What is Brand Awareness? Top 8 Strategies for Brand Awareness To Follow!

 24 Jan, 2024

brand-awareness-and-strategies

Introduction

Most businesses spend gazillion dollars fixing their website, treating their sales funnel, but what they heavily under look is efforts on pulling their “brand awareness”. Well, most businesses still don't know what brand awareness is & what value it serves in making their business famous.

Remember! Just spending big bucks on creating a website and promoting it via word of mouth or offline print media won’t get you business or long-standing in the market. If you won’t make enough efforts to shape your digital identity, know that soon you could be wiped out from the market. So to be able to become an authority in your industry, you have to work hard on building an unshakeable brand identity and awareness that touches the buyers emotionally & rationally. When the audience hears your name or see your business’s logo, they should know:

  • Your USP, and how you are different from others
  • That you are also a leading brand that is there to serve & thrive
  • That you can be trusted for the long-term to fulfill their specific buying needs

If you are able to tick all these situations, just know that you are a brand already that is able to hit its brand recognition, authority, and profit goals. 

What is Brand Awareness in Marketing? You May Ask!

Brand Awareness in Marketing

Brand Awareness is a marketing term that defines how a target audience perceives and recognizes your business or brand from just the name of it or just its visuals, graphics, logo or so. Brand awareness is important to distinguish yourself from the crowd, thrive your new or old product’s viability or recognition.

Adding to brand awareness definition:

  • Brand awareness is all about creating visible actions like customer-facing campaigns that could set your business apart from the crowd.
  • It’s also about getting the audience to become familiar and be able to trust a particular or group of products/services by your business and become your loyal customers in the long run.

Why is Brand Awareness Much Needed?

As a business, if you have products & services which are highly noticeable, perceived well & are highly recognizable, they would generate more revenue than you could imagine. If you would collate your target audience with a bunch of choices of products (inclusive of yours one, having not much popularity in the market), instead of choosing your product, they would choose other brands who are named well, have authority, and are good with their marketing & advertising strategy.

Take the example of the fizz drink industry for instance. Do you think people would prefer other newly-entering or not-so-popular fizz drinks over Pepsi or coca-cola? Well, these giants have made a symbol for themselves in such a niche. When someone thinks of soft drinks, these two brands are only recalled by 90% of the population. So this is the power of brand awareness, which is often undervalued and isn’t taken so well. 

Brands like Coca-cola worked on taking visible marketing & advertising actions & this is why they are received very well in the target market and have $19.2 billion net revenue in the second quarter of 2021. There was one time when Coca-cola was able to sell just 25 bottles in its first year of starting out (remember that?).

Why is Brand Awareness Much Needed

Keeping Your Brand on Top of Your Target Customers’ Mind WIll Serve You In Following Ways:

  • You will get increased word of mouth, people talk about your brand to others & get you referrals.
  • You will enjoy increasing brand equity.
  • You will enjoy increased customer engagement & loyalty.
  • You win qualified sales that add to your profits & bottom lines.

Read: Comprehensive Guide for Creating an Impactful, and Unique Brand Identity

Just 8 Unbeatable Brand Awareness Strategies

8 Unbeatable Brand Awareness Strategies

Now you know “what is the definition of brand awareness” or “what is brand awareness in marketing” and why it is so imperative to businesses, let’s now make you shake hands with unbeatable strategies for brand awareness that works at getting footfall of long-term customers & retain them as loyal ones while ensuring your solid brand recognition in the crowd.

Let’s Start with How You Should be Creating Brand Awareness Strategy…

1. Invite Referrals to Expand Your Brand Get Recognition

Do you know 92% of customers trust referrals from people they know? And 81% of consumers would engage with your brand if it is having a reward program & refer others!

Invite Referrals

Imagine when you give quality customer service and incentivize your existing customers, they will get tempted to spread positive words about your products and services within their community of friends, family, colleagues, and think how much traction it will bring back to your business & brand.

