What do such diverse companies as Apple, Starbucks, and Nike have in common? Mostly, they’ve built such strong brand awareness that most consumers know what to expect from their products and services. Even more, they’ve become the standards that people measure competitors against. Customers associate these brand names with expectations for quality and consistency. In turn, the companies prosper from plenty of new and repeat customers.
As mentioned by Harvard Business Review, buyers make up to 95 percent of their purchase decisions subconsciously. With solid brand awareness, people don’t need to think twice when they have problems that your business can solve. From Apple’s releases of new tech to Starbucks’ holiday menu, everything they do generates excitement and even becomes newsworthy.
If your business can develop this kind of brand awareness in your market, you will have a valuable asset that provides you with an automatic competitive edge, even when competitors may offer similar products or even cheaper prices. By developing brand awareness, you’ve built trust, engagement, and a connection with customers.
Particularly in this age when consumers get bombarded with marketing messages on TV, computers, and phones, having so many options can actually make choices overwhelming. Strong brand awareness cuts through the noise to improve conversions, sales, and profits. Take just a few moments to review the steps to develop your own brand awareness strategy.
Components of a Brand Awareness Strategy
Your brand awareness strategy cannot just center on one aspect of marketing. It takes a deep understanding of your audience and careful planning of your message to ensure your message aligns with customer’s needs and values.
Everything should center on the best stage of the customer’s journey for the medium and most important, how you hope to make the customer perceive and feel about your brand. To better understand this, dig deeper into some relevant examples.
Paid Search Ads
To develop brand awareness, paid search ads usually sit at the top of the marketing funnel. You can use ad platforms to cast a fairly wide net that will introduce more people to your solutions and your name. At the same time, you want to focus upon your customers more than your products. Customers use search to find solutions that could range from locating a nearby restaurant to managing their retirement savings.
To maximize paid ads:
- Use audience targeting to reach your most likely customers, which might include such demographics as location, age, or even browsing history.
- Find keywords that searchers will include in their queries, and craft advertising text that promises an answer to their queries.
- Also, make certain you deliver upon the ad’s promise in the content of the landing page linked to the advertisement by answering the question.
Paid Display Ads
Site-targeted display ads can work very well if you know the kinds of sites that your customers tend to visit. For instance, HVAC companies might know that homeowners generated most of their business. They might try targeting local real estate news. They can also use advertising platforms to geo-target local people who visit popular home improvement websites, like Bob Vila.
Besides targeting specific websites, you can also use contextual ads to have your advertising platform find you the best properties. These platforms can display ads based upon keywords or even site visitors who have interacted with your brand before. For example, your ads for a family or pediatric dentist might automatically display on pages relevant for moms. Very often, these sophisticated advertising platforms can provide you with a powerful tool to find your audience and learn more about their interests.
Social Posts
Just recently, Sprout Social unveiled the somewhat startling fact that 90 percent of consumers buy from businesses that they follow on social sites. A presence on social sites gives you a chance to engage in two-way communication through responses to your posts, reviews, and messaging. Most of all, you can incorporate your messaging right in your audience’s feed, right along with their social circles.
While it’s nice to develop organic followers, paid social posts can give less-known companies a way to promote their message and quickly attract a base of fans. By using the tools found on the ad platforms of such popular social networking websites as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, your business can target specific audiences or even people who might have visited your website before.
Once you developed a strong base, you might have the luxury of gaining more traction organically and not have to spend so much money on promotion. Either way, once you commit to a platform, you should create a consistent posting schedule to keep your brand visible.
Social Marketing and Podcast Influencers
Your business might not have developed strong brand awareness yet; however, you can partner with those who have already developed influence. To accomplish this, you might consider a few different tactics:
- Reach out to other businesses: As one example, go ahead and post about the great celebration lunch you enjoyed at a nearby restaurant with your employees, making sure to tag the restaurant. The other business will appreciate the attention is likely to respond in kind. For a more formal approach, consider organizing a group promotion where multiple businesses offer specials and promote them on their own networks.
- Spotlight your customers: Ask or even incentivize customers to spread the word about their good experiences with your business on their own social networks. If you’ve just completed a remodeling job, ask your customer if you can post it and tag them on Facebook.
- Sponsor community projects: By sponsoring worthy causes, you’ll not only benefit your community, you’ll also get a chance to generate positive attention for your brand. By getting tagged as a participant in a local project, you’ll gain attention from everybody who’s interested in that cause.
Developing Content to Connect With Your Audience
Mostly, when marketers discuss content, they’re talking about blog posts, videos, press releases, and similar kinds of marketing communication. Companies that truly focus on developing a brand awareness strategy take it further to ensure they send an integrated message with packaging, customer service, and just about everything that interfaces with customers and potential customers.
Brand Messaging
Businesses should certainly communicate about their products and services. At the same time, they should mostly focus their message upon their audience. Strong brand awareness can help make people care about your company. Thus, content that frames your brand as the solution to issues that your audience considers important will help establish your positive brand image.
Content Distribution
You can use ads, social networks, and other promotional strategies mentioned in the previous section to promote your content. You might also consider finding opportunities to submit guest posts, articles, and even videos to relevant blogs or journals.
As a unique example of both brand messaging and content distribution, a mattress company called Casper established its own magazine. Woolly, focuses upon sleep and general health and wellness. A recent issue featured content about alternative medication, snoring, and even an adult coloring book.
The magazine gives Casper a chance to demonstrate that they care about what their target market cares about, and in addition, serves as a promotional vehicle for their mattresses. In a somewhat similar move, some brands have even started their own podcasts.
Where to Begin Your Brand Awareness Strategy
The right tactics to develop your company’s unique brand awareness strategy may depend upon your kind of business, your company’s unique personality, and even your location. Most important, your message should highlight your products or services but always focus upon how it makes the people in your market feel about you.
For some organizations, implementing this kind of campaign represents a shift from the way they’ve marketed before. It’s worth it because it keeps your brand in mind when they need a solution that you can provide.
You can rely upon Surefire Local not only to help you to develop the perfect brand awareness strategy but to provide a platform that you can use to manage the disparate parts in an efficient and effective way.
For just a few highlights:
- A cloud-based library manages all of your graphics, so everybody can access them.
- The built-in calendar ensures you keep to a consistent posting schedule on social sites, blogs, and other media.
- The system will send alerts of business reviews, so you can track and respond right away.
- The platform’s machine learning even analyzes metrics to suggest action plans that will keep tuning and perfecting your efforts.
Take the first step towards enjoying better brand awareness by requesting a free demo today.