As a business owner or as an individual who manages the business of someone else, an increase in brand awareness is very important if you want growth to happen.
Have you ever wondered what you can do to achieve an increase in the awareness of your brand or you don’t even understand the relevance of increasing awareness for your brand?
I bet you don’t even know that for you to get more sales or more leads that would be converted to paying customers, you have to devote more to increasing your brand’s awareness. That’s how important it is to increase brand awareness.
[bctt tweet=”An increase in brand awareness opens up doors for your business even beyond the walls of digital marketing.” username=”dmsinstitute”]
Yes, let’s assume Person A follows you on social media without buying from you yet, then, there is a person B who reaches out to Person A because of a need that your business can sort, and of course, person A recommends your brand to that person and the person patronizes you and everybody is happy.
That is one out of the many advantages of increased brand awareness.
For you, you might have tried a couple of tactics to increase awareness for your brand but you are still not getting the results you desire. It could be that you are doing either of the following:
- Ignoring SEO
- Not engaging your target audience.
- You don’t have a website
- Your business does not exist on social media
In this article, I will be sharing some very strategic ways you can take to increase brand awareness especially if you are interested in growing your business and unlocking new levels.
I will also share with you the definition of brand awareness and why the increase is important.
Before then, I want you to watch this video of one of our student’s experiences after she registered for our 90% practical digital marketing course and implemented what she was taught in her business.
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtqzz5UCSPA[/embedyt]
You see, learning is very easy but to achieve a great result, you should be willing and committed to putting your knowledge into practice and in our course, you get to practice what you will be taught and our coaches are available to review and give corrections where necessary.
According to the sprout social index, 80% of social marketers say increasing brand awareness is their primary social goal. This shows the importance of increased brand awareness and looking at the chart below, you would see other deciding factors that contribute to the growth of a business.
I also want you to know that brand awareness cannot stand on its own, it needs other factors to contribute and these contributing factors are what makes it possible for you to achieve your business goals.
The next likely question in your mind is What is brand awareness?
What is Brand Awareness
According to Investopedia, brand awareness is a marketing term that describes the degree of consumer recognition of a product by its name and the services it offers. Creating brand awareness is a key and important step in promoting a new product or reviving an already existing brand.
Another definition from Hubspot is that it represents how aware your consumers/ target audience is of your business and how well they can recognize it. Brands with a high level of awareness are referred to either as trending or popular.
Basically, brand awareness has to do with making sure your target audience knows you exist and the services you offer. An increased brand awareness literally means getting a high number of your target audience to be aware of your business/brand.
Brands themselves are the personality and identity of a business in this context. Regardless of the kind of business or services it offers either producing and selling consumer goods like food, bags, etc, or services like digital marketing, business consulting, etc.
The emotions, images, and attitudes an individual can connect with your company have to be well thought out and of course, planned by the team to ensure success. In the case of small-scale businesses that cannot afford a team, you can plan this yourself.
For every company that exists, they strive to ensure that their target audience has a positive opinion of them, so they are committed.
For example, Bellafricana is a community organization that supports creative African-owned Businesses. How did I know this?
From their social media profiles, website, and the contents they share, their target audience can easily identify what they do and of course, registers that company in their mind and when there is a need for that particular business, they can reach out and patronize Bellafricana.
Whenever they think of African-owned businesses, they will remember Bellafricana as a business that supports African-owned businesses. This same thing applies to other businesses and corporate organizations.
What you want people to perceive as your identity and personality is up to you to decide and create. How to increase this awareness is what I will be sharing with you in this article. I also want you to see the importance of this brand awareness for your business and why it is relevant to your growth.
Importance of brand awareness
1. Brand awareness establishes and fosters trust between you as a business owner and your target audience. In a world where individuals rely on research and other people’s opinion about a product or service, establishing trust is everything.
When there is a face to your brand name, your target audience can easily trust you. The efforts you put into creating awareness for your brand helps in giving it a personality that can tell a story and receive feedback as well.
This is relatable when your target audience knows you exist and have seen what your business represents, they can trust you and of course patronize you later.
2. It builds brand values. When you create awareness for your brand, you are as well establishing and building your brand values. People know you for what you claim to do and can recognize you for it.
3. It helps your audience to understand your branding and the products you offer. With a brand identity and awareness, your target audience has insights about your existence and that makes it easier to get sales.
4. It helps your business to be at the top of the mind of your target audience. Just like the illustration I gave earlier in this article, brand awareness helps your business to exist in the mind of your target audience.
They may not necessarily patronize at that particular point in time but they might recommend your brand to other people because they have seen you and they know what you are capable of doing.
5. Brand awareness helps you to cast a wide net across your audience of potential buyers. Creating brand awareness can be related to going to the river to fish and you went with a net and a boat.
Your net will catch as many fishes as possible, but not everything will make it into your fish basket, some will drop off before you can move the fish into your fish basket and this is why you need a large basket because a large basket means more fishes and even if some did not make it to your fish basket, you will still have something to show for your fishing effort.
The same thing applies to brand awareness, it allows you to cast a wide/large net across your target audience and catch as many fishes as your network can take.
You are exposing your brand and making them visible to your target audience. It doesn’t necessarily mean all will buy from you but of course, you have results to show for your effort.
Brand awareness is a very vital aspect of business, and this brings us to how to increase the brand awareness for our business to help us get as many fishes as possible in our net.
