If you go around and ask people to name a soda brand, Coca Cola or Pepsi are probably the first brands that would come to their mind. That’s precisely what brand awareness means. It means that your brand gets the kind of recognition that it imbeds itself in people’s lifestyles. If you reach this point, you will gain the sort of customers that most of the time wouldn’t give it a second thought to acquire your services or buy your products.
This guide is all about making you understand what brand awareness is and how you can build a consistent campaign to establish your brand among your target audience, which would increase sales and conversion rate.
What is brand awareness?
Brand awareness shows how people are familiar with your brand and how they feel about it. Establishing a solid brand awareness is necessary when you’re promoting your company to attract more buyers. Especially when you’re just getting started and need to get yourself among your competitors fast, keep in mind that you can’t reach the kind of brand awareness famous companies have at the beginning. At local SEO Darwin experts believe that any local business should aim for the following goals when building brand awareness.
- Your customers know all about your business.
- Buyers would choose your products over others even if your price is higher.
- Your brand on social media is known for funny ads.
- Your brand’s name is getting searched in search engines.
Why is brand awareness important?
One of the first reasons for branding is to set yourself apart from others. You do that with the company name, logo, typography, colour pallet and your brand’s distinctive story. Without brand awareness, you won’t get far with your business even if you’re active on social media or spend a lot of money on ads. It’s the brand that your customers come to recognise and trust, not those ads.
Trust: brand trust is everything a company can ask for. If you lose that trust, you lose everything. Brand awareness tries to build that mutual trust between your brand and your customers.
Association: I bet you have referred to bandage as “band-Aid” or asked for a “Coke” instead of saying soda. Whenever people start to associate brands’ names instead of the names of actual products, you know they have done their brand awareness homework right.
Brand equity: brand equity is the weight of your brand. It’s directly related to your audiences’ experience and their positive takeaways about your brand. Brand equity adds value to your brand and business name. It also can affect your product’s pricing. For example, “SONY Electronics” charges more because they have a higher brand Equity and are seen as a premium company.
How to build brand awareness for your local business?
Brand awareness doesn’t happen with a snap of a finger when you buy a few ads here and there. Brand recognition takes time to resonate in people’s minds. Ads’ purpose is to get more sales, but brand awareness is the result of a campaign that thrives to go beyond sales increase. Local businesses need to build a strong brand to succeed in the market.
In the following paragraphs, you’ll read about a few methods that can help you build a solid brand awareness and makes an everlasting impact on your target audience. Since these methods cost little to nothing, they are great for small local businesses with a low budget.
1. Establish a partnership with other known brands
One of the most rewarding brand awareness strategies is establishing partnerships with other brands. It is a sort of mutual agreement that happens between businesses to help each other increase brand exposure, get access to new markets and add value to the business name.
The benefits of partnering up with other brands are as follows:
Builds trust: Two companies or more partnering with each other are easier to trust. If the target audience had a positive experience with your partner, it makes it easier for them to trust you. And more likely, they’re going to have a positive experience with your brand as well.
Adds value: A true partnership adds to the true value of a brand and its products/services. Now that there is more than one company involved, the finished products from both sides are more premium and more valuable. Customers tend to find these kinds of partnerships best for their interest because they are going to get the best bang for their buck.
Generates buzz: Partnership also creates big publicity, which is great for your local business as well as brand awareness. The big news of a partnership established between two companies can get trending on social media. Even if you’re are a small local company, it still can make you the hot topic of the day in your city.
- Have a sold guest posting plan
One of the smartest and cheapest ways to build brand awareness for your local business is through guest posting and spreading your knowledge online. Guest posting and directories are one of the main strategies in local business SEO trend 2022, but also one can take advantage of them to talk about the brand story to get more exposure and let people know what their brand is all about.
With each well-written SEO optimised guest post you publish online, your brand attracts new followers. And step by step, you’ll build your own loyal audience.
Guest posting has many SEO advantages, but the following are specific to brand awareness.
Establishes a unique community: Every blog post you publish online comes with a comment section. It is a great place to start building your community by answering their questions or their thoughts in the comments under your guest posts. If they like your content, they are going to look for your social media or website to follow your work there as well. Establishing a loyal community is very essential for any local business to thrive in the local market.
Creates brand voice: Your brand voice is best established by posting valuable content for your local business. With regular guest posting, your audience will come to recognise you more and more. Brand voice is one of the valuable characteristics of brand awareness that you need to work on for your brand’s successful future.
Expands brand awareness: Content adds value to your brand, and value builds brand awareness. Your content needs to be consistent, well optimised for your local business and well-written to show the strength of your brand or company.
- Take advantage of social media Marketing
85% of businesses use different social media platforms to increase brand awareness. No matter where you are in the world or how small your local business is, you need to be active on social media to boost brand awareness. However, Social media marketing agency Melbourne can help you with.
Cost-effective: Building brand awareness on social media costs little to nothing, especially if you’re just a small local business looking to get all the exposure it needs.
Customer engagement: People exist on social media to get to know each other and establish a connection. It is the perfect place to present your local business brand to get more exposure and engagement with your customers and get a new potential audience.
Promotes content: No place is better than social media to promote the content you have worked hard to create. By posting on various social media platforms and letting your audience know you published a new blog post or a video on YouTube to get their attention.
- Create and share infographics
We process visual information 60,000 faster than text. In today’s life, with ever-growing knowledge, we tend to have less and less time to spend on reading. We can share the same knowledge a lot faster with infographics and save time.
That’s why infographics can play a huge part in brand awareness because they induce perfectionism and will help you get a more robust brand voice.
Easy to share: Infographics are easy to share. This means that more people will share them around on social media or implement them in their blogs. The more your infographics get shared, the more your brand gets the exposure it needs.
Boost brand awareness: Infographics are visually appealing, and their shareable nature makes them one of the best ways to boost brand awareness. Visual content gets about 94% more views than those without visuals. Make sure to include information like your brand’s name, social media handles, and website address in your infographics so that people know who they belong to.
Show expertise: Infographics let people know how expert you are in your niche. The more you make them and share them around, the better. Showing your expertise through infographics will lead to a stronger brand voice. People will start trusting your brand because you’ve shown how much knowledge you can offer them.
- Ask for referrals from friends and customers
Asking for referrals for your local business is a free marketing strategy. You have many customers who are happy with your service, so why not ask them for referrals? You could do that on social media as well. Ask people to share your content if they liked it.
When people share your content or refer you to others, they inherently support your brand, and more likely, their friends and family will listen to them. Referrals will show that your brand is legitimate and is more trustworthy than your competitors.
Conclusion
Different strategies come together to build a solid brand awareness. In this article, we tried to talk about those strategies that cost little to nothing and are affordable for small local businesses. Strategies like guest posting, striking up a partnership with other brands, designing informative infographics and running a referral program are the best ways to build brand awareness.
