A complete guide to the importance of building brand awareness

In the digital world, customers today are bombarded by marketing messages and brand names. All the labor that you put in building brand awareness, comes full circle when your brand becomes synonymous with the product or services that you are offering. Google’s first page promotes a gain in visibility and engagement for the brand that increases its recognition in the market. Brand awareness helps in providing top rank in the SERPs and you should focus on optimizing website so that the visitor finally ends up making a purchase. Your brand recognition gives the visitors a belief that your company is making a promise that only it can fulfill or is better than your competitors.

A successful, well-established brand is immediately recognizable, loved, cherished by its customers, and even visitors all over the whole world. When you have brand recognition, it’s easier to grow brand awareness, which actually suggests how famous your product is and how familiar your target audience is with its characteristics and qualities. With brand awareness strategies, you can accomplish your target goals like increasing leads, increase sales, increasing revenue, etc. Brand awareness is essential for the growth of your business today and it’ll still be true next year and so on. The more your target audience notices your brand the more likely they are to buy from you. Going ahead there will be discussions on various aspects of brand awareness.

What is brand awareness?

Brand awareness is a term that describes the degree of consumer recognition of a product by its name among its target audience. Creating brand awareness is a key step in promoting a new product or reviving an older brand. Ideally, awareness of the brand may include the qualities that distinguish the product from its competition. Brand awareness not only helps in knowing the popularity of any brand but helps in bringing the credibility of any company to the front. Brands like Apple, Nike, and Adidas never have to refer themselves. This is what brand awareness does for your business.

A brand name exists in your customer’s mind. Establishing brand awareness is a powerful marketing strategy that leads consumers to develop an instinctive preference towards a brand and its products. Making a brand recognizable and memorable is the prime focus of most marketing strategies as it is a major force behind the brand trust, and ultimately, sales generation. Brands with high brand awareness are generally referred to as trendy, popular, etc. If you want brand awareness, make your target audience aware of your differences from competitors, work on competitive advertising and then you will be incomparable to your competitors.

There is no surprise that brand awareness is the first and the most important step in the marketing funnel. They let many people know about what you offer and nurture those who are interested in it. Brand awareness can lead to an increase in lifetime value and a decrease in overall customer acquisition costs (CAC). The key to brand awareness is to facilitate connections that are personal, creative, and memorable. While people may not buy from you initially, you want to help them remember your brand when they are ready to buy products or services within your domain.

Benefits of brand awareness

1. Customer loyalty growth – Strong brands can not only build robust edges in the market, greater revenue, and create emotional connections with customers but have another privilege that their occasional mistakes get overshadowed. It costs 5 to 25 times more to acquire new customers than to retain an existing one. Customers are tolerant of their favorite brand’s errors. Brand awareness creates a certain level of security for your business by generating a level of trust in your customers. Once a customer has purchased from your website, then also you can perform promotions, conduct surveys, etc. These simple actions can sustain the loyalty of the existing pool of customers to your brand.

2. Top of Mind – The highest level of brand awareness is staying at the top of your customer’s mind. This is when clients think of you first when they need to purchase a product within your category. You might build top of mind awareness through repeated exposure and consistent delivery of a good product or service over time. This is a huge advantage in the market when clients enter a buying situation and your brand name immediately comes to mind first. Some of the advantages of staying at the top of mind of customers are listed below:

• • It helps the brand to enhance its brand visibility in the market as it is recognized for offering the best of the products and the customer service experience to its target audience in the market.
  • The brand is high on the aspects of innovation as it offers products that are unique in the ideation and approach. The brand is able to gain a competitive advantage owing to an increase in sales and profit.
  • The brand is able to accomplish its short-term and long-term objectives. The brand can work on implementing innovative and promotional techniques to stay at the top of mind amongst its target audience.

3. Enhances product recognition – Brand image has a major impact on the customer’s buying behavior. Increasing brand awareness helps the customer to recognize the products. A brand becomes easily visible from its logo, shape, appearance, etc., and helps in identifying the product or service of the company. Your brand image encompasses both visual elements and brand associations like reliability, quality, etc.

With proper brand recognition strategies, you can make your company name synonymous with the product or service that you provide. The product recognition can be so deep that it subconsciously becomes part of the user’s activity. E.g. when you wish to search for a product you do not search it elsewhere but Google it. Google now does not have to introduce itself as a search engine as it is now set in the mind of its customers.

4. Competitive edge in the market – Your brand is what differentiates you in the marketplace. When customers recognize and back your brand, it helps lend a competitive edge to your company over others. You need to understand your customers so that you provide them with engaging content, updated products in the market, and finally increase sales for your business. This way the customers also start recognizing your brand. The more recognition you receive, the more you build your brand, the more you will find that your brand elevates and is competitive with other well-known brands in your field. The following strategies can help to distinguish your offering and provides a competitive edge. To stay ahead of your competitors you can consider the following points:

• • Be first in the market
  • Leverage your expertise
  • Make your product stand out
  • Provide customer-oriented services

5. Easy introduction of new products – When you already have a strong brand name, it is often easier and less expensive to introduce new products or test them out before you further invest in them. If you have a brand following, your customers will often be interested in your new products and even anticipate them being released. Brand awareness helps in saving money on advertising from the scratch and providing the product details is enough, as the customers already have trust in your brand name.

