The increasing competition can make it challenging for businesses to capture consumer attention. Furthermore, it's not easy to introduce your brand to gain widespread recognition. This is where you, as a business owner, must understand how to effectively enhance brand awareness.
Brand awareness can be a key pillar determining long-term success. Especially now, there are many digital media that you can transform into organic marketing channels. But, what is the right way to build brand awareness?
Don't worry, you will find the answer in this article. Later, we will discuss various brand awareness strategies you can try. So, let's read the article until the end!
What is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness is the level of knowledge, understanding, and recognition that consumers have about a brand or company.
Building brand awareness is crucial for businesses. The reason is that high brand awareness helps differentiate a product or service offered from competitors. By establishing a strong brand awareness, business owners can create a unique identity for their brand.
If you can build brand awareness effectively, your brand will always be at the forefront of potential consumers' minds. Since consumers are more familiar with your brand, they are likely to choose your products or services over competitors.
Up to this point, you might still be wondering, what's the difference between brand awareness and brand image?
Fundamentally, brand image and brand awareness are two different concepts in the context of marketing. Brand awareness is about whether consumers recognize or remember the brand. Meanwhile, brand image refers to what consumers think or feel about the brand.
Now that you have an understanding of what brand awareness is, how do you build the most effective brand awareness? Find the answers in the next section!
10+ Most Powerful Ways to Increase Brand Awareness
There's no denying that the concept of what brand awareness is can be quite abstract. Therefore, evaluating how much customer awareness there is of a brand is a rather challenging task.
However, that doesn't mean brand awareness doesn't need to be enhanced. Here are 10 ways to build brand awareness that you can follow:
- Maintain Branding Consistency
- Have a Business Website
- Utilize the Right Social Media
- Implement a Referral Program
- Showcase Customer Reviews
- Define Unique Selling Propositions (USP) of the Product
- Create a Freemium Program
- Enhance Customer Satisfaction
- Execute Influencer Marketing Strategies
- Provide Sponsorship
- Establish Partnerships with Business Allies
Let's delve into the detailed explanations below!
1. Maintain Branding Consistency
The first method to increase brand awareness is consistently maintaining the brand image. Because consistency will create a strong brand that is always remembered by the target audience. That's why having a brand book to record your brand's identity and style is highly recommended.
The tone of your brand image can be humorous, professional, friendly, and so on. Most importantly, determine a unique tone that remains consistent with your target audience.
2. Have a Business Website
Creating a website is a suitable step to demonstrate that your brand is an expert in its field. The way to do it is by providing relevant content with high value for the right target audience.
By regularly uploading content, the audience will feel confident in your brand. This trust is what will make it easier for you to convert the audience into loyal customers.
However, what is comprehensive content without easy access to the website? Poor performance will only make the audience uncomfortable and ultimately lead them to leave your website. That's why choosing reliable and high-quality web hosting services is one essential aspect that cannot be overlooked.
3. Use the Right Social Media
Every marketing channel has a unique audience. Some social media platforms cater to a younger crowd, while others attract a group of people more business-oriented.
The suitable social media for your business is the platform where your target market resides. So, there's no need to promote your product on Facebook if your consumer demographics are not active on this platform.
4. Implement a Referral Program
A referral program functions similarly to word-of-mouth promotion. Through referrals, customers will promote a product or service to friends, family, or acquaintances, helping the promoted product gain wider recognition.
In this program, however, customers receive rewards when others join using their unique referral code. A referral code is a unique code used to invite people to purchase a product or join a platform's membership.
When someone uses your code during registration or purchase, you'll receive rewards such as cash, points, discounts, or other benefits.
5. Display Customer Reviews
As many as 91% of internet users aged 18-34 trust online reviews just like recommendations from close acquaintances. Therefore, customer reviews become one of the effective ways to enhance brand awareness.
So, how can customer reviews influence brand awareness?
For online businesses with their own website, you can integrate customer reviews into a loyalty program or membership benefits. Customers not only earn points when purchasing products but also receive additional points when reviewing purchased products.
If you don't have a customer review page on your website yet, try following our guide on how to create a review page.
6. Determine the Unique Selling Proposition (USP) of the Product
The Unique Selling Proposition or USP is crucial in business. This is what sets your business apart from competitors and tells the audience why they should buy your product.
If all businesses offer the same products, potential consumers would surely be confused about which one to choose, right? In the end, they would likely buy from a seller that provides more benefits. Well, those benefits are what we call the USP.