Your customers would love it if you would relish them some sort of reward, they will feel delighted to share their positive experiences within their troops, which could help maximize your brand’s exposure in a bigger crowd.

Here are a few ways how you can reward or incentivize your customers:

  • Give them rebates & discounts on your products
  • Give them off on certain credit cards
  • Offer free trial or sample of the product
  • Feature them with your products in your social media posts as “customer of the week”, “top shopper”.
  • Run contests and give prizes
  • Have giveaways 

Relishing your audience with such rewards will lure them to promote your brand & product within their circle and help you get maximum exposure to uncharted market segments.

2. Partner with Other Brands

“Co-partnering with brands who have superior followership or customer bases could help your brand get a great deal of recognition, leads, buzz & brand awareness, without delving deep into the hard work.”

If you wonder how brands collaborate to promote their products and enjoy each other's stardom, then take the example of Spotify & Uber for instance.

So whenever you board the uber ride, you as a passenger get the option to tune into Spotify and create your own playlist. No new brand, just two brands collaborating and giving each other room to help each other’s customers know about them at the individual level and enjoy maximum brand awareness.

Partner with Other Brands

Co-partnerships with relevant brands not just helps to level up your brand value & recognition, it also helps you scale sales, you can improve margin, increase your profitability avenues at the cost of just mutually collaborating with a powerful brand.

To choose your right brand partners, consider opting for those:

  • Whose goals are similar to your end-goals
  • Whose products/services are complementary to that of yours & are not in direct competition
  • Whose customer base is solid and have high brand authority & loyalty in the market
  • Whose brand positioning & identity is quite huge
  • Who share the same values & ethics to that of your brand
  • Whose brands scale and earn great customer retention & profits

3. Engage with Video or Visual Content

Engage with Video or Visual Content

Do you know more than 70% of B2B buyers have spoken out the real truth that “they would like to view some interactive content rather than reading walls of text”?

By interactive content, they simply mean some visual content or some video content that is less boring, less sales-y, and highly informative to eat their brain cells.

Video content is an accessible, amusing, and highly shareable form of content that hooks almost every person. Even while they are scrolling their social media feed, checking out Youtube, or any other digital touchpoint, and watching some video content about your brand, they would stop, stare, glare, and get to know about your brand in a more storytelling & indirect way.

What kind of video content can help you reap great brand awareness?

  • Explainer video - Videos telling your brand story of 1-2 minutes or explaining your vision through an amazing storyline & creative examples get amazing engagement from the audience.
  • Video Blogs- These are how-to videos helping visitors get the solutions to their most searched queries. Supposedly if you are selling a brand of cleaning supplies, you can choose a wide range of questions people put up often on the internet and try to give expert answers around it.
  • Pre-roll videos - Before main ads, these pre-roll videos of 15-30 seconds are a great way to hold the attention of users. These videos can have any concept, creativity, or storyline you would like to tell about your brand and have a CTA that takes the viewer to your website or any landing page you would like.

Here are the few tips to make your video content more approachable for viewers, in order to interact with your brand & know it better:

  • Focus on messaging tone - Is it going to be fun, corporate-y, or a mix of all? Look around and find what your target audience demands.
  • Consistent designs - Ensure your video content has consistent color & themes, with the same fonts & style, so that your brand videos could get recognized better.
  • Bring originality - Just bring your own taste, creativity & create something you wish to show your audience.

4. Use Social Proof to Convince Buyers

Social Proof to Convince Buyers

Creating customer’s trust and credibility towards a brand is key to maximize brand awareness. 

Social proof is an effective way to form social clout, enhance your online presence, increase your brand networking with co-creators or customers, which ultimately helps you in increasing brand awareness.

Social proof is all about gathering realistic conversation from past clients, similar co-brands, or third-party promoters in order to help you verify your brand for future customers’ trust & further transactions.

