If you’re a business owner, we’re sure you want to get your brand out there in front of as many people as possible. In this blog, we’re looking into how to boost brand awareness.
What is a brand?
Many people assume that a brand is simply a business or its logo, but that’s definitely not true. Your brand is so many different things, from the colours and fonts you use to the way that your staff interact with customers.
To have a successful brand, all of these aspects must be consistent and work together. Many businesses create brand guidelines for employees to refer back to. These are helpful to show new staff members who join the team.
For your brand to be consistent, you need to select a specific font and colour scheme. These can be used across all online platforms and in any print media relating to your company. You’ll need to ensure brand consistency on your website, social media and any brochures or business cards.
Your branding should help to tell the story of your business, so it’s very important to get it right. We offer a fantastic branding service where we can support you with web design, logo design and business stationery. We can also support you with social media management, creating striking graphics and crafting compelling copy to encourage engagement from your target audience and spread awareness for your brand.
What is brand awareness?
Brand awareness is how much people recognise your business through your branding. It may also be referred to as brand recognition. Companies with great brand awareness may also benefit from brand loyalty. Brand loyalty refers to customers repeatedly using your business rather than your competitors.
Raising brand awareness also helps to increase trust and equity. These aspects may encourage people to purchase from your business in the future.
How to build brand awareness
So, now you know what brand awareness is, you probably want to know how you can start building and creating brand awareness. Here are some options. You should remain up to date with these in case new ways are discovered to raise brand awareness.
Social media
Social media is a fantastic marketing tool, and the best thing is that it’s a free way to build a brand awareness campaign. Social platforms are often recognised as being a great way to share content with a wide audience, and they can even help you to reach new audiences.
For social media to be successful for your brand, you need to share useful content and engage with your followers. You’ll need to consider your target audience when building social and brand awareness campaigns. You’ll also need to think about various options when creating content, such as video marketing, carousels and simple image posts.
Engaging with followers through comments helps to add a personal touch to your brand, which consumers tend to like. Read our blog on using social media for business.
Blogging
Blogging is a great tool to use within your SEO strategy, as it helps you to incorporate relevant keywords on your website and increase brand awareness.
When searching for blog titles, you’ll want to ensure that they answer common questions that your customers have. Blogging aims to answer questions and provide valuable information. This will help you to engage users and improve your ranking position on the search engines.
We provide all clients with monthly data reports regarding each marketing campaign. This allows us to recognise elements that are working well and identify where improvements can be made in our marketing efforts.
Networking
It doesn’t all need to be about building your brand online, but it definitely helps. Another great method for increasing brand awareness is networking. You might choose to go to a local networking event for a range of business types or go to one specific to your industry. Showing up and chatting about your business and brand story can really help to improve your brand equity and build awareness. You never know, you might meet some potential clients too.
Networking has been working for businesses for many years, and with the rise of personal branding, it doesn’t sound like it’s going anywhere. Networking can also be supported by word-of-mouth marketing.
How to measure your brand awareness strategy
When you’re spending time and money, you’ll want to consider the impact of your digital marketing and brand awareness efforts. You can measure your brand awareness in many ways, but they may vary based on the platforms you are using. Any platforms you are using should have consistent branding, or you may risk losing out on potential customers.
Here are some ways to measure brand awareness, consider your KPIs (key performance indicators) carefully.
- Online mentions
- Website traffic
- Visits on social media channels
- Page mentions on social media
- Engagement on social media
- Blogging traffic and shares
- Company backlinks
- New customers
It can often be tricky to determine where new customers have come from, but you must ensure that you’re measuring brand awareness. Some businesses add this as a question in a contact form, so they can clearly see what’s working. You may find that customers are also happy to complete surveys where you can ask where they heard about your business.
This data can be useful as it helps you to see which methods are working and which may need to be improved in your brand awareness campaign. Monitoring your progress is very important in digital marketing so that you can avoid overspending on strategies that don’t work for your business at the moment. Many of these important brand awareness metrics can be measured easily using social media or an analytics tool. Read our blog on why you need to track your website analytics.
Why is brand awareness important?
There are many benefits of building brand awareness. Here are just a few reasons why it’s important in the digital world.
- Builds brand trust
- Helps to improve brand equity
- Helps to guide your content marketing strategy – gives you campaign ideas
- Can help to improve brand loyalty
- It helps to create a differentiation between your brand and your competitors
- It gives you a brand voice
- Build strategic partnerships with other businesses
- Can help you make improvements to the customer journey
We hope this blog has been useful regarding building brand awareness for your business. We can support you with all aspects of brand building and your marketing strategy. Get in touch with our friendly team today!