It’s No Accident: How to Increase Brand Awareness
Building brand awareness means increasing the level of familiarity consumers have with your brand, which in turn increases recognition, trust, and conversions.
Brands with high brand awareness are ones that are trending, generate buzz, or even replace everyday words. If you’ve ever used a Band-Aid, put food in Tupperware, or Googled something, you’ve been made brand-aware.
Once you have a memorable brand design and a website that works, you’re ready to build your strategy for increased brand awareness. Here’s how we do it.
Social Media
Social media is quite possibly the most important tool for building brand awareness. More than 50% of brand reputation comes from online sociability, so make sure you’re ‘gramming, tweeting, memeing, and generally being as social as possible.
“You want your brand to feel like a person, not a company.”
It’s important to establish a personality, tone of voice, and consistency across all of your brand’s social media. You want your brand to feel like a person, not a company. Interacting with your customers, asking questions, starting conversations, and delivering relevant content positions your brand as one to be liked and trusted.
Social media is the avenue most people use to familiarise themselves with a brand, and the significance of this cannot be overstated. Your brand’s social media is its first impression, so make it count.
Social Advertising
Over 2.1 billion people have social media accounts. It’s hard to comprehend just how huge that potential audience is, but easy to see it should be capitalised on. The purpose of social media advertising is threefold:
- Awareness— Increasing reach and building awareness around not just your brand’s existence, but how it stands out.
- Interest— Sending traffic to your website, increasing engagement, gaining likes, comments, DMs, and registering client details.
- Conversion— Converting leads into sales or sign-ups, increasing traffic to bricks and mortar stores.
Twitter is used to ignite conversation. Instagram is extremely visual. Snapchat draws a younger crowd. Facebook has a huge demographic and range of targeting options. There are many social media marketing platforms to use, and the key is choosing which is best suited to your target demographic.
By nailing who your target audience is and using the most appropriate platforms, you have the best chance of achieving these goals.
Collaborations & Sponsorships
Brand collaboration is when two brands join forces for a campaign. This only works when it’s valuable for both brands, widens their customer base, and increases their reach.
- Collaboration shows the audience that the two brands can be trusted
- It adds value to what they each offer natively
- Buzz and hype is generated around the unexpected pairing
A good example is when Uber and Spotify collaborated for their “soundtrack for your ride” campaign. The two well-known brands teamed up to promote the idea that people like to play their music while in the car.
Sponsoring events is another way to differentiate your brand from other competitors. It’s a great strategy to increase your audience potential and align your company to a relevant or worthy cause.
“If you’ve ever used a Band-Aid, put food in Tupperware, or Googled something, you’ve been made brand-aware.”
Competitions & Giveaways
Giveaways are an inexpensive way to gain heaps of traction. Who doesn’t love free stuff? People are willing to engage, share, comment, and tag friends in posts if it means the chance to win goodies.
Instagram is a great tool for competitions and giveaways as 91% of posts that have achieved over a thousand comments are competition posts. This speaks volumes as to how they work to increase engagement.
Follow these steps when creating a competition or giveaway:
- Lay down the rules and restrictions
- Outline what users need to do to be eligible (such as refer a friend, follow and share, sign up)
- Create a unique shareable hashtag
- Decide on what the prize is (a lifetime supply, a discount, a membership, a shoutout)
- Include the deadline for entries
- Outline when the winner will be announced
Be clear on the goal. Is it to gain more followers, a wider reach, web traffic? This will inform the rules and the prize. Launch the competition and watch the engagement skyrocket!
Email Marketing Campaigns
Email marketing is an incredible and often forgotten tool for increasing brand awareness.
As we go into detail in our blog on how to build your brand through email marketing, email campaigns have massive audience potential and high ROI. Not only do the results speak for themselves, but it’s a beautiful way to showcase your brand’s goals and personality.
Regular Blogging
Blogging increases your authenticity and positions your brand as a trusted wealth of knowledge in your area. All of your brand’s copy should have these three things:
- Tone— Consistency establishes and affirms your brand’s personality and values.
- Language— Write with stimulating, attention-grabbing, positive language to encourage action.
- Purpose— Underpinning all of your brand’s content should be a strong sense of purpose.
A successful brand is one that tells a story. Your branding should tell a narrative that conveys what you do in an engaging way. Remember: first and foremost, you must entertain.
