One of the most critical challenges marketers face today is raising brand awareness. It doesn’t matter how much you spend on beta testing for a new product if consumers never find out about it. Many newer companies face this problem, but even more established ones can lose out to their aggressive new competitors. The good news is there are nearly endless online and offline opportunities to increase brand awareness for your company.
What Is the Importance of Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness refers to the degree to which potential consumers recognize a brand and the products or service it represents. Every other component of your sales funnel, from lead generation to retaining customers, relies on a customer’s awareness of your brand. Brand awareness is also what allows your company to distinguish itself and develop trust with consumers in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
Related: 3 Proactive Questions You Can Ask to Form Your Brand Identity
The Advantages of Brand Awareness
- Increased sales
- Greater brand loyalty
- Lower long-term marketing costs
- More word-of-mouth marketing
- Easier retargeting of lost leads
The Disadvantages of Brand Marketing
A company may not want to invest in branding because it may not immediately translate into sales. In addition, brand marketing requires a sustained investment in order to yield results for a company. While brand awareness is crucial to the success of all of your company’s other marketing efforts, it is difficult to measure awareness in financial terms, making it easy for sales-driven managers to undervalue it.
It may be tempting to discount the power of brand marketing, but consumers increasingly base purchase decisions on their perception of a company’s brand, ranking it even higher in importance than the actual product they are buying. This means that you can better position your company to get more business today and in the future by increasing awareness of your brand with your target market.
Related: 4 Branding Mistakes That Are Killing Your Company Image
How to Increase Brand Awareness
Here are a few strategies you can use to build brand awareness across all channels:
How to Increase Brand Awareness in B2B
- 1. Write for Industry and Trade Publications: One way to instantly build credibility with other businesses is to write for the publications people in your industry trust and read. This allows you to instantly build credibility for your brand, and you might get a few new business opportunities if you can show your peers what value you have to offer.
- 2. Create Strong Content: White papers, infographics, blog posts, and ebooks for your website can help you to establish your business as an authority on the subject matter you cover. This can also improve your website’s search engine optimization, making it easier to draw in customers.
- 3. Host a Conference: You can attract attention from peers in your industry by hosting a conference or a convention for your industry. You can then make connections with other professionals who can help to grow your business.
How to Increase Brand Awareness for a Service
- 4. Use Referrals: Your business could give incentives for referrals, which can help it to gain new customers while building loyalty with current ones.
- 5. Make it Invite-Only: You could generate buzz for your service by making a beta version of it accessible by invitation-only. This allows you to work out any kinks before opening it to the public while also letting your users build anticipation for it.
- 6. Offer Freemium Accounts: A freemium account for your service can give users some limited access to a part of your it. Once they see the benefit that your service can bring them, they’ll have an incentive to sign on for the full package.
How to Increase Brand Awareness Online
- 7. Guest Blog: Guest blogging allow you to build brand awareness for your business and trust with your target audience by writing for the outlets they trust. You can create useful and engaging content for them while also demonstrating your subject-matter authority.
- 8. Paid Advertising: A paid advertisement on a major search engine can help you gain exposure for our brand. While these produce relatively little engagement on their own, they can be very useful if you are just launching your brand and simply need exposure.
- 9. Organic Search Engine Optimization: You can increase your brand’s visibility by creating high-quality content that provides readers with useful information. They can then share and promote your content, further increasing your website’s performance on search engines.
How to Increase Brand Awareness by Using Social Media
- 10. Post Often: Social media is a 24-hour medium, which means you should post frequent updates about your business to keep your customers in-the-loop. However, make sure your posts are high quality and offer value to your subscribers, or users might consider them spam.
- 11. Cultivate Your Community: Social media marketers strive to create engaged, active communities of brand evangelists. You can engage with your audience to show them that their activities matter and will be recognized, encouraging them to stay active while bringing in more new users.
- 12. Create Viral Content: Videos, fun quizzes, memes, and special offers can all help you to generate interest in your brand. If you create content someone wants to share, you can also gain free advertising while building brand goodwill.
The Best Ways to Increase Brand Awareness Offline
- 13. Partner with Another Brand: You can increase awareness of your brand by providing a special offer with another brand or business that is popular with the specific demographic you are targeting.
- 14. Network: You can develop new connections at mixers or other social gathering with old-fashioned networking. A face-to-face meeting allows you to create a more durable relationship with your connections, who may then remember you for business in the future.
- 15. Business Cards: In any business meeting, you need to be prepared to give your contact information to your people who can become customers or future business partners. With an expertly crafted business card, you can showcase the essence of your brand while making an unforgettable impression.
The Keys to Crafting a Brand Awareness Strategy That’s Right for You
Your brand awareness strategy will depend on your budget and your buyer personas. Whatever methods you choose, it’s important to conduct A/B testing for any new methods you decide to use to determine which are most effective. You can also utilize data to create personalized experiences for every customer, further building trust and awareness.
It’s important to remember that the methods you choose to build brand awareness should also fit within your brand. Every company you partner with, event you hold, or piece of content you produce should fit within the brand you are creating. Customers will find it easier to place their trust in a company they can understand.