It’s no doubt that products or services with a high level of brand awareness will generate more sales because consumers would prefer to patronize an already known or popular brand compared to a brand they barely know one thing about, hence some basic strategies for brand awareness are important for business growth.
Nobody wants to buy a product they don’t really know much about.
95% of people prefer to buy from a known brand.
Have you ever walked into a cosmetic shop to buy a body cream because you already knew their brand, if you have, then that’s the power of brand awareness to you.
Good brand awareness keeps your products and services registered in the minds of the final consumers.
For instance, if you needed a bottle of soft-drink now, one of the first brands that runs into your mind will be Coca-cola.
This is because Coca-cola has invested a huge amount of time, energy and resources in building their powerful brand and market name.
Hence, knowing how to build brand awareness will give you a competitive edge in the market.
What is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness is a marketing term that tells how much a consumer recognizes or identifies a product by the name of the product.
It’s a term that talks about the rate at which a customer or consumer recognizes and identifies your products and services.
Hence, the simply definition of brand awareness is the degree at which consumers are familiar to your product and services against all other competitions in the market.
This means you simply know what a product or service offers by seeing the logo, hearing it from a friend or on a post or banner.
For instance, if i mention Google now, you know am talking about Search engines, what about Facebook, you already know am talking of Social media.
Amazon is e-commerce, Apple is Tech, if you need a bottle of Soft-drink now, am sure you will think about Coke or Pepsi, this is simply how much you are familiar with these products.
Tesla creates Electric Cars, Microsoft deals on Software’s, just to mention but a few to explain the power of brand awareness to you, you already know what brand awareness means now, okay let’s move on.
Let’s talk about the importance of brand awareness, why should i get familiarity and push my brand to the public?, lets find out!
Importance of Brand Awareness
- You win the trust and loyalty of consumers before your competitors.
- It multiplies and increases your overall market share and sales.
- Customers will keep coming back to patronize because you are actively in the market.
- You are sure to sell more when people know your Logo, business name and what your company stands for.
- It increase your click through rates and conversions online because they are already familiar with your brand.
- Good brand awareness increases your business value, people will be willing to pay you more when they know your brand is famous.
- It helps you sell both physical and digital product
Good brand awareness campaigns will help you promote your digital marketing successfully because consumers are already familiar with your brand.
Strategies for Brand Awareness.
Let talk about the basic strategies for brand awareness, that is, how to build brand awareness to promote your business, increase your market share, product or service value.
1. Freebies:
Giving out freebies works perfectly to promote a brand.
In our world today when nothing is free, you have to pay to get something.
People like to receive something for free, giving out freebie to customers will help you gain brand awareness because they will likely tell their friends and families about your brand and word of marketing is important in business.
Lets say you sell food stuffs or beverages, you might just give your customers a cup of tea or coffee to keep them warm when they patronize your stop in the morning, or just look for what your customers love related to your brand and give it out for free.
2. Host Social Media Contest:
Hosting social media contest is a very cheap and fast way to increase your brand awareness.
Check your budget and host a contest on social media to give winners a gift or a price tag, maybe from your products too.
Contestants will gladly share your brand to families and friends in demand for votes to win the contest, they will indirectly be sharing your brand Logo and business name to everyone they know and this will ultimately increase brand awareness for you.
3. Tell Engaging Stories:
People tend to find stories engaging and interesting, It makes your brand memorable.
They will be glad to hear your failed stories, your return back stories, your growth stories or how you finally decided to start up a business.
Tell stories about your challenges, what problems did you encounter and how you solved them, it will draw attention and popularity to you because people love to hear real life success stories.
It might be educational, emotional, just engage your customers and potential consumers, letting people know you more will make them trust your brand and feel connected to you hence increasing your brand awareness.
4. Be Socially Interactive:
Maintain a strong social media presence, make sure people can easily connect to you on social media, socialize with people.
Ask questions, respond to questions, drop contents, see beyond business, interact with audience, see it as you trying to make a friend and not you trying to make money.
What this does is that it psychologically makes users feel you as a person or individual not just as a brand.
5. Introduce referral programs to increase brand awareness:
Referral programs can growth hack a business and increase your brand awareness in a short period of time.
People will gladly tell others about your business and services when they know they will get a bonus or an advantage for doing so.
