Understanding the Importance of Brand Awareness

Branding is an essential part of building a successful business. However, it is equally as essential to make sure that people know about your brand, or as it’s known to marketers, cultivating brand awareness. Brand awareness can not only catapult your business to success, it is also the cornerstone of any well thought out, robust marketing strategy. If you’re hoping to scale your business and convert more leads, brand awareness is the place to start. And, if you’re a marketer, brand awareness campaigns should be top of mind.

 

Brand awareness in all its glory

Brand awareness refers to a customer’s, or potential customer’s, ability to recognize your brand and a desire to engage with it. It’s the process of building loyal brand champions and inspiring trust in your audience, so much so that people keep coming back and avoid your competitors. Ultimately, brand awareness strengthens brand equity which is the tangible value that a brand has, whether that is determined by revenue, market share, or stick prices. Brand equity is the direct impact of strong customer and public perceptions of the brand. Since brand awareness is an important part of a brand’s success, how do you build strong brand awareness for your brand, and how to do measure it? 

 

First, build a strong brand!

Before we dive into the specifics pertaining to brand awareness, let’s start at the very beginning; your brand. If you do not have a strong brand or a well-thought out plan, building brand awareness is not useful. Consumers are smart, and they can tell substance from fluff. It will not be hard for them to tell if your brand is underdeveloped or inauthentic. So, before you spread the word about your brand, ensure that it is ready. 

Start by developing a consistent, and strong, brand voice and visual identity. Your visual identity is often the first thing people will recognize about your brand, so make sure it embodies the brand’s values. Your brand voice is also incredibly important as it will be another way in which your audience recognizes your brand. If you have a playful and fun brand, it does not make sense to create serious and heavy content just for certain social media channels. Rather, ensure your voice and approach stay consistent, and tailor it to meet the needs of your audience based on their demographic, marketing channel, or objectives. Both of these approaches will build trust with your audience.

It’s also more important than ever before to maintain transparency and authenticity as this fosters impactful community engagement. If you build an engaged community, they can easily turn into brand champions, further expanding your brand reach. The stronger your brand, the easier it will be to successfully build impactful brand awareness. 

 

Building brand awareness: marketing strategies that work

Building brand awareness should always be a long-term strategy as the goal is to improve customer retention and loyalty and develop a competitive advantage. Getting the word out about your brand requires constant work, and at least one of your overall marketing objectives should always be to improve brand equity or brand awareness. This is important for the success of your brand, but also because brand awareness requires constant effort and attention to get it right. You can’t achieve brand awareness with a singular campaign. When building out a brand awareness campaign, take into account the following guidelines: 

• Know your audience or desired audience: If you do not have a clear idea of who you are targeting, you will not be able to share relevant or engaging content. You might even risk alienating the right people from your brand. Do the research to understand your audience; who they are, the problems they need to solve, the places they get their information, and much more. 
• Multi-channel marketing is top-tier: While you want to avoid quantity over quality, it is still important for the success of your campaigns to engage in multi-channel marketing. Working across numerous channels gives you a broader reach and the ability to meet your audience where they find it most convenient. It can improve conversion rates, and the more you talk about your brand on different channels, the more likely people are to find it, and keep finding it. 
• Test out traditional marketing methods: Brand awareness campaigns are a great opportunity to try more traditional marketing methods because your call to action is for people to learn about your brand. It might be a great time to send out mailers, design billboards, and maybe even buy a radio or podcast spot to start introducing people to your brand. While you might not necessarily know how many people actually saw your billboard on the bus, you can be sure that people saw it, and that is all you need to start building brand awareness. 

 

How to master brand awareness metrics

The tricky part about brand awareness is that it is difficult to measure, and many marketing teams will measure it differently. At the end of the day, as long as your metrics support your business goals and objectives, those are the metrics you should be using. Brand awareness metrics should be unique to your brand and business. However, deciding on the ideal metrics may take a few iterations. Some of the most common marketing metrics for brand awareness include; brand mentions, reach, impressions, and traffic, among many others. 

Most marketing tools today will have options for brand awareness metrics and may even provide additional features such as market share, social listening, and Google trends. Invest in a high-quality marketing technology stack as it will streamline your tracking and data to ensure you are meeting your objectives without having to pull stats from hundreds of different applications and platforms. 

One of the great things about brand awareness and marketing is the use of qualitative metrics. As marketers, sometimes we place far too much relevance on quantitative data to measure success. With brand awareness campaigns, you can put more emphasis on how people respond to your campaigns and the feedback you receive in different ways, giving you real-time insights into how your brand resonates with an audience. 

Overall, brand awareness can catapult your brand equity, but it requires a consistent and thorough approach. If you’re ready to take your brand awareness campaigns to the next level, reach out to the team at MDG. We love building unique, engaging campaigns that help our clients scale through strong brand awareness.