What is Brand Awareness?
What feels more natural to you â asking for a Coke or a cola? Or asking for a Band-Aid instead of plastic bandage?
Known as proprietary eponyms, these brands are so well-known, theyâve become the replacement to the generic term for the product or service. They are the apex of âBrand Awarenessâ
In simpler terms, Brand awareness is a term used to describe how familiar a brand is to its consumers. Furthermore, there are various tools of brand awareness that help measure how memorable a brand is to its target audience.
âA brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumers decision to choose one product or service over anotherâ â Seth Godin.
For example, when a person is buying a car, 90 percent of purchase intent comes from unaided brand recollection, according to a Nielsen study. What is unaided brand recollection? This occurs when a product is the first one to come to a buyerâs mind when ready to make a purchase, without any prompting from the brand. This phenomenon comes only through consistent brand awareness marketing.
Why it is so important?
Making a brand familiar is the central idea behind most marketing strategies. Considering its strategic nature, hiring a brand consultant will always give you an advantage, when implementing brand awareness strategies. An effective marketing strategy will be able to influence and direct a customerâs instinctive preference to a particular brand.
5 Useful tools of Brand Awareness:
With so many brands competing against each other, a brand consultantâs first tip would be to not just create a brand but put efforts into consistently increasing the association between the brand and the product or service. People always have a preference for a brand that is familiar to them. While brand awareness is not an overnight exercise, there are a few tools of brand awareness usually recommended in major metros for example by a brand marketing consultant in Mumbai to strengthen the brandâs recall in a customerâs mind faster:
Social Media Management and Marketing: Ask any brand consultant and they will admit that their use for social media is more about brand awareness rather than sales. A well-aligned social media management can make a big difference in community engagement and overall brand building â likes, comments, shares and follows should take precedence over conversions.
Public Relations: Another brand consultants favourite. Public Relations as a tool for brand awareness is a useful way to promote your brand in a cost-effective manner. Being mentioned in the right articles in the right media platforms will give an organic boost to your search rankings as well as put you in front of new readers who were most likely not part of your audience before.
Influencer Marketing: One of the critical tools for brand awareness, influencers are people built their own brand, have a large following and a ready audience. Building a strong relationship with them is key and tapping into this tailor-made audience can give a boost to your brand awareness within a short period of time.
Content Creation: As a marketer, once you have a pulse of where your brandâs awareness currently stands, content across different channels can be crafted to suit the brandâs narrative and bring out its value proposition.
Referral Programs: When your customers get incentives on top of a great product to spread the word about the business, rest assured, they will turn out to be your most effective salesperson. Referral programs are a great way to increase brand awareness without huge advertising spends.
Tracking Brand Awareness:
One of the key challenges of marketing to create brand awareness followed by the challenge of tracking the effectiveness of brand awareness. How can you tell if people are becoming more aware of your brand? There are a few basic brand awareness KPIâs that you can measure and track.
First, measure your website traffic. If people hear your brand campaign, they will Google you. If you’re seeing increased brand awareness, it most likely means your brand awareness marketing is working.
Next, track social shares. Are people sharing and liking your blog posts and social media content? If so, then your brand awareness is likely increasing.
Finally, track your overall sales. If you are working on brand identity awareness and see your sales / conversion numbers are going up, it is a good indicator that your strategies are working.
Key Takeaways
- More More than 94% of customers usually buys from companies which rank high on brand awareness.
- Brand awareness builds brand credibility, creates better engagement with customers and safeguard brands from becoming obsolete.
- Brand awareness is often seen as the first stage of the marketing funnel. By creating brand awareness, you can cast a wide net across your audience of potential buyers. From there, you can funnel leads towards the research and decision-making processes, and eventually the buying process.
Customers will stick with a brand and be loyal in the face of other completion, only when the brand is deemed as trustworthy. A consistent and continuous marketing strategy, developed with key insights from a brand consultant and incorporating these tools of brand awareness will make your business stand out in no time!
