What is Brand Awareness? A Definition and How to Improve It
What is brand awareness? This is one question you may have considered as a business. When you’re trying to build a successful business and brand, there are many ways you’re going to reach (and stay in) your consumer’s mind. Exploring brand awareness is just one of the marketing methods you should be exploring in order to reach the right target audience and have the right influence on their purchasing behavior.
What is Brand Awareness?
When a customer has brand awareness, they have accepted a brand into their minds and lives as though it’s second nature. Brand awareness means they have no hesitation about investing in a brand or thinking of a certain brand when it comes to everyday needs.
When exploring your brand awareness, it’s about how well consumers are able to recognize your brand and how connected they feel with it.
There are huge and well-known brands, like Coca-Cola and Apple, which have created significant awareness and recognition within the target market. So much so that consumers wouldn’t hesitate to turn to any of their products — or even think of their products first when they have a need for a certain item. These brands have successfully secured their brand awareness and improved it over the years to become the giant industry leaders they are.
The Importance of Brand Awareness
Looking to increase brand awareness is a key marketing tool for every business, and it can be very important for success. Nevertheless, it can be difficult to measure brand awareness because, as a business, you aren’t going to be able to record every time your consumers are thinking of your brand.
Brand awareness is not only important for marketing your brand and creating greater attention to it, but it’s also important for fostering better relationships with your target market through trust and reputation.
A lot of brand awareness is drawn from the trust consumers have with a certain brand or product. That’s why the way in which you market and brand your business, such as through the services of a branding agency, is so important.
Having strong brand awareness can mean that your brand slips easily into everyday conversation and everyday thought. A prime example of this can be “Googling” something. You might not even be using Google, but the brand is so popular with people that the branded verb has become synonymous with the term internet search.
So, what is brand awareness in regard to business worth? Well, the more consumers are aware of your brand and put faith and trust into your product, the wider knowne your brand will become. This can mean a higher potential for increased brand awareness.
How to Increase Brand Awareness
It is also just as important to know how to keep increasing brand awareness. There are many ways brands and companies can work to increase awareness within the consumer market. However, building brand awareness isn’t going to happen overnight. To cement your brand into the mind of a consumer, build a high level of trust and work on creating brand awareness, it’s going to take dedicated effort over a period of time.
So how do you improve it?
Build Your Brand Personality
To gain more awareness as a brand, you need to be a brand that is memorable and which has a clear personality. The more you build up this voice and personality consistently, the more likely it will be that consumers can relate to you, think of you, and want to turn to you.
Building your brand personality can be done through all relevant channels such as your website or email communications, marketing strategies, any marketing campaign — and especially through social media posts. Be open and transparent with all information regarding your business so that consumers can learn more about you, the faces behind the brand, your brand story, and see proof of your personality.
When you have consumers always returning to a certain brand based on the appeal of their brand as well as product dependency, your brand awareness is starting to improve.
Stay Relevant
If you want your consumers to think of you first when they need a certain product or service, you need to remain at the forefront of their minds — and the business world. This means you need to do whatever possible to stay on top of trends, remain relevant, and remain active and consistent in the conversation.
A lot of brand awareness can come from appearing in a relevant way within a search engine, so improving your search engine optimization (SEO) to ensure that your business website and its content appears within the top pages will help customers to understand that you’re an active business which can solve a consumer’s need with your brand or product.
Concentrate on Excellent Customer Service
Excellent customer service is going to increase the likelihood of consumers recommending your brand to friends and family through referral programs or word-of-mouth marketing. If you can be the go-to brand within a household, within a family, or within a group of friends, you’ve built up that loyalty between a key group of people — and also allowed your consumer to do the marketing for you.
To make it more likely that consumers will refer you, you need excellent customer service on top of a dependable product or service in order to gain more brand recognition.
Tell Your Brand Story
Even if your product or service is similar to a lot of other brands out there, your personal business story is your own. A lot of iconic and big brands which have lasted through the years will have a clear and compelling brand story that consumers will usually be aware of, whether it’s the name of the business founder, the development team, or the story of their progression.
A brand story can help customers to connect with your brand, learn more about you, and remember you more easily (especially if you have an interesting and memorable business narrative).
Revealing your business story can help to build a greater level of brand awareness.
Encourage Sharing and Conversations
If your consumers are excited enough about your brand and product, you want them to be able to share content easily. You don’t want them to build enough loyalty to want to refer to your brand, only to then find it difficult to share anything and give up trying.
The more your business is open to two-way conversations, interactions, engagement, and sharing, the more you will be able to increase your brand awareness.
Sharing on social media is a popular option for consumers, so make sure any content you post can easily be shared. Include information, links, media, and more to make it easy for others to copy and paste or link back. Join in with conversations and interact with consumers as much as possible. You need to think about how these simple interactions can make consumers more aware of you.
These are just some of the ways you can work on a dedicated brand awareness campaign and build a loyal consumer following which easily recognizes your brand.
Building Brand Awareness with Anthem Branding
At Anthem, we know what it takes to build up your brand awareness and increase the marketability of your brand. Our top branding agency services can help your business to develop a high-level of brand and find success with your potential customers.