Brand awareness

Brand awareness – is a metric that shows the level of recognition among consumers. The levels of brand awareness answer the question – how familiar is your target market with your brand? 

Brand awareness is one of the major assets your brand can build. High levels of awareness can increase the value of your product or service. Building brand awareness builds competitive advantage. 

What are the benefits of brand awareness?

Brand awareness can have tangible effects on your business performance:

Brand awareness increases trust

Trust is the currency of the 21st century. Consumers rely on family and friends recommendations. They research the opinions about a brand, product, or service and base their decisions on the research. Brand awareness campaigns help you build consumers’ trust. A high level of brand awareness will assure your customers will come back to you. In other words, brand awareness bonds customers to your brand. Customer loyalty has a direct impact on your revenue.

Brand awareness grows brand equity

Brand equity measures brand’s value. Brand equity is directly correlated with brand awareness.

Brand equity is not only determined by the number of tangible assets the company has. You also have to take into account brand reputation. Positive associations can raise your brand equity. That’s why it’s important to build positive brand awareness.

Brand awareness makes marketing easy

Brand awareness enforces associations. Consumers use brand names from the top of mind, and they do not always differentiate between brands.It connects actions or events with certain products. We replace generic terms with branded words. And that’s how part of our marketing is done for us.

Brand awareness helps you reach your target audience

Reaching the right people at the right time is the key to success. Brand awareness is an important factor not only in brand building, but also in increasing your consumers base. Well-known brands can spend less on marketing and still make sales and increase their consumers base.Once you gain sufficient brand awareness levels, you can work on brand loyalty or brand associations.

How to measure brand awareness?

There are a few ways brand awareness can be measured, for example:

• conducting surveys to measure customer experience
• tracking certain types of website traffic over time
• monitoring mentions of your brand name across the web to measure media coverage
• measuring the media value of your earned content

1. Measure brand awareness with media monitoring tools

Measuring awareness relies on what your existing and potential customers are saying about your brand. That’s why a social media listening tool is enormously helpful when it comes to measuring brand awareness.

• Track your volume of mentions
• Track your engagement levels
• Track your Social Media Reach
• Analyze the sentiment of conversations about your brand for extra credit

2. Conduct a brand awareness survey

Working with focus groups and conducting your own brand awareness survey. Survey random selections of people and see if they have ever heard of your brand, and whether they can identify or recognize it.

It’s also a good idea to reach out to your customers directly, whether it’s via e-mail, on-line surveys, over the phone, face-to-face, or on your website. Ask them how they heard about you.

This gives you insight into your levels of brand recall and brand recognition among customers, and also tells you how people heard about you.

3. Keep an eye on your web traffic over time

• Observe direct traffic
• Observe referral traffic

4. Check the search volume data for your brand

Your search volume data tells you how often people search for your brand.

Tools like SemRush and Google Trends not only help you optimize SEO, but they also allow you to check the monthly search volume for your brand. 

5. Measure the share of voice

The share of voice is one of the most important metrics when it comes to measuring the results of a PR campaign. The share of voice is also indispensable when it comes to brand awareness measurement.

The share of voice will indicate what percentage of the whole online discussion was initiated by your social media profile.

6. Track backlinks to your website

If your website has a solid number of referring backlinks, it’s a reliable source of content. You might be an authority within your industry and run a page where people look for certain pieces of information.

Lack of backlinks to your website is an indicator of several problems. The content you offer might not meet the audience needs or is unreliable. Every company wants to be seen as a reliable business leader. Providing your customers with pieces of content they find useful will make measuring brand awareness easier.

The benefits of measuring brand awareness

Brand recognition is based on the customer’s ability to identify or tell a brand apart from others. This doesn’t necessarily mean that customers remember the name of the brand, but simply that they’re able to recognize it.

Brand awareness plays a key role in the customer decision-making process. When faced with several brands, brand awareness makes certain choices a little more obvious than others. This helps consumers reach their purchase decisions (‘I want that one – the one with the red cap’).

How to build brand awareness?

Before you start building and improving your brand awareness, you need to set a benchmark. You should measure brand awareness of your brand and your competitors’. 

Within the Analysis, you will find the information about:

• the total number of mentions
• social and non-social mentions
• estimated social media reach
• non-social reach
• the number of social media interactions
• sentiment analysis

All of these metrics are vital for assessing your brand awareness and working on your brand management.

To truly assess if your brand awareness efforts are bringing the desired results, you have to establish the levels of brand awareness of your closest competitors. 

1. Use media listening to increase brand awareness

The critical element of increasing brand awareness is to be aware of what your potential customers expect from your brand. Building long-lasting relationships will help your brand thrive in an extremely competitive world.

How does it increase brand awareness?

