Brand Awareness: What, Benefits & 5 Strategies

Standout brands are easy to spot. They have a clear mission, they’re visually consistent, and they make an impression on their audience.

But anyone involved in marketing or branding will tell you that making a standout brand hinges on one thing: brand awareness. Building a recognisable and respected brand is critical to success, but it's not always easy.

Especially because there are a million things competing for your customers' attention these days. So, how can you make sure that they remember your brand?

Savvy marketers know that the key to standing out is to raise brand awareness using a brand awareness strategy. By creating a strong and consistent branding message, you can make sure that your customers always think of you when they need what you offer.

Never heard of one? Check out five different brand awareness strategies your business can start using today.

What is Brand Awareness?

Brand awareness is a term used in marketing and advertising. It refers to how well a consumer can recall a particular brand name or product. Brand awareness is often measured through surveys or focus groups, and high brand awareness is a crucial part of a company's marketing strategy.

You can build these surveys yourself using a WordPress survey plugin for example, or pay to have these run for you. Alternatively, if you’re in the UK you could also keep an eye on YouGovs BrandIndex data.

Awareness can be broken into three major categories: top-of-mind, category and brand. Top-of-mind awareness means that when asked an open ended question such as giving examples of brands in a particular product category, the respondent will name this brand first. Category awareness means a respondent can name a product category, but not necessarily a specific brand.

For example, if you ask someone to name a computer company, they may respond with Apple or Dell instead of Sony or Toshiba. Finally, brand awareness means that when asked to name individual brands within the product category; this particular brand will be named first.

Why is a brand awareness strategy so important?

Increasing brand awareness is one way to increase your market share, increase your customer base, and increase your revenue.

Brand awareness seamlessly communicates the entire narrative of your brand, as existing and new customers begin to recognise it - and flock to it.

Brand awareness can build brand equity, and develop trust in your brand as it goes from a player in your market, to a major leader in your industry.

Over time, customers will immediately start to associate your brand with the products and services you provide, and favour your brand, reputation and offerings over those of other brands. Neat, right?

What are the benefits of Brand Awareness?

As if increasing market share, customer base and revenue isn’t enough, there are some other benefits to building brand awareness. Namely:

Brand awareness can lead to brand recognition

Brand recognition is when a brand becomes synonymous with the product or service it provides. For example: “Can you Google that?” Google by itself is a search engine, just like Bing or DuckDuckGo, but because Google is the prominent search engine, its brand becomes synonymous with the service it provides.

Growing brand awareness efforts can lead to brand recognition through building a brand that is almost impossible to avoid. If someone says the word “Mac” it’s likely that a majority of people will envision Apple’s high-end computers, instead of a raincoat.

By associating actions and products with a brand, a brand awareness campaign subconsciously encourages a target audience to replace common words or phrases with the goods and services of the leading brand in a particular niche or industry. starting from monetizing Facebook groups to building up solid communities, brand awareness is being created by the companies that can lead to quicker brand recognition.

Brand awareness can nurture customer loyalty

Once customers recognise your brand and become familiar with your goods or services, they will begin to follow you. The more customers that follow you, the more your brand will begin to be seen as a trustworthy and professional business. And that means: consumers will spend more money.

A well-designed brand or product awareness plan encourages client loyalty, which helps your company grow a large, engaged customer base that makes it more sustainable in the long run.

Brand awareness can firepower your brand equity

Brand equity is the term used to describe a brand’s value, which is based entirely on customer experience and customer perception of a brand. Positive experiences and a positive brand perception increase brand equity, but negative experiences and negative perceptions diminish it.

Brand equity is a powerful tool because it unlocks a wealth of opportunities, such as being able to raise product or service prices due to higher perceived value (which is associated with leading reputations, see: designer clothing companies), the ability to expand the brand through product line extensions or brand partnerships, and even the chance to increase your price on the stock market.

So how does creating brand awareness affect brand equity?

By promoting positive experiences with the brand, and heightening a brand’s perceived value as that of best in class or high quality, a positive brand awareness campaign can quickly raise a brand’s equity.

Once your consumers become aware of your brand, they will recognise it without needing to be targeted through numerous acquisition or marketing campaigns.

They’ll seek you out to make a purchase, prefer your products over those similar to competitors, and will perform word of mouth marketing to recommend your brand to their network of friends and family, spreading your brand awareness far and wide.

5 Brand Awareness Strategies

Okay, so you’re sold. Now what? Which brand awareness strategy is the best for your growing brand or business?

The answer is: there isn’t one. Different brand awareness strategies can achieve different results, and it is well worth trialling different strategies to see which appears to work most successfully for your brand. Just you're set up to measure brand awareness with the correct metrics.

You can find out more about general types of branding strategies here, but otherwise the five main brand awareness strategies to utilise include:

Content Marketing Strategy

Strong content is the key to showing your customers who your company is, and what it represents - two vital factors in brand awareness. Using tools like the Serpple keyword rank tracker, you can monitor how well your content is performing in search engine rankings.

Though an important part of brand awareness is whether or not your audience recognises your brand, another part is more focused around how well they comprehend the unique characteristics that distinguish your brand from others. To make this distinction, your content can highlight the unique value propositions that set your business apart from its competition.

Additionally, incorporate keywords that are relevant to your industry and use tools like a keyword rank tracker and Google Trends API to stay up-to-date on their popularity. When crafting content, it's essential to ensure that it is both SEO and conversation optimized so that it ranks well on search engines and engages your audience. By using these tactics, you can establish a strong brand identity and connect with your customers in meaningful ways

Creating a content strategy that focuses on your brand story can allow you to share unique details that offer value and chances to forge emotive connections.

