Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is the familiarity that the target audiences/consumers have with a brand, product, or service. It represents how familiar your users are with your brand to recognize it with your key brand features.

Brands that enjoy good awareness are termed popular, buzzworthy, or trending. For successful branding, marketing, and advertising campaign, building brand awareness is one of the primary steps that not only optimize the presence of a company/brand in front of new customers but also boost lead generations, conversions, and brand recall.

What is Brand Awareness?

Brand awareness is a branding technique used to familiarize the existing or new audiences with a new or revised product by differentiating it from the competition.

Brand Awareness is a term used in the marketing field. It defines the extent to which consumers can identify and associate particular products and services with a brand.

The term brand awareness explains the degree of familiarisation of consumers with a brand and its products. For example, a Brand possessing a high brand awareness is called ‘Trending’ or ‘popular’.

Brand awareness is a marketing tool, that is, capable of promoting new brands and restoring the glory of old brands.

Brand Recognition Vs Brand Awareness

Brand recognition is all about identifying a brand through indicators like logo or color. For example, one can identify McDonald’s by looking at the logo, which resembles the letter ‘M’.

Brand Awareness doesn’t only mean identifying a brand, and it goes a little in-depth by recalling the feelings, experiences attached to the product of a particular brand.

Why Build Brand Awareness?

Despite having quality products and services along with good spending plans for marketing and advertising campaigns, effective awareness campaigns are crucial to help you reach audiences who are more informed and conversion-driven. Some of the reasons why brand awareness is important are-

1. Building Brand Awareness will build Brand Equity

Brand equity refers to the brand’s value, which is developed based on the overall perception and experiences of consumers with a brand.

By possing positive brand equity, a brand can enjoy outcomes, like –

  • Rising stock prices
  • Expanding of business
  • Have greater social impact

Earning positive brand equity is not easy because earning positive brand equity depends on the experiences and overall perceptions o consumers. If consumers possess positive perceptions and experiences about a brand, then the brand’s value also rises.

2. Association of products, brands, and target audience

Brand awareness influences consumers to associate products and actions with particular Brand names. For example, people would say ‘Google’ it, rather than saying ‘search engines’.

Brands get positioned in people’s minds in such a way that they unconsciously associate that brand name with certain actions or products.

Tips to Increase Brand Awareness

Tips to Increase Brand Awareness

1. Socialize on Social Media

To grow a business, one would need to socialize, form connections and reach out to consumers. And what could be a better platform than social media to start socializing.

Marketing people tend to remain active on social media by posting related and unrelated stuff to their brand. Social Media enables one to interact, connect with potential consumers. The motto is to promote one’s product and brand through socializing.

2. Tell a Tale

It is not unusual to come across blogs, stories, and reviews about products on brand websites, social media, or other promotional mediums.

Associating a story or tale with the particular products gives the brand a more humanized approach. One can also include tales, like how the brand came into existence, employees’ experiences, or the story behind the name or logo, etc. The content of the story or tale should create a position in the minds of consumers. Consumers should be able to feel a connection with the brand.

3. Be Unique

The most effective way to promote a brand and establish brand awareness is by standing out in the crowd. Possessing a USP can open up more doors towards establishing brand awareness.

By being unique in terms of either product, services, or promotions, brands can become memorable.

4. Use Referral Chains

Brands can let other users on social media or brand users share their posts, video, or blogs for promotion. People tend to believe more in reviewing a product written by consumers who all have already used the product.

One can consider word-of-mouth marketing as the most efficient way of establishing trust and familiarity among customers about a particular brand.

5. Provide Freemium

Through this option, brands that are new in the market can provide a taste of their brands by providing a sample of their products for free.

This approach achieves two objectives in one go. First of all, it promotes the brand, and second, the free option gets the consumers to try out the product.

6. Provide Sponsorship for Events

Through sponsoring events like exhibitions, concerts, fairs, or festivals, brands can gran the attention of hundreds of potential consumers in one place.

Perks of sponsoring an event are that the brand’s name would be everywhere, starting from on water bottle labels to flyers and banners.

7. Give your brand a personality

You should treat your brand as a person and accordingly define your brand narrative to let your brand have a specific kind of personality to channelize marketing efforts.

Your audiences will relate and engage with the personality of your brand which will simply optimize your awareness.

Some of the other ways that big as well as small businesses can use to increase brand awareness and optimize marketing campaigns are-

  • Influencer marketing
  • Producing a podcast
  • Controversy
  • Paid social media ads
  • Remarketing campaigns
  • Search Engine Marketing and PPC ads
  • LinkedIn publishing
  • Blog posts
  • Car Wraps
  • Local Partnerships, etc.

Brand Awareness Examples

Brand Awareness Examples

Red Bull utilizes brand awareness campaigns to take its marketing to new heights. They sponsor extreme sporting events like cliff diving and motocross. In addition, they are also involved in sponsoring athletes. Such awareness activities have associated the brand with a daring and adventurous lifestyle.

In the same way, brands in the soft drink industry also build brand awareness quite effectively. Brands like Coca-Cola and Pepsi adeptly utilizes brand awareness along with marketing and advertising campaigns to let their optimized brand awareness convert into higher sales.

How to Measure Brand Awareness

To measure brand awareness, you need to review a few activities and metrics to gauge the popularity and consumer awareness of your brand. Two measures that are preferably used are-

1. Quantitative Measures

They let you gauge the overall picture of your brand awareness. Some of the metrics that will help you in the process are

  • Direct traffic
  • Site Traffic numbers
  • Social Engagement

2. Qualitative Measures

Such measures will help you find out who and how many people are aware of your brand. You can do this by with the help of-

  • Searching Google and setting up Google Alerts
  • Social listening
  • Running brand awareness surveys

Wrap Up!

Beginning from promoting brands to increasing brand equity, brand awareness is a concept that helps in all these aspects. Brand awareness can prove to be a powerful marketing weapon for a brand if wielded correctly.

Brand awareness is one of the most powerful branding concepts that play a major role in your consumer perception, marketing, and advertising efforts and revenues.

What factors do you consider most important for building brand awareness among the target audience?