Social proof can help you in the following big ways, it would build immediate trust within your client or customers as:

  • It would act as veracity to the fact that you do offer solution-oriented services, and have helped clients in the past get sureshot solutions to their pain problems, which could increase their trust within you.
  • It would help you become a subject-matter expert in a particular industry, product, or service vertical, which would instill great trust within your customers’ minds.

Try to leverage as many past clientele testimonials as possible, display media interviews, press releases, and have contributed content from other famous sites.

Here are few varieties of social proof practices you can instill around your brand to gain some hype and recognition within your customers’ circle:

  • Do celebrity/influencer endorsements
  • Display website testimonials, Google reviews, Clutch or good firm reviews, or gather reviews on popular reviewing sites
  • Increase and ask for user ratings
  • Get product/service approval from industry’s thought leaders or experts
  • Leverage business credentials gained over time (if any)

You can innovatively think over any other form of social proof content that highlights your brand’s interaction with real-time customers/clients/co-brands and shows your business’s authenticity in some way or other!

5. Focus on Remarketing

Focus on Remarketing

Remarketing is a process where you try to get the attention of people who have already interacted with your website or brand somehow, maybe by visiting a website, exploring your products, clicking the CTA, or something else.

Showing the repeat ads to the targeted audience would help highlight your brand to them. They would be able to recall your brand once they see a great pop-up of ads with some discounted deals. All this in addition could even spread positive words around their community of friends, family, or peers.

Remarketing is an effective way to drive brand awareness, as per Comscore reports, repeated ads can boost the branded search by 1046% for a brand.Remarketing is an effective way

With repeated ad campaigns having improved brand offers & messaging, your brand gets more exposure, gets more customers footfall, and manages to add to the lifetime value of the customers.

B2B brands of today are betting on remarketing campaigns & collateral via Google ads to gain that much-needed brand affinity & position.

Here is a bifurcation on how many different industries are coming upfront & investing in remarketing to highlight their brand.

6. Focus on Account-Based Marketing

“Account-based marketing has caused a 60% increase in brand awareness followed by revenue growth up to 10% within the span of 12 months. While every one in five companies easily experiences brand awareness and 30% more revenue generation.”

 Focus on Account-Based Marketing

Account-based marketing is an effective business marketing strategy that can help you draft personalized campaigns and communicate with the individual user account to win their trust.

You here base your marketing strategy & messaging based on the needs of every individual user account. Basically, you relish each of your particular customers or prospects with customized offers or content through social media, text messages, your membership website, emails, or any digital account your users are super active on.

 “Hey thanks for shopping with us. To have you as our long-term customer, we are giving you a 20% discount on your next purchase.” --- Such types of messages when you send individual buyers who could turn into your loyal customers through direct emails or mobile messages is an example of account-based marketing.

It shows that you are valuing each customer or prospect personally, which propels them to promote your brand and have good words about your marketing.

All in all, this account-based marketing approach is very proven in weeding out the wasteful or less valuable prospects. It makes sales & marketing practices come in great alignment to help engage customers and develop surety towards accounts that are likely to engage and convert faster.

There are many account-based marketing tools that you can use to plan, orchestrate, and implement your marketing campaigns like Uberflip,  Engagio,  Terminus,  Tribilio,  Bound,  6Sense

7. Maximize your Social Media Presence

Do you know that every 6.4 seconds, a new social media account is created? The social media world revolves at a very blazing speed, if you set your business around it, you would definitely get something out of it.

On average a user spends his/her 142 of a day on social media either to just scroll out of boredom, to see what pages, celebrities, or stores are up to, and what memes are trending over Social media. if you are not publicizing your business over key social media platforms, you would be missing out on the brand recognition you truly deserve.

Social media has the tremendous potential to make any brand of any sort go viral and create a lot of talks around it (more talks means you are getting popular & hitting your customers’ minds quite well).

If you say that “Nah how can I promote my just stationery business on social media'' then mate see this Staple’s dedication of how it turns most basic notebooks or paper clips as the interesting point of the talk.

