For any business to be successful, you need to work on its branding. All the strategies used in branding are first and foremost created to create brand awareness. You need your prospects to know about your brand, and then only they will gain interest or engage with it more.
Creating brand awareness begins from the very beginning of your business. Before you even launch your very first product line, you need to start marketing your brand name to give your audience an idea of what you will be offering. This is a good technique for getting your first few customers as soon as you launch your retail outlet, online store, website, office, or services.
Different phases of business require building brand awareness in different ways. We will be discussing the benefits of developing brand awareness at each of these different phases. But before anything else, let’s clearly define what brand awareness is.
What is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness is a non-technical, general term that refers to the extent to which your audience and target customers are familiar or aware of your brand name and your brand offerings. In simpler words, the more your prospects know about your products and the general theme of the range of products you offer, the greater is your brand awareness.
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Brand awareness can also be described as the measure of how recognizable and memorable your brand and your products are to your target audience. The greater brand awareness you have, the higher will be your brand recognition, which means the more your consumers will identify your brand based on your logo, name, slogan, website, adverts, and tangible products.
In today’s digitized world, there are many sneaky ways to build brand awareness. But you can only be motivated to adopt those tactics if you know the benefits of building brand awareness.
What are the Benefits of Brand Awareness?
Following are the 5 main benefits of brand awareness.
1. More Word of Mouth Marketing
Having more brand awareness means your customers know more about your products and are happy to talk about them. When people talk about your products and services with their friends and peers, you get free of cost marketing service from them. This is called word of mouth marketing and is practical and valuable for your business growth.
2. Increased Customer Loyalty
More brand awareness keeps your customers reminded about your outlet, website, and products or services. This means they will visit your online or retail store more often, increasing the chances of more frequent purchases by your existing customers. This, in turn, displays increased customer loyalty for your brand.
3. More accessible to Penetrate New Markets
With high brand awareness, it is easier for a business to penetrate new markets. When people in your existing market segments know a lot about your brand, the news might also spread out to other customer segments. Some market segments might already be aware of your brand name before you even start selling to them. Thus developing brand awareness opens doors and opportunities to easily penetrate new markets.
4. Higher Sales Revenue
Suppose you can get more repeat purchases from your existing customers, get more new customers through word of mouth marketing, and easily penetrate new market segments. In that case, you will ultimately have higher sales revenue. These are all results of having brand awareness.
5. Opportunities For Long Term Business Growth
If there is anything that can help you sustain your business in the long run, providing easy expansion opportunities, it is your brand awareness.
Now that you know the benefits of brand awareness, let’s talk about some effective brand awareness strategies that can help you enjoy all the advantages mentioned above.
Steps to Build a Successful Brand Awareness Campaign
Many businesses these days struggle to build online brand awareness by spending a lot of money on display ads. Thousands of impressions can be generated in search engine results and on various websites in the form of display ads, which may or may not lead to clicks to your landing page. Even though that’s an effective brand awareness strategy, it can cost you thousands of dollars before you start seeing the results.
Today, we will talk about brand awareness strategies that can be used in conjunction with the display ad network technique.
1. Use Referral Programs
Referral programs provide an incentive or reward to those who spread the word about your products and special offers. Giving added perks to existing consumers to bring in new consumers is an effective brand awareness strategy.
An example of such a referral program is the campaign run by Dropbox. If an existing Dropbox user refers the tool to their friends, they get 500 MB of extra storage space per friend who signs up for it. This referral program has helped Dropbox generate thousands of new sign-ups, saving the company thousands of advertising dollars.
2. Impressive Guest Content
Another good way of building online brand awareness is to make guest posts on different websites and blogs, mentioning your brand name and linking the posts to your landing pages. Guest posting is a powerful way to create brand awareness and get your name known in your niche market.
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However, merely writing any posts won’t help. You really need to produce good quality content that inspires readers and influences them to click on the links that bring them to your website. The more unique and valuable content you create, the better will be the brand awareness effect.
3. Infographics
This might sound surprising, but using infographics in your marketing content indeed boosts your brand awareness. Infographics are a colorful and bright way to display marketing data. They are known for developing thought leadership. They are sometimes referred to as content powerhouses and have more chances of being shared and spread by those who see them on a landing page or social media page. That’s why they are an excellent tool for creating and spreading brand awareness.
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4. Freemium With Credit
These days, most of the online products and tools offer a free version, including a credit line or watermark. They offer an option to upgrade to the premium version for removing the watermark and unlocking the paid features.
All the users who use the free version of such tools carry around the brand watermark to their audience, thus spreading brand awareness. Some of the new users who see the product with your watermark on it will straight away choose to buy the paid version. Therefore, offering a freemium product gets your brand name in front of many eyeballs, leading to more premium customers.
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5. Local Partnerships
Another great brand awareness strategy is to form local partnerships. This is particularly helpful for local-oriented brands, but other businesses can apply this strategy as well. When you make local partners, you open up opportunities to join seminars and festivals, donate to charity events, and sponsor local sports teams. In these events, you can get your brand plastered and have your brand name in front of many people. This works wonders for your brand awareness.
6. Freebies
Who doesn’t like free stuff? Of course, everybody does! Every once in a while, giving out free gifts to your customers on their purchase will significantly impact your brand awareness. These customers will go around showing off the free gift they get from you, marketing your brand by default in the process.
7. Social Media Contents
Social media platforms have a greater chance of making your brand or adverts go viral than anything else. Running contests on social media can get your followers excited and increase your brand awareness. This is particularly useful when you just start off a business or are about to launch a new product.
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These contests not only entertain your followers, but also give them an incentive to get a reward if they become the winner.
Social media contest links spread very fast. A person interested in participating in a contest is likely to share it with all his friends to bring them along to compete. An example of a social media contest can be asking contestants to submit a video or photo and getting other users to vote for their favorites. Contestants will excitedly share their photo links with their friends and peers, hoping to get more and more votes. This will skyrocket your brand awareness.
These were several brand awareness strategies that you can use to uplift your brand and sales. Once you have established good brand awareness, you can use it to direct more traffic to your website. Building a website these days is just as simple as creating a social media page. But getting people to visit it is the difficult part. You need to have the basic know-how of search engine optimization to be able to do that.
If you develop your website on Strikingly, we provide several tools and features that enhance your on-site SEO. If your website has higher search rankings, it will further help you boost your brand awareness and increase your sales revenue.
