If you want your brand to succeed, you need to make it recognizable to your target audience. This comes through a purposeful and strategic brand awareness strategy.
Brand awareness is the attempt to develop awareness as well as trust for a business in the eyes of a potential customer. It associates your company with specific pain points and positions it as an effective solution to those problems.
If you’re trying to boost your brand awareness efforts and increase brand recognition, it’s important to go about it the right way. Here are five ways to help you build your brand awareness effectively.
Let’s start with one of the most critical brand building items of all: consistency. If you want to improve brand recognition, your brand has to be consistent every time your target audience sees it.
That doesn’t mean you can never change things. Rebrands are a reality at times, and it’s possible to alter and tweak branded elements as you go along.
However, change should never take place flippantly. Why? Because you want to be consistent.
Consider all of the elements that represent your brand to consumers. There are colors, logos, fonts, labels, products, slogans, content — the list goes on. All of these are touch points by which a consumer can begin to build brand loyalty.
For your outward-facing branded marketing to work, it has to look and feel the same across the board. Even something as intangible as a central story or marketing message for your company should always come across the same, whether you’re presenting it in a 2,000-word “About Us” page or a 100-word boilerplate on a press release.
PR is a key element of any brand awareness marketing strategy. If you want to generate brand equity and customer loyalty, you need to push your brand out into the spotlight. Digital PR is the perfect way to do just that.
Brands that continuously appear in relevant conversations are able to build consumer trust and enhance the customer experience. That means you can’t simply present canned pitches on a company blog and call it a day. You need to seek out meaningful PR opportunities on third-party platforms, such as getting your brand mentioned on an industry publication or news site. It’s one thing for you to say great things about your business, but you’re in a whole other ballpark when you have that third-party credibility of someone else saying something great about you.
By positioning your brand in the right limelight and bringing powerful, positive, and insightful messages to the table, you communicate that you aren’t just another option. You’re a superior solution. You understand consumers’ struggles and can provide effective, thoughtful answers to their questions.
The critical element here for effective brand building awareness is to continuously invest in digital PR. You can’t make a single push and expect to remain relevant in the modern, over-saturated marketplace. Ongoing digital PR keeps you in the spotlight and creates repeated exposure for consumers. It builds your brand into a company that is an industry authority with relevant answers.
Awareness is dependent on creating a brand that your target audience can relate to on an individual level. One of the most powerful ways for businesses of any size to build that personal element into each marketing effort is through social channels.
Social media marketing allows you to build communities around your company’s vision and mission. You can interact with an existing customer and answer the questions of curious potential buyers. Are you a beauty brand and your future customers are going to TikTok for the answers to their beauty questions? Then you need to be on that social media platform too.
You can also invest in shareable content marketing and even embrace user-generated content. Influencer marketing can also help you build awareness and trust with highly-targeted audiences. Social media is highly interactive and also opens up the door to run contests and deliver free content as a way to offer value to your existing and future customer base.
Search engine optimization (SEO) isn’t necessarily an obvious choice for building awareness as a brand. But it’s an effective tool, nonetheless.
When you invest in optimizing your business site with keywords and linking strategies, it can boost your SERP rankings. As you appear higher in organic search results, it does more than just improve site traffic. It can also begin to embed your brand name into the minds of those searching for targeted solutions for which you can provide answers.
SEO is a common marketing technique that is often associated with traffic and revenue optimization. However, it can also play a critical role in the earliest stages of the sales funnel as you seek to increase brand visibility with curious customers.
Charity work can be a powerful way to impact your community …and build your brand at the same time. Business strategist Nida Leardprasopsuk emphasizes the importance of not just one-time but ongoing “Do-Good” campaigns. These give back to society in ways that align with key elements of your business.
For instance, you should choose to support causes that relate to the central focus and vision of your company. This spreads brand awareness among audiences that can relate to what your brand stands for.
If you maintain hiring standards that reinforce brand identity (i.e., you hire workers who actually want to invest in your cause), choosing the right organizations can also improve buy-in from your workforce. This can increase loyalty and lead to better team performance — which can have a quiet but important impact on how effective your awareness efforts are.
Building brand awareness doesn't happen in a day. Brand awareness campaigns take time. Consider partnering with a growth marketing agency that specializes in digital PR. If you’re willing to invest in a multi-faceted brand marketing campaign, they can provide guidance to help increase your brand awareness quickly and effectively.
Use things like digital PR, social media, SEO, and “Do-Good” campaigns to grow your reputation and credibility with consumers. And remember to stay consistent every step of the way. If you can do that, the results will speak for themselves.
