Brand awareness is the extent to which your brand is recognised by consumers. Creating and developing brand awareness is key to developing new products and services, or of reviving an existing brand.
It’s crucial to the success of your business. If people aren’t aware of your brand, your products and services, then they won’t make a purchase. If people don’t purchase your products and services, ultimately you have no business.
To put it simply, brand awareness is key to the success and sustainability of your business in the long-term.
How does brand awareness work?
Companies that are able to maintain high-levels of brand awareness are likely to be more successful. They will experience higher levels of consumer engagement with their brand and will ultimately sell more products and services. As a result, their marketing efforts will be more effective because they build on an existing understanding and appreciation of what their brand is all about.
Industry giants like Coca-Cola and Nike rely on very high levels of brand awareness to dominate their respective markets. When you’ve built up a certain level of brand awareness, it acts as a protective moat against competitors.
We invited Dawn Creative to share some insight with the community.
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What does this mean in practical terms?
Before you begin any brand awareness campaign it’s important to identify what it is you hope to achieve. You need to outline specific goals for your brand awareness strategy, that taken together will form a coherent set of brand awareness objectives.
Here’s some of the most common objectives for a brand awareness strategy:
Increase website traffic
Increasing web traffic to your site is a key objective to most brand awareness strategies. You may want people to engage with your content, check out your product range or be prompted to make an enquiry. Encouraging engagement with your digital content helps to promote and support brand awareness going forward. To achieve this a range of measurable goals will usually be decided upon and then tactics developed to help your business get there. You may implement a social media plan, paid advertising, or develop an approach that engages with influencers. You can measure the success of each tactic, drop those that don’t work and focus more on those that do.
Promote your products and services
A key part of brand awareness is promoting your products and services as part of an overall strategy of building a general knowledge of your brand. Specific products and services can be used to strengthen your brand awareness. With the right content, delivered through the right channels you can increase the chances of your products and services being in front of the right people at the right time.
Strengthen your reputation
Brand awareness uses strategies to help strengthen your company reputation. With social media and the advent of online review sites a close attention needs to be paid to what customers are saying about your brand. Brand awareness uses a range of strategies to help foster a positive reputation for your brand and to challenge negative perceptions.
Build customer loyalty
Another objective of brand awareness strategy is to foster a sense of customer loyalty. The goal should be to encourage customers to choose your brand over others. What aspects of your brand might they relate to and how do you communicate that to them?
Become a thought leader
To break through the online noise, you don’t always have to go for the hard sell approach. Instead, you could opt for the softer and perhaps more long lasting approach of becoming a thought leader in your particular industry. With this strategy you’ll set your brand as a go-to resource for information, ideas and product developments. You’ll have solutions to your customer’s pain points and even if audiences are not yet aware of your products they’ll come to your company for answers to questions and suggestions.
Brand awareness strategies can incorporate the objective of becoming a thought leader.
Use brand awareness to sell products, services and generate leads
Brand awareness is a crucial step when it comes to selling your goods or services. If people are not aware of your brand and what you do then they’re not going to buy your products. Brand awareness campaigns can be used to promote specific products and services, or they might be used to encourage people to take a specific action such as signing up for a mailing list, asking for a quote, downloading an eBook or brochure, or deciding to purchase a product.
Brand awareness campaigns don’t exist in a vacuum
Brand awareness campaigns can be monitored over time, with attention paid to how well they perform. Are different aspects of a particular campaign more effective than others? Going forward you can then optimise those aspects of previous campaigns that worked and remove those aspects that didn’t.
At Dawn Creative, we can help you develop brand awareness strategies that achieve your objectives and grow your business. Don’t sleep on it, contact Dawn Creative today.