Now, you can find out consumer preferences by conducting surveys directly. For example, by asking them to fill out a form about the reasons that make them prefer your brand over competitors.
Additionally, you can also request feedback on key aspects such as price, service, quality, and others. After that, you can focus on marketing strategies for the product according to the desired aspects of consumers.
7. Create a Freemium Program
Freemium is a combination of the terms "free" and "premium." This promotional method provides an opportunity for users to try out the service before making a purchase.
If you want to build brand awareness, offer consumers the chance to experience the benefits you offer without having to pay.
For example, if you have a subscription service, offer a free trial or a period of free testing. This brand awareness strategy has been employed by Dropbox, which provides a 30-day free trial during the initial usage period.
8. Enhance Customer Satisfaction
Some people won't want to make repeat purchases from a store that provides a bad experience. In fact, they often immediately tell those close to them not to buy products from your brand. Thus, sales can plummet if this happens in your business.
To avoid this, ensure you always provide the best service to your customers. Instill the idea that your brand must focus on customer satisfaction.
In the future, customers satisfied with your service will undoubtedly give positive reviews and recommend your brand to others. This way, you can boost business brand awareness.
9. Implement Influencer Marketing Strategy
Influencer marketing has been a popular promotion strategy since the rise of Instagram. An influencer is someone who can exert influence in society. For instance, celebgrammers, YouTubers, and others.
Now, you can collaborate with influencers to have them promote your products on their social media accounts.
This method of increasing brand awareness is highly effective, especially for brands that have just released a new product. With the extensive followers of influencers, you can effectively build brand awareness within a specific market segment.
10. Provide Sponsorships
Sponsorship is a common way to boost a brand's popularity. However, not all business owners are willing to allocate their capital for sponsoring an event.
The consideration often arises from the difficulty in assessing the return on investment (ROI) from sponsorship. For those unfamiliar, ROI is a calculation used to measure the efficiency of an investment.
Nevertheless, offering sponsorship to an event can be a strategic move to enhance brand awareness. Especially if this approach is applied to the right timing, type of event, and target potential customers.
11. Establish Partnerships with Business Allies
One way to enhance brand awareness is by collaborating with other brands. This allows you to introduce your business to potential customers from different market segments.
If they like brand A, and brand A is partnering with brand B, the audience feels that they should also know about brand B's products due to their trust in brand A.
Furthermore, partnering is a smart strategy to keep customers from getting bored. By teaming up with other brands, you can experiment with creating and marketing limited edition products.
Uniqlo is one brand that frequently employs this strategy. Every season, Uniqlo releases new designs inspired by cartoons, artists, and others that are clearly distinct from Uniqlo's simple character. As a result, consumers are encouraged to quickly purchase these "rare items."
How to Measure Brand Awareness?
Now that you know various effective ways to increase brand awareness, you might wonder, how do you measure the success of the strategies you've implemented?
Here are indicators of brand awareness that can help you evaluate the success:
Website traffic. Website traffic indicates how many visitors are interested in and engaging with your brand. Through the amount of traffic, you can also identify which content and products are appealing and have potential for promotion. Conversely, you can also identify areas that are less popular. Next, you just need to optimize that content to make it more appealing to potential customers.
Social media engagement. Good engagement is indicated by increasing numbers of followers, likes, retweets, and comments on social media.
As they say, it's about branding. The words of potential customers about a business reflect brand awareness. When one customer speaks negatively, that negative impression can spread to other potential customers, and vice versa.
Survey. You're surely familiar with surveys, right? Through surveys, you can ask several customers about their knowledge of your brand.
While not absolute indicators, these four factors will provide some insight into the brand awareness being built.
Let's increase Brand Awareness and make your Business Successful!
Increasing brand awareness isn't just about big billboards and ads everywhere. It turns out there are many ways to boost brand awareness so a business can reach its target audience.
Some methods are more popular than others. For example, using the right social media, engaging in influencer marketing, and providing sponsorships are commonly done by business owners.
Unfortunately, many still underestimate the impact of having a website for a brand. However, besides serving as an introduction to a brand, a website can also play a role in enhancing social media marketing and strengthening branding.
No need to worry about the complexity of website creation. Now there are content management systems (CMS) like WordPress that make the website creation process easier. Just remember, the hosting you choose should ensure quality so the website is always easily accessible.