Then, producing content like blogs can give your business a voice in your industry, which is another invaluable tool for cultivating brand awareness. You can also create podcasts to increase awareness of your brand, either by yourself if you have the set up or with the help of podcast production companies.

One of the benefits of podcasting is that they are easy to start even with little experience.

Influencer marketing campaigns across social media platforms can also boost brand awareness by promoting particular products, brand values or even the mission of the brand or business.

Just as long as you're producing high quality, unique content that offers value, you'll drive traffic to your website, spread authoritativeness and expertise, attract new customers and increase brand awareness. This content can also help you nurture leads as prospects may not be ready to convert straight away. By following a lead nurturing guide, and using personalized content and targeted communication, you can build strong relationships and increase brand recall

Video & Motion Graphics Strategy

With research showing that adding a video onto a landing page can boost conversions by 80%, it’s no surprise that video marketing has seen a gargantuan rise in the past few years.

Video marketing, or the use of motion graphics in short animated videos, engage audiences in a way that text or images can't and is an excellent way to improve brand awareness for businesses of all sizes.

However making and delivering such videos can bechallenging, so make sure to consider all the issues that can arise,including the compatibility with different players including an M3U8player, MP4 player, VLC media player, and HTML5 video player.

By creating engaging and informative videos, businesses can increase the likelihood that consumers will remember their product and eventually purchase it. To help businesses create enthralling videos, there are various video editing tools available, equipped with features like noise reducer for podcasts, social media video downloader, pre-made templates for marketing campaigns, and easy-to-use editing options.

Additionally, video marketing can help businesses to stand out from their competitors, as consumers will be more likely to remember a unique or memorable video.

That's why many businesses start video podcasting as it is engaging compared to any written content and cost-friendly since it does not require other costs beyond video recording software, mic, and editing tools

A strong video marketing campaign can also help to create a positive association with the company's products in the minds of consumers, which can lead to increased loyalty and sales and increased engagement will help multiply brand awareness.

Utilise Your Brand Personality

The first stage in developing a personality for your brand is to consider it as a person and frame your narrative. The next step would be to incorporate this personality into your marketing efforts.

When you sell your products and services with personality, you can't help but build brand awareness because the heart of your brand will shine through. Sure, people will notice the products or services you're promoting, but they'll also get a sense of your personality from the commercials. And if it aligns with their own: you’re onto a winner.

Cisco are notorious for highlighting their sense of humour throughout their brand personality. Back in 2013, Senior Marketing Manager Tim Washer told the joke “When I can’t find a compelling statistic to support my argument, I invent one: 73 percent of people who read B2B blogs are people” in the midst of a fairly serious B2B showcase. Cisco quickly made the gaffe into an advert, and it went down a storm.

Combining traditional marketing efforts with the best brand activations by showcasing what makes your brand human is a fantastic approach, and nowadays, a great way to go viral.

Your brand personality should be reflected in all aspects of your business, from the way you answer customer service inquiries to the language you use on your website. Exit-intent triggers can be a valuable tool in helping you to ensure that your brand personality comes across clearly to your target audience. It allows you to track mouse movement and activity on your website.

If someone appears to be leaving your site without taking any desired actions, you can display a targeted message that reflects your brand personality.

The same can be said if you’re using other marketing channels such as an SMS API in the case of SMS marketing or email marketing campaigns. Make sure your brand personality shines through. And when it comes to emails, ensure you have good email deliverability and an updated email list, and use an email verifier to make sure you have valid emails as well.

Get Your Brand Voice Right

Just like developing a brand personality, developing a brand voice can also aid your brand awareness campaigns because a voice allows your brand to stay in the minds of customers. Your company's voice may be hilarious, emotional, intelligent, or sentimental; all you have to do is make it genuine to the company and audience you service.

Having a distinct tone makes a business memorable, and it can go a long way toward raising brand recognition in the market.. it doesn’t matter if you're working on an email or an SMS marketing campaign, it's still essential to be able to deliver your brand message and have your voice.

Find A Relevant Brand Partnership

Though it may seem counterintuitive, if you want to expand your brand recognition, there's a good chance that other like-minded businesses are attempting the same.

When another business's brand is linked to your own, you not only combine the two companies' reach, but you also create trust among both audiences. Maybe Brand B is someone they should know about if they enjoy Brand A and Brand A is working with Brand B.

One notable example of a partnership working between two global brands was that of Amazon and American Express. Amazon wanted to improve the way small businesses sold their products on its platform, so they opted to partner with American Express - a brand who notoriously gives rewards to B2B and B2C consumers that use their cards.

Together, they produced a co-branded credit card that encouraged users to buy goods and services from small businesses by offering reward incentives and discounts, but that also provided Amazon with data insights on the subsequent purchasing activity.

By combining their efforts in a card that benefited both company owners and customers, the two companies increased their brand awareness through a joint partnership, while also increasing brand trust and equity.

Conclusion

So, how do you create a brand awareness strategy that stands out and entices customers? And once you have that strategy in place, how do you nurture brand recognition to keep those customers coming back for more? The answers lie in understanding what makes your target market tick.

Thankfully, the team at Huddle is here to help. We’re experts when it comes to tweaking branding strategies so they resonate with consumers and translate into tangible results.

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