If your customers don't know you, they can't buy from you. To purchase, your customers must first be aware of you - a term called brand awareness. Think of the last thing you bought and imagine a company that makes a cheaper, easier, faster, and higher quality alternative from a company called ZirkelCorp. If you don't know ZirkelCorp exists, they didn't even enter your decision-making process.
Brand Awareness is the ability of your customers to recognize and recall your brand. In other words, it's how well people know and remember your brand when they encounter it in various channels, such as seeing your logo, hearing your company's name, or encountering your products or services. Brand awareness is a foundational marketing element and a crucial first step in building a customer relationship. So, how do you build brand awareness if you are starting a new business, launching a new product, or entering a new market?
Here is a quick guide with 10 fantastic ways to help you build brand awareness:
1. Consistent Branding: The brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster than text. If you want people to see and remember your brand, create a formalized standard, often called a brand guide, that outlines how your brand should look across all platforms, including logos, colors, fonts, and messaging. These standards will help create a cohesive and memorable brand image for your customers to recall quickly.
Pro tip: Guidelines are only as good as how consistently they are applied in the materials seen by customers. Ensure you have a system of checks and balances to ensure external content meets your brand guide and that it is simple for your associates to apply in their day-to-day work.
2. Simple Brand Narrative: Your brand is more than your name and logo and should go into what you, your teams, and eventually your customers say about your brand when they see it. Think of this as the elevator pitch of your brand. Brand consultants will charge a lot to develop this for you, but answering the four simple questions below may help you do it independently.
Why do we do what we do?
How do we do this?
Who do we do this for?
What makes us unique from the competition?
Once you have a sentence or two on each of the above, put it together in a straightforward brand narrative, share it with your teams, and start using it with prospective customers.
Pro tip: A brand narrative is not a slogan (e.g., Innovating for Tomorrow, Today). These often say nothing and are a lazy way to share what you do or value in your branding. It is more powerful to get your teams and content to be consistent in what they say about the company than to confuse customers by adding this to your branding.
3. Content Marketing: Gartner has done excellent research showing that customers spend 47% of their buying journey researching independently. The insight here is that customers aren't looking for solutions; they are looking for help to solve their problem. Produce high-quality, relevant, and valuable content such as blog posts, articles, prescriptive guides, videos, and infographics rooted in helping your target audience. Share this content on your website and social media platforms to showcase your expertise so prospective customers can find your brand while researching independently.
4. Social Media Engagement: Social media is a free and easy way to connect with your target audience. Regularly post content, respond to comments, and engage in conversations to humanize your brand and foster a community. Social media is also a great way to build and engage with an online community around your brand. Engaging on social media can be through forums, social media groups, or your own platform.
Pro Tip: An often overlooked way to extend the reach of your social media content is to have employees reshare the content you post. Providing guidance and encouraging this will help you build awareness with a larger audience.
5. Share Your Stories: Whether trade, local, or national, people rely on the media to take all the information out in the world and share the most relevant stories. To be part of this process, find great stories about your company or unique insights about your industry and pitch them to be featured in media outlets, both online and offline. There are three ways to achieve this:
Earned: Earning the placement is hard but comes with higher trust. As Parry Headrick from Crackle PR insightfully shares, "Your parents didn't read you press releases at bedtime. They read you stories." Pursuing this route requires convincing editorial teams that your story is unique and valuable to their audience.
Paid: Paying for placement is advertising and costs money, but it can help you reach the large audiences media outlets build. People can quickly identify paid promotions, so keep paid placement educational, insightful, and helpful.
Owned: Using your own channels to share your stories. See "Reach Out Directly" below.
6. Events and Sponsorships: Events hold value for brand awareness as they typically have a large niche audience. Participate in events, workshops, seminars, or conferences where, and this is key, you think your customers will be. Events often have sponsorship opportunities that can increase your brand's exposure to a broader audience but are often costly. If budget is a concern, consider attending events to network as this can lead to valuable partnerships and increased awareness.
7. Organic and Paid Search: A great deal of the time your customers spend searching is online, and brand awareness means making sure they find you when they are searching. There are two ways to do this: organically and paid. Organic focuses on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to optimize your website for search engines to improve its ranking in search results. This is free to do and increases the likelihood of your brand being discovered, but often requires specialized expertise. Paid focuses on things like Paid Search, Remarketing, or Retargeting to advertise your brand to specific target audiences searching key terms, previously interacted with your brand, or have interacted with your competitor's brands. This can cost a lot of money, but if you can get specifics on the terms and scope of whom you are trying to reach, it can fit within your budget.
8. Reach Out Directly: In the early 2000s, as media companies began to decline and slash their editorial teams, companies began to see the need to be their own media outlets. This has proven valuable and costs companies less over time. To start on this path, create content your target audience finds useful and collect opt-ins wherever your customers engage in this content. This will build your base of customers to communicate directly with, and you can start sharing regular content newsletters or important updates to keep your audience informed about your products, services, and industry news.
9. Use Someone Else's Reach: If you can't wait to build up your own base of customers, another route is to utilize the reach of someone else. Collaborate with influencers, thought leaders, or organizations in your industry who align with your brand values and can share your brand with their established audience. This is advertising and will cost money, but it can help you target a focused audience in your industry.
10. Public Speaking and Thought Leadership: Establish yourself as an expert by speaking at industry events, writing whitepapers, or contributing to authoritative publications in your field. This costs nothing more than your time and persistence. Start by identifying the approval timelines and process for industry events and target the ones with the highest potential to reach your target audience. People don't want to be sold to and the committees who evaluate submissions will restrict topics that feel like pitches. To get around this, focus less on what you offer and more on the problems you solve, ideally bringing a customer (or two) along with you to speak to how your unique product or service solved their problem. Supporting data, unique frameworks, and valuable insights will move your submission to the top of the list.
These are some of the best ways to build brand awareness so that customers can be aware of your brand and consider you in their buying process. The next step past awareness is to create brand perception, which I'll cover in a future post.
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