The simple answer is that it helps you find conversations you can jump into. That way, you can sway undecided customers towards your brand or even get your competitors’ clients to buy your product.

2. Build brand awareness on social media

Well optimised social media channels can do wonders. Claiming that almost everyone is now on social media is not an exaggeration. Only Instagram has more than one billion active users, and that number is still growing. That’s a market you can’t miss.

3. Use customers’ testimonials

What are the perks of customers’ testimonials on your website?

• they help establish your credibility as a brand
• they drive sales. There’s nothing more convincing than reading success stories from other satisfied clients
• they are highly effective and free ads

4. Cooperate with social media influencers

Influencers can help you reach consumers you’d otherwise miss. They can not only spread your content and build brand awareness, but also legitimize your message with their authority.

5. Do your SEO research

SEO is not only about implementing keyword research on your website or blog. You should also think about the technical aspects of your website, such as loading speed. The faster the page loads, the better. It all has an impact on your position in Google or any other search engine.

6. Make your product exclusive

Creating a sense of exclusivity will, on the contrary, build brand awareness. People like to share their interesting finds. From the UX design point of view, make it easy to share. A clear call to action, for example, inviting your friends, and an easy-to-fill form is a must-have.

7. Implement remarketing campaigns

The main aim of a remarketing campaign for brand awareness is not to broadcast your message to new audiences but to strengthen your message among your existing potential client base.

8. Partner with local businesses

Partnering with local businesses to build brand awareness works similarly to cooperating with influencers. You can expose your products to new audiences, which will tremendously help with increasing the awareness of your brand.

9. Invest in referral program

Referral program will boost your marketing efforts and give you endorsements you need to build a strong brand.

In programs like that, your existing customers and influential people from your industry niche, encourage others to make a purchase. Once people buy your product or service from their recommendation, they receive a commission, and you get some new customers.

10 tips on how to increase brand awareness

Tip 1. Use search advertising

Put your brand name in your customers’ line of vision with search advertising – one of the most popular forms of PPC. 

How? Start by bidding on keywords for ad placement in Google’s sponsored links. When customers try to Google these keywords, your ads will display at the top of the page.

Tip 2. Employ remarketing techniques

Remarketing ads work by finding audiences who have previously visited your website or used your mobile app so you can show them advertisements for your brand.

How? An important thing to watch out for is keeping your message consistent across channels (like all your search, email and display ads) so that you don’t lose the effectiveness of your targeted messages.

Tip 3. Embrace influencer marketing

Work with industry influencers to increase brand awareness. ‘Influencers’ are marketing experts with an extensive audience base who are more than happy to see and follow their latest posts.

How? You need to consider the topics that the influencers talk about, whether their image is a good match for yours, how engaged their followers are, and many other factors.

Tip 4. Guest post in related industries

Write for other websites and put your content in the hands of a brand new audience. Guest post for a blog in a related industry to help new customers discover your brand and find a new source of leads.

How? If you’re a retailer that specializes in hair accessories or makeup, you could guest post on wedding, party, or event planning blogs to help your brand reach customers who have an interest in these closely related topics.

Tip 5. Produce consistent content

When your audience sees new posts from your brand pop up in their social feeds, this increases brand awareness by reminding them about your brand via news and updates. Plus, putting out new content on a regular basis helps your audience see you as an innovative source.

How? Aim for consistency, whether it’s daily, weekly, or monthly. Adjust it as necessary for different platforms.

Tip 6. Create a social media contest

Contests on social media create excellent opportunities for your brand to increase brand awareness, especially when they invite users to interact with their own social communities or earn votes for ideas that they’ve personally contributed themselves.

How? Create a contest or giveaway that requires contestants to ‘like and share to enter’ or which encourages customers to share posts with their communities for votes. 

Tip 7. Engage with customers

Speaking of generating engagement, when your customers go to the trouble of contacting your brand, the least you can do is thank them for it. Not only will your customers appreciate the attention, clever responses have the potential to go viral. And definitely don’t overlook customers who are asking questions, requesting service, and making complaints on social. 

Tip 8. Participate in referral programs

Referral programs offer incentives to customers for getting new customers to join.

Tip 9. Use popular hashtags

When you share and distribute content, use hashtags to extend the reach of your post. Make sure you pick hashtags that are popular enough.

How? Pay attention to how popular the hashtags are, related to your topic. If you’re launching a campaign, consider creating your own hashtags to be used together with existing ones. 

Tip 10. Sponsor events

Sometimes they’re paid advertisements, but oftentimes, these banners are from event sponsors. Large visual displays like this are great for increasing brand awareness, especially when the event is related to an important cause.

How? Millennials are interested in what’s going on in the world. Sponsor events that support the environment, have a health conscious bent to it, as well as important social causes. Extra bonus if you partner up with related businesses.