People like it when you tell them to invite their friends and get a whooping 50% discount on purchases, wow… that great isn’t it, yeah that the power of referral programs.
They will do so much marketing for you to win amazing prices from you.
Try this strategy, am sure you will be surprised at the number of users willingly recommending your products or services to third parties.
6. Spark up Controversy:
This is one of the cheapest strategies for brand awareness.
It might not be for everyone, but being controversial in your business niche can call lots of attention to you.
For instance, sparking up statements that will demand the validity and judgement of others.
For example, let’s say an online coach comes up to say “Nobody makes money online”..
It sounds crazy right, why would someone ever say that, but that’s when controversy comes in.. People will start their judgement and others be for or against the motion, only to draw a conclusion afterwards.
They might just conclude telling you that nobody makes money online but it’s the products they sell or the services they render online that makes them the money.
By the time this controversy is over, you might have built huge recognition and popularity.
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7. Local B2B Partnership:
There is power in business partnership.
Local business to business partnership is one of the most reliable strategies for brand awareness that works in all business niches.
Partnering with similar businesses like you who are already making huge market popularity can also increase your brand awareness.
How this work is that business “A” will let customers know they partner with business “B” and “C”.
Alternatively, those that patronizes “A” will not see it as a big deal checking out “B” and “C” to know them more and also patronize them thereby increasing brand awareness for the three businesses.
8. Social Media Influencer’s:
Social media influencer’s that people already know are good and effective strategies for brand awareness.
You can leverage on their huge social presence and followership when they talk well of your brand online.
Their loyal followers are sure to check you out to know you more and possibly do business with you.
Most big brands leverage the huge fan base of celebrities when promoting an existing brand or introducing a new brand to the market.
Users tends to go for these brands because they are already accepted by influencer’s and celebrities.
9. Word of Mouth Marketing:
This is one of the most effective way to establish trust and familiarity among customers.
If someone sees that a friend or family member is recommending a product or service, they’ll take note of that product and brand to check it out.
I have personally purchase products from brands i barely know because a friend or family member recommended them to me. This is the power of word of mouth marketing.
When friends let people know about you, users will want to know if the brand is worth exploring or not.
Are the brand products reliable? Do they have good services?, and if they are convinced enough, they are sure to start patronizing you.
10. Branded Materials (T-Shirt, Face-Caps, Pens and Business Jotters):
I call this the offline method of brand awareness.
Here, you don’t need to do anything online to advertise and market your product.
You can give out branded t-shirts, face-caps, pens and business jotters containing your Logos and business name to your customers.
This is one of those strategies of brand awareness that makes your existing customers happy to patronize you.
This will also make them share information’s about your product to people who sees your brands on them.
This type of brand awareness is less expensive, easy to design and used when businesses run on a low budget.
This is one of the best ways to grow your business brand by promoting on a low budget.
Nevertheless, it also gives high conversion rates, it keeps existing customers closer to your brand and opens the doors to new users.
11. Car Wrap or Mobile branding:
This is a method of branding that involves wrapping your car or vehicles with your brand logo, business name.
This is why I call car wraps “mobile branding” because you brand your business everywhere you drive to.
I have seen lot’s of business owners use this car to create brand awareness for their businesses.
Mobile form of advertising attracts massive attentions to brands because of it’s unique attention capabilities.
12. Impressive Guest Content:
Sharing quality information’s on other related businesses to you will build trust to your business.
This involves creating amazing blog post or contents describing a product or service on another website or blog.
Be sure to give out value here, be real and straight to the point.
As far as possible, keep it short, simple and straight.
At the end of the post, you can give a detailed description of your product and brand to the readers.
Many who feel impacted will visit your site or blog to learn more about you.
13. Paid advertising to target improved brand awareness:
Paid advertising is one of the effective strategies of brand awareness used to promote an existing or old product.
It could be a short video displaying your new product or services with your brand logo passing a detailed and amazing message about your brand.
It could also be used to further promote existing products or services to your audience.
Many small businesses practice paid advertising in their brand awareness campaigns.
14. Encourage Social Sharing:
Making it easy for people to share your contents will be a fast way to catapult your brand to the public.
It could be a blog post, sponsored content, videos, social media posts, or your product pages.
It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it’s shareable, its a vital factor you must take note of.