Maximize your Social Media Presence

See how they turn just basic products of everyday use so entertaining & worth interacting with their succinct content at caption & such creative imagery.

This brand clearly teaches that you don’t have to have a big social media strategy in place to get started, you just have to start & be there and start communicating with the audience. And strive to make your most mundane or generic offered product or service as part of their gossip.

Tips to expand your brand over social media:

  • Just explore the right social media where you target buyers lies from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, Reddit & more.
  • Start posting a variety of content as visuals, imagery, gifs, videos that could inspire and provide some banter or information to your audience.
  • Use proper hashtags, conducts giveaways, contests where users could be drawn
  • Keep posting consistently, and have at least weekly posting
  • Invest in paid ads as organic reach is quite less on these social media platforms

Read:

8. Launch Your Own Podcast

Do you know 67 million Americans like listening to podcasts monthly? 32 % of Americans listen to podcasts once a month? Podcasts either audio or video-based are 100% proven ways to build brand awareness. People like listening to podcasts from brands that aren't just sales-oriented and share some educational content or information with their audience.

Remember, people would listen to podcasts to gain some knowledge, get entertained, have solutions to their problem statement, so your brand mention should come second after you have addressed the content which your audience desires.

So keep the rule 80/20 in mind, whenever you are planning & recording the content of a podcast, ensure that its content is 80% informational and 20% related to the promotion of your brand.

Launch Your Own Podcast

Take the biggest online selling store eBay for instance. If you will look or listen to the content & material of their podcasts you will see how they only focus on talking about “how to help brands grow, how to start a business, how to be successful, they share other businesses' journeys, their challenges, how you can stir through them”. 

At the start of the podcasts, they talk about their brand, but after that, it’s just purely focused on helping businesses pave their way into the digital landscape.

Now you know how you should be creating Brand Awareness Strategy for your business, let’s now check out the top 5 brand awareness campaigns that are worth following & taking major inspiration from.

Also Read: How to Brand Your Business in 7 Super-effective Steps & Start Getting Leads?

3 Amazing Brand Awareness Campaigns

Here are the top 3 real-life brand awareness strategies and campaigns that are Jaw-Dropping and used by real brands to win big.

1. Complementary Partnerships between brands as “Pottery Barn & Sherwin-Williams”

You would find a lot of companies already ahead in the name & their branding game, having a footfall of heavy customers. In such an event, it is best to partner with such brands on different scales, to ingrain their authority, customers, and authority to a level, so that in return your brand could come in limelight & get attention.

See this example:

Complementary Partnerships between brands

Pottery Barn (brand selling furniture) partnered with Sherwin-Williams (who sells furniture paint). Both of them collaborated with each other to gain some benefits as brand recognition & customers. Whoever will be willing to buy furniture would go to the Sherwin-William site to buy the paint next. This way, both the brands are able to sell & earn that much-needed recognition.

"Pro Tip - You can look for the brand that isn’t at your competition, but closely relates to your product. Like if you are in the tourism business, you could promote and partner with the biggest airlines & cruising companies to gain mutual benefits."

2. The “Got Milk?” Ad Campaign by --- California Milk Processor Board

The California milk processor board got a big upward curve in their brand recognition & sale and became the most identified marketing campaign worldwide with its visually appealing TVC --- “Got Milk?”.

California Milk Processor Board

This ad was first launched in 1993, where you would see “The Rock” aka “Dwayne Johnson” is seen creatively fighting the world, gregariously chasing the milk van to just get the milk for breakfast. The ad is quite hilarious and very thoughtful, which took this ad to retirement after almost 25 years (that’s a huge lifeline for a commercial). And this ad helped the brand get exposure and raise its sales by 7% which is 13.5 million gallons right within a year of this ad (between 1993 -1994).

"Pro tip - The key is to just engage in video advertisements & content and have amusing, storytelling, creative concepts that could engage people. You don’t have to splurge big & invest in TVC, you can go for short, crisp, animated, or real Youtube videos with amazing concepts & storylines, and voila this will help you get the traction you wished."