Strategies to build brand awareness

For any SEO company, it is all about improving user experience like simplify website navigation, content creation, optimizing images on the website, etc. Brand awareness entails your brand’s name in the users mind and they automatically get redirected to your product or services. For your SEO Company working on some of the brand awareness strategies could help you in lead generation, increase sales and generate greater revenue for your business.

• Advertise on the right channels – Each advertising channel has a unique audience and you should choose the advertising channel where your users spend most of their time. Maximized ROI is the ultimate goal of any SEO Company and choosing the right marketing channel would help you achieve this. There are platforms and channels that cater to the needs of people with certain interests. The crucial thing is to have a marketing strategy to know where your target audience is. This way your product and services will make the biggest impact, even within omnichannel marketing You can do this yourself or can hire a digital marketing agency that has the necessary expertise and experience in determining this.
• Use of social media platforms – The safest and the surest way to increase brand awareness to the next level is by utilizing social media in your marketing strategies. With nearly 8 billion social media users across the globe and growing, it is quite obvious why businesses are taking steps to plan out their social media marketing strategy. Having a page on relevant social media platforms is a must and you should work on social media marketing strategies that help in increasing brand awareness, increasing brand loyalty, increasing website traffic, etc.

Besides regularly posting content that is useful, helpful, and interesting to your audience you should also:

• • Engage with your followers with comments and messages
  • Partner with other brands from your community
  • Use social media ads to expand your reach and grow brand visibility
  • Try various advertising and engagement techniques to see what’s working for your SEO Company.

 You can even organize contests, quizzes, and giveaways to increase your brand awareness. You can also create custom and branded hashtags to promote your products or services, company news, contests, events, etc. If the visitor gets finally gets converted to customers, they become partial promoters for your SEO Company and help in peer-to-peer marketing.

• Keep consistency in voice and image – Consistency is the key to build brand awareness. People respond negatively to a change if it’s frequent and aimless (not in line with marketing trends). To increase brand awareness a purposeful rebranding is completely okay, but you shouldn’t frequently change your brand image over and over again.

You should have such brand awareness strategies that your target audience must be able to recognize your brand. A good example of a perfect brand is Coca-Cola, whose logo and image hasn’t changed ever changed since its establishment in the late XIX century. This way you can have brand recognition that lasts for 10 or 20 years and the brand visibility of your SEO Company also increases. 94% of the world’s population recognizes the Coca-Cola logo and this helps in generating revenue, increase the trust of customers in the brand name, etc. Besides the logo, other aspects of consistency are a brand voice and brand image. So try to have consistency in presenting the brand image, so that your brand creates the first impression, grabs the attention of the target audience, makes them eager to avail of your services, and many more.

• Build a brand on community and belonging – 89% of consumers are more likely to make another purchase after a positive customer service experience. To increase brand awareness you should consider using words such as ‘we’, ‘our’ in a proper way so that the consumer gets to have an affinity for your company and share positive feedback to others about your company. Affiliations to certain groups are made subconsciously as people have a strong faith in the company.

If a person has a strong faith in your brand’s name then it automatically spreads to the community as others also start believing in your company’s services. With an SEO plan and strategy, you can optimize the conversion rate on your website, increase clicks, brand recognition, more leads, etc.

• Adopting a data-driven approach – Data-driven marketing is when you work on strategies using digital analytics. With the analysis of data reports, you will have an overview of how your website is performing. You should pay close attention on Google’s page ranking algorithm to ensure users are getting what they are looking for.

To build brand awareness, you can make use of these data points to track and monitor CTR, bounce rate, organic traffic, etc. The main benefit of this data-driven approach is that it improves the decision-making process and work on marketing strategies that increase brand awareness, maintain top SEO rank, etc.

• Keep updating content on the website – To keep the trust of the visitor attached to your brand image proper update on the content needs to be done from time to time. Your marketing strategy should focus on the fact that customers attached to your brand image remain intact while the new visitors do not switch to competitors’ services. Content marketing is crucial to keep the customers updated with the ongoing marketing trends and benefits your SEO Company with a greater ROI.

Round off

Brand awareness is a powerful concept that can have a major impact on your marketing efforts, consumer perception, and many other factors. Now you must have got an idea of brand awareness and how it elevates traffic and boosts revenue for your business. Creating brand awareness is not an overnight process and it may take a long time for the consumers to be acquainted with your brand name. You should focus on brand awareness strategies that include consistency, outreach, engaging with people regularly. To expand your brand name digitally you should work on SEO plans, web designing, SEO copywriting, etc. Your brand also needs to reflect the essence of how your product or services are different from your competitors.

References

• 18 Sneaky ways to build brand awareness [updated 2020]
• 8 Proven ways to grow brand awareness — fast