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Want to grow your business?
Want to continue adding new customers and getting in front of a larger audience of qualified buyers?
You need to focus on brand awareness.
Brand awareness and visibility are key elements of successful business growth. And the number one way to enhance awareness is through targeted marketing strategies.
What is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness might sound like a vague business concept or buzzword, but it’s actually a concrete idea that’s extremely important in the overall growth and development of a healthy business.
Brand awareness is a representation of how familiar and comfortable your target audience is with your business (and how likely they are to recognize it).
A business with a high level of brand awareness can be easily identified and picked out of a lineup of other brands. Ideally, this extends beyond just recognizing your logo. If your company has exceptional brand awareness, customers might even recognize your brand based on things like color scheme, typography, brand voice, sounds, or even smells. (Don’t believe me? Think about the smell of a Target store. Or what about a Home Depot? These are smells you would recognize anywhere.)
The Benefits of Brand Awareness and Visibility
Brand awareness is certainly an interesting concept, but why is it so important? In other words, what makes it such a valuable thing to foster? Here are several key benefits:
- Brand awareness builds trust. People don’t trust brands (companies, products, people, etc.) that they don’t know. When you build brand awareness, you’re really investing in trust. You’re creating a connection so that people are more likely to trust you with their time, money, and energy.
- Brand awareness establishes association. Think about how many times you use brand names in your everyday life. When you have a runny nose, you ask if anyone has a Kleenex. When you need to answer a question, you Google it. When you need some groceries, you tell your spouse you’ll make a Walmart-run. Brand awareness breeds association, which can potentially position your products and services as the leaders in your market.
- Brand awareness simplifies marketing. When people are aware of your brand, you don’t have to do nearly as much educating in your marketing. Instead, you can focus on stoking the emotional flames of desire so that people take action. It simplifies your overall approach to marketing.
- Brand awareness lowers CAC. High brand awareness means lower customer acquisition cost (CAC). You’ll get more repeat customers, as well as first-time customers who are already familiar with your brand and products as a result of your investment in marketing and PR.
When you understand the full benefits of brand awareness, making an investment in this aspect of your business becomes a no-brainer. Now you just have to develop and implement a strategy that increases your visibility and penetration.
8 Tips for Greater Brand Awareness
Building brand awareness takes time, effort, and energy. It’s not something that you’re going to do overnight. With rare exceptions (like a piece of content going “viral”), it takes a steady commitment and ongoing investment to build awareness. Having said that, here are several helpful tactics:
1. Know Your Brand
The very first step is to know your brand. After all, if you don’t know your own brand, how can you expect other people to recognize and trust your brand?
Knowing your own brand means getting very specific and granular with your brand’s voice, values, mission, goals, objectives, and personality. You need a very specific understanding of who you are.
2. Know Your Audience
The next step is to know your audience. In other words, who is your target audience and what are their greatest desires and pain points? Take the time to physically create rich customer profiles that include desires, pain points, demographics, psychographics, and anything else that’s important for you to know.
When you understand who your audience is, you’re better equipped to deliver the right message in the right places. Because you know your audience’s online consumption habits, the websites they visit, and how they interact with content, you can reach them much easier and more consistently. This makes the rest of your marketing efforts simpler.
3. Develop a Consistent Brand Profile
Consistency is one of the most important elements of successful branding. If you want people to connect with your brand and recognize it from a distance, everything about it must be consistent.
If you look at a sample of 10 brands that are winning the brand awareness game and another 10 brands that are struggling, you’ll almost certainly find the element of consistency at the heart of the issue.
Amateurish brands like congruence. Whether it’s failing to use the correct hex codes for brand colors, using different fonts across different content resources, or mixing and matching different voices and tonality in messaging, a lack of consistency makes it difficult for customers to connect with the brand.
In order to successfully establish brand awareness, you need to first build a brand profile. This is an actual document or folder that outlines the exact logo files, color hex codes, typography, editorial guidelines, value propositions, mission statement, etc. Anytime a marketing asset or campaign is created, it must first meet all of the requirements outlined in the brand profile.
4. Perform an SEO Audit
So much of your online visibility is dictated by your website’s search engine optimization (SEO). If your website doesn’t have a strong SEO presence, good luck getting the sort of organic brand awareness that you’re looking for.
Not sure if your SEO is up to snuff? Perform an SEO audit to find out where things stand. A good SEO audit will analyze your website and identify any hidden issues that may be suppressing your search rankings and traffic. This may include an on-site SEO analysis, link profile analysis, indexing analysis, competitive analysis, and site crawl report.
5. Get Active on Social Media
In addition to your website, you also need to consider your social media presence. This gives you an additional channel through which you can reach your target audience and build recognition and awareness.
When it comes to social media, it may be better to take a quality over quantity approach. In other words, it’s better to have a really strong presence on one platform (such as Instagram) rather than a weak presence on half a dozen different platforms.
6. Become a Content Machine
Content is the fuel that makes your marketing engine run. You need to consistently produce high quality content that resonates with your target audience in order to build the sort of awareness you’re looking for.
Lead magnets are a great way to build awareness. Whether it’s a PDF, eBook, video series, course, checklist, or simple calculator, you can use lead magnets to add value, collect leads, and strengthen your relationship with the marketplace.
7. Use Ad Retargeting
Most companies understand that they need to advertise if they want to consistently put their brand in front of people. However, not nearly enough brands are using sophisticated ad retargeting tactics.
Retargeting ads work great because they essentially follow your target customers around the internet and continually serve them ads even when they’re on different sites. This repetitive exposure breeds awareness, which ultimately strengthens trust in your brand.
8. Forge Powerful Partnerships
Why do all of the heavy lifting yourself when you can tap into the resources that other companies and individuals already have? Leveraging other people’s exposure is one of the best ways to get ahead.
Looking for an easy, low-hanging fruit option for partnerships? Try influencer marketing. Find an influencer with an audience that mirrors your own and pay them to promote your brand on their social channels.
Set Your Business Apart
Do you want to grow your business in the most efficient way possible? There are dozens of different strategies that work. But at the heart of each is an important concept known as brand awareness. Hopefully, this article has given you some tools that are helpful for architecting and strengthening your company’s brand awareness moving forward. Put a couple of them into action right away and study the results. You’re going to like what you see.
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