3. Nike: Reactland Campaign --- “A rich digital marketing campaign mixing reality with AR”

To promote their new running shoes ``Epic React”, the brand Nike created an event where people were invited in real-time to check the sole cushioning & comfort of the shoes. They created an AR gaming experience, where people could be transported to the game, create their 8-bit avatar, and play the virtual game with an Augmented reality setup while running wearing Nike’s Epic React shoes.

Nike: Reactland Campaign

This campaign was huge and was covered in Nike’s official website, mobile platforms, social media, and more. This immersive brand exposure technique helped this brand soar its band entitlement and social media engagement drastically.

"Pro Tip -  You can think of some real-time event and create some campaign around it, as it will help engage your audience and get their attention, better off than your competitors. You can host trade shows, demos, or any event in which your target audience would be interested in participating."

Read: How to Develop Brand Strategy? A Complete Guide!

Final Thoughts on What is Brand Awareness & Top Brand Awareness Strategies!

Branding is a very important aspect that lets your customers make a cordial relation with you. More than that, making people aware of your brand is more important, in order to make the business sustain and thrive with growing revenues.  If you are thriving low-key in the market with no recognition and positioning as such, would you be able to sell and sustain your business? Well, you could be able to stomp the yard for a few years (only if you have good connections already), but after that, your business volume would eventually decline. Thereby, you would need brand awareness campaigns and strategies to make a space for your business.

The 8 strategies for brand awareness we discussed are proven and have been put to use by the smallest to biggest brands. With the right planning, execution, and branding solution experts by your side, you can get fame for your business. We can help you get custom branding awareness solutions that could let you excel in a way where your customer footfall increases, brand identity shoots through the roof, and profit volume maximizes.

Read: How to Improve Brand Awareness? Here is the Best Guide for Guaranteed Results

FAQs on Online Brand Awareness Strategy

1. Brand Awareness Define or definition of brand awareness.

Brand awareness is a stage where you try and put effort to make your business name familiar to your target audience. Whenever your audience sees your business’s commercial, hear about your product’s name, see your logo, if they are able to recall your business name as an ardent brand follower, then you have achieved brand awareness.

Now you know what is brand awareness in digital marketing, would you like to explore what strategy you need to lift your brand identity with our result-driven digital marketing services?

2. What is brand awareness example?

Brand awareness is a process where customers are able to locate your brand based on your visual elements like logo, color theme, tagline, or any messaging. Like whenever people hear about McDonald’s, they can recall its tagline “M Loving it” or whenever they hear Dunkin Donuts, they would recognize its outlet from distance with its color scheme of pink and orange letters. These are a few examples of brand awareness!

3. How to increase brand awareness strategy’s effectiveness?

To increase the brand awareness strategy’s effectiveness, try to:

  • Have it all written down: An online brand awareness strategy should be drafted on digital documents, it should be planned, tested, and every step identified.
  • Be original, have your own brand message, voice, and collateral that stands out from your competitors, and do not rest on your laurels, and always innovate.
  • Know what competitors are up to and plan ahead: your competitors have your target audience as well, know what exceptional they are planning to be ahead, and plan something more creative.
  • Invest in the performance marketing plan: Performance marketing is basically where you pay for the marketing efforts only when a certain action has a performing outcome in your favor like when an ad is clicked, you are charged then only. There are more such actions under performance marketing that can save your dollars.
  • Take help of professional branding services: The professional branding services can help rev up your brand personality with trending creatives, brand messaging, and an online presence that users would love to explore & take customer actions with. Looking for affordable branding services, try our quotes!

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Also Read:

This was your quick yet elaborate guide on what is brand awareness and the top 8 brand awareness strategies you need to be a recognized brand in your industry. Tell us in the comments what other ways you feel could be ideal for boosting brand awareness!

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