How To Increase Brand Awareness
1. Have a business website for your brand
A website serves as a space to provide general and important information about your company/business. It is developed to give members of the public access to the right information they need about your business and what you do.
It is like a virtual office/showroom for your business as you get to showcase what you do/sell, the price range, what you’ve been able to achieve, product images, you also get to share testimonials on your website.
In a digital world like ours, every business should have a website, as much as you might have a physical office space for what you do, some of your target audience may not know you exist because they don’t know you personally and have never heard of your business, a website positions your business to be seen.
There is one thing I love to do, whenever I hear of a business or corporate organization, I go to Google. com and check if they have a website representing them and creating awareness for them. If they don’t, it’s either they are newly established or they are still in ancient times or they don’t see the importance of owning a website and that’s a turn-off for me.
You see! Not everyone can have the time to visit your physical store to learn about your business, but they will surely have time to look up your website and verify your credibility and authenticity.
See an example below.
This is a screenshot of a fast-food store. As much as they have physical stores, their website has been structured in a way that gives you the feeling of visiting the physical store.
In the highlighted part of the screenshot, you can see that there is a provision for you to order online, which means you don’t have to visit them to order pizza. You either take the delivery option or offer to walk in to pick up your order.
You can also get to track your order using the tracker button on the website. The owner of this business has not only built credibility but has also designed its website to make life easy for its prospective customers.
To achieve this, your website has to be well optimized with keywords representing your business and this takes us to the next point.
2. Leverage on keywords for your business website
Keywords are words or groups of words an internet user uses to perform a search on search engines. Use keywords that represent your business while creating content for your website and your social media platforms.
This will help potential clients discover your brand when they are looking for solutions that your business was designed to solve. When you can identify the keywords your target audience may be looking for, you will be able to broaden your audience and reach.
It will also bring people to your website and they become aware of your brand and in turn patronize you. To create more awareness for your brand you should leverage keywords.
Another reason why you should leverage keywords is SEO. SEO is the acronym of search engine optimization, it is the process involved in making sure that your website or virtual presence appears on the first page of search results for a particular keyword.
The way it works is that search engines crawl through the websites and the moment it recognizes a particular keyword that is well distributed, indexing takes place and when there is a request for it, it produces it.
When you evenly distribute keywords that represent your business, search engines recognize it and index it and the next time someone has a question related to your website’s keywords, your website pops up, and voila! You have more brand awareness.
As you can see in the screenshot above. The keyword is “shoes for babies”, and the search results show businesses that sell baby shoes and also have a website.
There may be thousands of stores that sell baby shoes, but if they don’t leverage keywords for their websites, their target audience may not be aware of their existence. If you want to increase awareness for your brand, don’t ignore keywords and SEO.
3. Use Social media
Do you know that 54% of social browsers use social media to research products they want to buy? Do you also know that 44% of local businesses say they depend on social media to generate brand awareness and 41% depend on it to drive revenue?
My next question will be, do you have a social media account for your business? With about 3.78 billion world users which makes up to 41% of the world population as active users of social media, that is a huge market for you to spread your net.
All the social media platforms that exist have features that allow you to create social media pages for your business. Your business should have an active account/profile where contents are being shared to create and increase brand awareness.
You share contents frequently that are useful to your target audience and make sure they can see them. you can use features like hashtags and groups. These hashtags can be used to search for information on social media platforms.
This is an example of content shared on Instagram for brand awareness showing the use of hashtags.
4. Create referral programs
A good way to increase your brand awareness is to maximize the power of referrals, making your loyal customers be the best advocate for your brand.
In one of the scenarios I shared in the earlier part of this article, I shared how someone who is aware of your brand can recommend your business to other people even without them ever buying from you.
Here, you have someone who has already bought your product or paid for your services. All you have to do is to create a referral program for your customers. You can offer them a percentage of the profit from every person they refer to you.
This program does not only help to increase your reach, but it also takes awareness to people from a source that is trusted- family and friends.
A couple of businesses run this referral program, for example, Cowrywise
5. Remarketing campaigns
If you have ever visited a website or searched for a particular product either on google or on social media platforms, after going through the products displayed, you leave the website. The next time you are surfing the internet, you suddenly start seeing ads for that particular item you were searching for. It’s called remarketing.
The ads you see are inviting and nudging you to revisit that particular online store to buy.
With your ads showing up everywhere your target audience visit online, it sends out the impression that your brand is huge, and your target audience can have more confidence in the authenticity and credibility of your brand.
They know you exist, they know they can trust you to provide solutions to their problem, and then they buy from you.
Ultimately, an increase in brand awareness leads to increase in sales, and of course, that is more growth for your business.
Conclusion
As you must have seen in this article, the growth and survival of a brand rely on how much effort is put into creating awareness for the brand. And of course, knowledge alone does not work if there is no action.
This is why in our 90% practical digital marketing course, we will teach you how to increase brand awareness using digital marketing strategies and also you learn to position your business for growth.
More articles for you to read
Digital Marketing Defined: 9 Amazing Ways to Make Money Online + Proof
Social Media Influencer Marketing Explained: What It Is And How To Make Money From It
Effective Social Media Campaign Strategies For Small Businesses
Facebook For Business Marketing | 3 Actionable Tips For Growth
Google Adwords Hacks | 12 Tips For Improving Your AdWords Campaign Performance