Consumers will raise your brand recognition by simply clicking the “Share” button.
This will make them automatically share your brand to their friends and loved ones.
15. Charge less and offer more:
Letting people pay less and get more value makes them happy. It’s another form of brand awareness to you.
It brings them back to purchase from you without any further marketing because people see it as a good way to save money.
It also makes them do advertising for your brand by telling their loved ones how much money they save when they patronize your brand.
16. Customers Feedback and Review:
Ask customers who patronize you for feedback, be sure you have offered good products and services that truly satisfies customers.
You might get good star ratings that will increase your online brand reputations.
Go beyond just a brand, try to relate with them to know what their past experiences are related to issues concerning the products you sell or the services you offer
A research shows that over 50% of customers who purchase a product or demand for a service check the customer reviews of such brands to know what people are saying concerning those products or services.
How to increase brand awareness:
Let’s quickly examine some amazing ways to increase brand awareness.
1. Offer Freemium plan:
This is a common brand awareness strategy used by software companies when they allow you get a good taste of their brand before you can willingly purchase an upgrade for a higher plan and benefit.
Freemium plans usually carries the company logo or watermark and will be visible to the public anytime such a user shares an item using the Freemium plan account.
Therefore, Freemium users cheaply advertise and market your brand for you at zero cost to your business.
2. Sponsor events to boost your brand awareness:
Have you attended a Carnival, festival, exhibition or a concert before?
These events are not truly possible without sponsorship from brands.
Take a look at the t-shirts, the banners, the fliers, the water-bottle and any postal associated to the events you will see brand Logo’s everywhere.
Sponsoring events are sure ways to catapult your brand to hundreds, thousands or millions of viewers at the same time.
For instance, Red Bull is an energy drink, they sponsor athletes, cliff diving and motocross, they sponsor energy driven programs thereby putting their brands on the sight of millions of event viewers.
What about football clubs, you see company brands and logos on their jerseys.
These businesses put their Logo’s and brand name at the front of their player’s jersey which is seen by every football lover and others who care to watch football around the world.
For instance, NIKE is a foot wear manufacturing multi-billion dollar company sponsoring sport programs around the world.
Others include: Adidas, Puma, Vans, Foot Locker, Under Armour e.t.c
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3. Give your brand a personality, go beyond a company:
Marketing your brand with some level of personality and humor will push your brand into the limelight.
Consumers will take note of the product or services you are rendering but will also enjoy your personality in advertising.
Taking Red Bull adverts for instance, they advertise their brand with lots of personality which makes users see the fun in energy but also catch the brand message at the same time.
Engaging with users on a personal base will make them see you more as a person. This is more like a friend talking to a friend.
It’s about interacting with your audience in a way that makes them see your personality and not just your company.
4. Videos and Podcast are major brand awareness strategies:
Creative videos speak a lot about your brand. Video’s are top engagement driver, they are one of the key ways to build brand awareness.
You can further create a podcast (audio recording) educating people about your products and services.
Telling them how the products will solve problems for them and why they should use such products.
How to check your brand awareness campaign progress.
Let’s consider 3 checks to measure the effectiveness of online brand awareness campaigns.
1. Site traffic:
Direct traffic, referral traffic, social media traffics to your website or blog are proofs that your brand awareness campaigns are doing well.
2. Social engagement:
How well do consumers interact with your website or blog, what is the average time they spend in your site?, what are your social shares like?
You must keep a metrics of what your social engagement was before you started your brand awareness campaigns and after you have been there for a while.
This will help you know your brand awareness campaign and social media presence growth rate.
3. Search Engine Checks:
You need to pay attention to search engine expressions. How many times your brand is likely to appear on search engines when a user search for products and services you offer.
This is also a good measure to know how successful your brand has become through your brand awareness campaigns.
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Final Touch
Having considered the strategies of brand awareness to business growth and knowing how to build brand awareness, we will say brand awareness is a vital factor for increased customers retention and sales growth.
This implies that every business needs to be visible in the market, you need to be known to enjoy huge a customers patronage and business growth.
Thanks, kindly share this article to your loved ones and tell me what you learnt or think about brand awareness at the comment section.
2 Comments
Great piece of content, thanks for sharing
Thanks Odunwo, we’re glad you appreciate and value our content here at business finger, stay updated for more, once again thanks for the recommendation.