When you are putting together your marketing strategy, you are likely focused on closing on the sales you need to secure your company’s success. Yet marketing does not always produce those immediate results. Sometimes, you have to play the long game to get the customers you want. You need to introduce your brand to your target audience, build relationships with those customers and then, eventually, close those sales. But it all starts with brand awareness.
Not even sure what is brand awareness? Here’s what you need to know:
Defining Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is pretty easy to define in abstract, but it is less easy to attain. Simply put, brand awareness is the knowledge that your desired customers have about your brand. When customers hear your brand’s name, they should know what you sell and what values you represent.
For example, if you hear the name “Target,” you will likely immediately think of quality home goods, clothing, toys and electronics at affordable prices. If you hear the name Disney, you likely think of children’s characters, movies, or the theme park itself.
In both cases, the associations are typically positive, and you could probably be very specific in your descriptions of what the brands offer and what they represent. Your goal for creating brand awareness should be that your target audience can do the same for your brand — but hopefully that they will have the positive associations that you want them to have.
Increasing Brand Awareness
Increasing brand awareness requires careful strategy just like any other aspect of your marketing campaign. To start, you need to provide the best product and the best customer service possible. No matter how small your current customer base, those customers will start spreading the word about your brand. Make sure that they are spreading the good word. You can then start spreading the word about your brand by helping others. You can either create valuable content for your target audience, or you can actually do good works in your community, such as making a large donation to a charity or contributing your time to help a worthwhile group. The publicity from those good works will promote your brand. Find ways to personalize your brand. People connect much more with a personal story than they do with a corporate narrative. Even if you don’t have a real person with a relevant story to tell, you can make one up.
Some good stories include how your brand helped someone reach their goals, how it improved someone’s life, or how it helped someone realize their potential. Stories will people understand your brand’s values better than any marketing copy you can write. Finally, you have numerous opportunities to use SEO to create brand awareness. You can run contests on social media, get more reviews from your happy customers, improve your onsite SEO with meta descriptions and other elements, and creating online communities.
Measuring Brand Awareness
Just like with any aspect of your marketing campaign, you need to have ways to measure your brand awareness to know if you have been successful in your efforts. You can start by determining the search volume for your branded keywords. You can discover this information with a keyword tool. If you don’t want to pay for one, you can easily get the information you need from Google’s Keyword Tool.
You’ll also want to look at your analytics to determine how much direct traffic you are getting. Anyone can stumble onto your site through a search or a link on social media. However, the only people who are coming to your site by typing in the URL are those who are already your customers and those who have been referred to your brand. Look at your direct traffic numbers to see if they are increasing after you begin your brand awareness campaign. If they are, you’re doing something right. You can also look at your social media metrics. More followers, shares, likes, retweets and mentions can all indicate that your brand awareness campaign is working.
Finally, one of the easiest ways to measure your brand awareness campaign is to conduct a survey. You’ll likely have to pay to promote the survey since it will be on other sites besides your own. The survey can be one of those simple two- or three-question polls that appear on paywalled sites or in newsletters. If your brand awareness campaign is working, you’ll get more positive responses on the survey.
Brand awareness doesn’t get as much attention as other types of marketing, but it is equally important. In fact, some may say that it is the most important aspect of your marketing. With the right brand exposure, you can establish the reputation you need to get customers again and again in the long term and to grow your sales over time.