long run? You will find out soon as you continue reading this piece.
What is Brand Awareness?
There are many ways to improve brand awareness. To get one thing straight, I would like to talk about what does brand awareness really mean? The definition of brand awareness is “the extent to which consumers are familiar with your business or product”. It is the degree to which customers are able to recall or recognize a brand. Brand awareness can be a great asset for any company. The more consumers know about your company and its products, the more likely they are to purchase from you rather than your competitors. This is why it is a key consideration in consumer behavior, advertising management, brand management and strategy development.
Informational influences also include how much one knows about a brand. Here, it is widely accepted that the more consumers know about a brand, the greater its influence on consumer purchase decisions.
The most common tools for measuring brand awareness are spontaneous and prompted awareness. Spontaneous awareness refers to a consumer’s ability to recall a brand without any external stimuli or cues; this measures the strength of a brand in memory. Prompted awareness refers to consumers’ ability to recognize or acknowledge a brand after being exposed to some external stimulus e.g., by way of an advertisement.
Strategies for Improving Brand Awareness
In order to grow your business, you need to focus on increasing the brand awareness of your company. How do you do that? Let me give you 7 tips on how to increase brand awareness.
- Use social media platforms
Social media is a great platform where you can find your target audience. Creating profiles on these platforms is the first step to increase the brand awareness of your company. You can share videos and images about your company and its products or services. You can also provide information about how your company solves problems of customers, how people are going to get benefit by buying your product or service, etc. This will give an idea to the customer that they are getting a good value for their money. There are various social media platforms out there such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Reddit, Youtube etc. However, choosing the appropriate social media platform to promote your business will be a little tricky task for you because each platform has its own pros and cons. You need to choose a social media platform that matches the type of business you are running or planning to start up with. It would be better if you have a basic understanding of how social media works because it will help you in creating a strong online presence for your company which in turn leads to higher brand awareness.
Companies that blog receive 97% more links to their website! That’s why it is important for businesses to start blogging if they haven’t already done so. For example, blogging allows you to share your expertise with a larger audience and helps you establish your authority in your industry while also building brand awareness nearly effortlessly. You are able to provide useful information or tips and tricks related to your products or services through content marketing, thereby increasing trust among potential customers and ultimately increasing conversions.
- Use referral programs
Referral programs are a great way to get people who are already engaged in your brand to spread the word about your business for you. Encourage them to share their experiences with their friends, family and colleagues by offering them something in return for doing so. This could be anything from a discount on their next purchase, to some kind of reward system where their points add up towards something bigger such as a free product or service after they’ve referred so many people.
- Stay Consistent
Make sure that your brand messages are the same across all channels and from the different stakeholders within your organization. If everyone is on the same page, they will make sure to deliver a consistent message, which will help to strengthen your brand.
It’s important to keep a close eye on how people are talking about you online as well. This can be done by setting up Google Alerts or by using Social Mention. This will alert you when someone mentions your company or brand name, allowing you to jump into the conversation and interact with that person in real-time.
- Use SEO and SEM
If you want people to find your brand online, you have to use search engine optimization (SEO) tactics. If you’re not familiar with SEO, there are plenty of tools out there that can help you improve your ranking on Google and other search engines. You might even consider hiring an SEO expert or agency to assist you with this if you don’t have experience in this area yourself.
- Collaborate with other businesses
Collaborating with other businesses can help you reach a whole new audience and grow your customer base. If you collaborate with a company that shares the same target audience, this will be very beneficial for both of you!
- Guest post on other websites
Writing guest posts on other websites is another great way to increase brand awareness as well as build backlinks from high authority domains which will also help improve SEO rankings for your website. You can contact blogs or websites that share similar interests with yours and ask them if they would like any guest posts from time-to-time; most likely they will say yes!
- Be Authentic
People want to know what they’re getting into when they do business with you. Be yourself, and don’t try to be something that you’re not; it will come across as phony and unoriginal. Share more of the human side of your business with customers – let them see who you really are, what kind of team you have, and what kind of culture exists in your company. This allows people to get to know the real you – and if they like what they see, they’ll be more likely to become customers for life.
Conclusion
We hope this article has given you a good foundation to improve your brand awareness.All of the above are simple ways to increase brand awareness and, in turn, sales. If you want to make your brand a household name, you need to get creative.