8 Tips to Improve Your Brand Awareness
By Space Coast Daily // December 29, 2020
While working on your Marketing Strategy, you should never forget about your brand awareness. Have you ever prioritized this aspect of your business?
It is easy to think of some famous brands for several kinds of products. Very few people have never heard of Apple, or Google, or even Amazon. Surely they are huge companies, but they also have a strong brand backing them up. And that is something you should do as well.
Brand awareness is not just about buying ad space and trying to reach as many people as possible. It is a more nuanced work that requires a deep understanding of the brand itself, your target audience and proper adaptability to your market’s shifts.
In this article, you will learn more about the importance of brand awareness and how to improve it the right way. Check it out!
What is brand awareness?
The term brand awareness is used to refer to how familiar your target audience is with your business, its value and unique characteristics. It basically involves how your brand sets itself apart, such as the things it does differently, how its products are designed and other traits.
A higher level of brand awareness is able to turn customers into real advocates for your business. That happens when your products or services become a part of these people’s lifestyles, essentially becoming an important part of their lives.
However, brand awareness is not autonomous. It requires a constant strategic effort to maintain it, as the market tends to shift just like people’s preferences. It is a great way to measure your brand’s impact in its market and detect opportunities for further growth.
Why is brand awareness important?
The worst thing that can happen to a brand is causing indifference in its target audience. Losing market share is terrible and so is getting an influx of criticism, but a low brand awareness can get you to failure much quicker. In any business, it is essential to be remembered.
Dedicating efforts to improving your brand awareness is important because it helps you make sure your products and services stay in people’s front of mind. It is also a great way to build trust among potential buyers, as people tend to stay with what they know instead of venturing outside of their boundaries.
Brand awareness also helps your business to become subconsciously associated with the solutions it offers. Have you ever said you would “Google” something? See how Google’s brand awareness is so strong that it became a verb for looking something up on the internet?
Lastly, working on your brand awareness is the best path to prepare for your growth. This is how you can scale your reach and increase your customer base further and further.
What is the difference between brand recognition and brand awareness?
Brand recognition and brand awareness are often mistaken for each other. They are similar concepts, but key differences set them apart.
While brand awareness is all about how people associate images, colors and emotions with your business, brand recognition is simply about identification.
Brand recognition is literally the audience’s capacity of identifying your business among other similar choices based on its unique traits. It has a more limited scope, which means it is also improved in the case you work on a strategy that is focused on brand awareness.
A really simple way of thinking about the difference between brand recognition and brand awareness is to think of how the former is about symbols and colors, while the latter is about emotions and strong relationships.
How to improve your brand awareness?
Now that you are aware of how important brand awareness is to a business, you must place its improvement among your priorities. Maintaining brand awareness requires constant adjustments in your campaigns to make sure that your approaches are always capable of reaching your target audience and fitting into your market.
Below, you can find a list of the 8 best actions you can implement to improve your brand awareness. Check them out!
1. Consider what your brand is
The first step into improving your brand awareness involves a more introspective exercise. Since this concept is all about making sure your audience identifies with your message, you should first review what it is.
This is important because improving your brand awareness involves strengthening your message across your media channels. In the case that such a message is not correct, your whole effort might be compromised.
2. Create great guest content
Creating quality content within your own spaces—like a corporate blog or your own social media channels—is essential for any modern Marketing Strategy. However, to improve your brand awareness, you must also venture outside these spaces. This means creating quality guest content.
Get in touch with other publishers from your field, such as sites and blogs from fields related to yours. Negotiate a space within those pages to publish your content that helps both your audiences. This might make more people aware of your business in spaces it might be as popular.
3. Invest in infographics
As you know, the creation of quality content is very important for brand awareness. It is even more essential to work with innovative and interesting formats such as infographics. They are able to convey a lot of information in an attractive way, which can fit into pretty much any kind of subject and theme.
This further helps your brand awareness because infographics are highly shareable. People are drawn to reposting them on social media. That is a great way to make sure your brand reaches a wider audience and becomes better known among potential customers.
4. Run ads on social media
As social media became a part of daily life, you need it to improve your brand awareness. To make more people think about your business and remember it, you must work with ads that reach the right audience within these platforms.
Segmentation is key when running ads on social media. Use the available tools to target people with specific interests and demographic data to increase your odds of engagement. That way, a larger portion of your target audience will become more aware of your brand with a greater chance of becoming customers.
5. Use native advertising
Working with traditional ads is not the only way to increase brand awareness. In fact, you should also invest in native advertising. Have you ever heard of this possibility?
Native advertising is ads that have the look and feel of the media in which they appear. For example, it is the case of an article showcasing your product or service that is published on a specialized blog. Such a recommendation will carry a lot of weight since it will not be formatted as a traditional ad. The goal is to fit in with the rest of the content and being non-disruptive.
6. Do a lot of research on SEO
As you probably already know up to here, increasing your brand awareness is all about making sure people think of your business whenever they need a solution like yours. Google and other similar sites are great allies in this sense, but you need to adapt your content to gain an advantage among search results.
This means researching enough information on SEO (Search Engine Optimization), which is a series of techniques that are focused on optimizing your pages for proper positioning on Google. This will help you rise among the ranks and appear as a suggestion whenever people need a product such as yours.
7. Invest in interactive content
Your target audience might become more aware of your brand’s value if you offer them worthwhile experiences. Interactive Content is a great way to make people remember your business since they often consist of tools that help them or provide entertainment in original ways. You must try this approach to improve your brand awareness.
Additionally, Interactive Content is able to provide you with plenty of useful data on people’s preferences and habits. For example, when someone answers a quiz, they are revealing a lot about themselves. Your business can leverage this information for more effective campaigns.
8. Create limited-time offers
Another way to improve your brand awareness is to make people flock around your business. A simple approach to this is creating limited-time offers. This idea will not only help your sales but also make a wider audience become aware of your business and your products.
You should make use of all your marketing channels to promote your limited-time offers. Try adding an actual countdown timer to further pressure your potential customers into making a decision and sharing your offer with others.
Deciding to improve your brand awareness is an essential step to your business’ success. Firstly, you need to define what your brand is and make sure that your Marketing messaging matches that idea. Additionally, you must dedicate constant efforts to adapting to the market’s changes and your target audience’s behavioral shifts. Consider the tips in this article to draft a killer strategy for your brand awareness.
How is your experience with brand awareness in your business? Let us know in the comments below!
This post was written by Raphael Pires, Tech blog editor at Rock Content. Rock Content provides over 2,000 brands, marketers, and agencies with innovative content marketing solutions, creative services, on-demand talent, and professional training.