How to Increase Brand Awareness Faster
Knowing how to increase brand awareness is vital if you want your company to reach and exceed its full potential. By using a robust strategy that combines the best in digital marketing and the smart brand awareness-raising tactics that you can use, even small businesses can boost brand perception and recognition considerably.
Starting with a brand awareness strategy that combines the best of all communication channels, any brand can dominate a market, target potential customers, and promote products or services considerably easier. If you're not sure which marketing tactics will be the best for building brand awareness, here's an in-depth look at what it is, how to establish brand positioning, and how to best use a brand awareness strategy.
What is Brand Awareness?
Businesses with strong branding are
recognizable immediately. Think Starbucks, Coca-Cola, or Facebook. Potential customers
recognize logos, slogans, and products as soon as they see or hear them. While
a small business might struggle to reach that level of global brand awareness,
a lot can be done to increase brand awareness in the minds of your target
audience.
Brand awareness means that your customers know what you do, know what
to expect from you, and will buy from you instead of a competitor. In a
consumer era where customers want to align with brands and gain an experience
with every interaction, raising brand awareness is one of the most high-value marketing tactics
available to businesses of all sizes.
The First Step to Increasing Brand Awareness
You won't be able to start building brand awareness
if you don't have a defined brand. It can take time to build a strong brand,
but that time is well spent. The key to stronger branding is to remain
consistent across all of your communications channels, from your social media platform to
your printed marketing materials, trade booth designs, and your website.
Often,
it's a lot easier to outsource to a branding agency to help with
brand development. They can conduct a brand audit, and design a strategic brand
guideline document that will make brand growth considerably easier. Put simply;
you won't be able to build awareness
of your brand without a solid foundation. Once that is in place, you can
start to use the following marketing
tactics to start building
brand awareness.
How to Increase Brand Awareness with Referral Programs
Even the most fresh-faced entrepreneur will have some knowledge of the importance of referral programs. They're useful because they reward existing customers while expanding your reach to potential customers. Referral programs will help you spread the word far beyond your friends and family! There are lots of guides available to help you get more from your referral programs, but the main points to remember are:
● Ask for your referrals at the right time
● Offer high-value incentives
● Make the process of referrals as simple as you can
● Use your referred customers as your next stage of referrers
What you offer as part of your referral program will matter. Discounts of products are useful, but options like custom promotional products or social gifting will be valuable to your brand awareness development.
How to Increase Brand Awareness with Content Marketing
One of the most important strategies for digital marketing, your blog posts, ebooks, and
industry-relevant social media posts are vital for boosting brand awareness.
Content makes it easier for potential
customers to find you because a search engine will direct them to your content
when they need the products or services that you provide.
Blog posts are one of the
most high-value marketing
tactics around, but you can boost brand reach even further by using guest posting. Post blog
entries on relevant blogs other than your own, with links leading back to your
own content. Write industry-leading content on a website you don't own, and you
have access to an entirely new audience. Blog posts of any kind will help with building brand awareness.
How to Increase Brand Awareness with Company Swag
Branded promotional products are a
marketing department's dream. Those branded promotional items that you give out
for free are a lot more high value than you might think. If you give out
branded Bluetooth speakers to your top clients, those clients won't just know
that you value them.
They'll also see your branding communications every time
they listen to an album, and if they take that speaker to an event, others will
see it too. Even giving away free custom-made hats can be of more benefit than you might
think. Give someone a free, comfortable, and high-quality hat and they'll wear
it. Every time that they do, people will see it. That can go a lot further for building brand awareness
than you might think, and branded clothing and accessories are always an
effective brand awareness
strategy.
How to Increase Brand Awareness Using Social Media
It should go without saying that social
platforms are one of the better resources to use for increasing brand
awareness. If you can post content that gets shared, then entirely new potential customers will
see it. That's great news for your brand reach. However, you have to use a social media platform in
the right way. Different social platforms need different marketing tactics.
You
don't post on Instagram in the same way that you do on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Focus your social media so that it's platform-specific. You can also use
additional social media marketing
tactics such as contests and giveaways. Make a contest that encourages
brand followers to create content for you (photos with your products are a good
option), and then open up a vote for whose is best. Encourage engagement such
as likes and shares, and your brand reach can be dramatically boosted.
How to Increase Brand Awareness with Pro Storytelling
Storytelling is one of the marketing tactics that
has become increasingly important in recent years. Brand loyalty is reliant on
customers and potential
customers feeling as if they are part of your story. There are lots of
easy to integrate brand storytelling techniques into your marketing strategy,
but going behind the scenes is one of the most high-value.
Showcase your
Employee of the Month on Facebook, show behind the scenes teamwork on your
Instagram story, and always use the core values of your brand to identify the
best stories to tell. Are you a cutting-edge tech startup? Show your team
attending new product launches. Are you a hard-working restaurant competing
against global brands? Show your hard work and highlight your underdog status.
Every content marketer
loves brand storytelling because it allows for brand reinforcement while
increasing brand awareness.
How to Increase Brand Awareness with Paid Social Ads
We've already talked about some of the best marketing tactics to use on a social media platform for building brand awareness, but paid social ads need to be highlighted as they are one of the best ways to develop increased brand awareness. Those paid social adverts are ideal for smaller, local businesses because they can be targeted at potential customers that live specifically within a certain location. You obviously need to focus on the platforms that your target demographics use the most, but you can buy paid social ads on:
● Snapchat
When it comes to the best digital marketing tactics, paid social is one of the most valuable for boosting branding awareness.
How to Increase Brand Awareness with Remarketing
A remarketing campaign is very useful
because it not only reaches the potential customers who have decided not to buy right now but also
because it makes your brand appear a lot bigger than it is. One of the best branding agency services to make use of, remarketing works by showing targeted adverts at potential customers who
have visited your website already. If those customers didn't buy anything, they
will start to see your ads wherever they go online that allows ads. Every blog,
every webstore, there you'll be.
Brand perception is a critical component of
brand awareness, and by making it feel to those potential customers that you are bigger than you
are and more trustworthy, the more likely they will be to take another look at
your product pages. This can be a tricky brand awareness strategy to get right, but it can
pay off with higher conversion rates and improved brand loyalty.
How to Increase Brand Awareness with Influencers
This is yet another way to use a social media platform for
building brand awareness,
but it's unlike any of the other marketing tactics. Small businesses especially are making more
use of social media influencers, and they have quickly become one of the best
ways to boost brand awareness. You don't need to get high-profile celebrities
to show off your products or services on their social pages.
Not only will they
be too expensive to justify for smaller brands, but they also won't have the
impact that you're looking for. Influencers that are already posting about your
niche (or even better, already posting about your brand), are the ones to
target. Nano-influencers (usually with fewer than 1,000 followers) are the ones
to aim for because they have a genuine profile that they actually engage with.
Their followers will know that the influencer is showcasing your brand because
they believe in it. As far as marketing tactics go, using nano-influencers is also very low
cost!
Knowing how to increase brand awareness can be all that separates you from your competitors. In today's consumer-focused business world, the right branding can be the only difference between a business that fails and one that continues to grow. Develop strong branding and use all of the marketing tactics at your disposal, and your brand can only grow stronger.