Stage 1 of our lifecycle in helping businesses achieve their sales revenue goals relates to brand awareness.
Brand awareness as a broad and general term refers to how familiar your target audiences are with your company, products, or services. It is a measure or barometer of how recognisable you are to your consumers or customers.
Simply put, brand awareness is important because it is the very first step of your marketing funnel and can heavily influence prospects to eventually become customers.
Why is brand awareness so important?
Brand awareness plays a vital role as it establishes trust with your audience
For example, if you buy a new Apple Smartphone, you know how it will look and trust it will be of a certain design and quality. And this is the case even if you have never owned one before due to your exposure to the brand and its products.
A brand story or narrative has already been formed which influences how we feel before we buy.
Trust can develop into brand loyalty
Once consumers are exposed to a brand and buy into what it stands for and represents this can then influence how loyal your audience will feel and behave.
Loyal customers are more likely to purchase more frequently, engage with you more positively over social media and become powerful word-of-mouth and digital social media ambassadors for your brand and products or services.
Driving brand equity
Brand equity as a marketing term relates to the value of your brand which is directly influenced by the overall customer or consumer brand experience coupled with a perception of the brand.
Brand awareness can therefore help to increase the value of your brand through building positive brand equity.
Creating brand association
Strong and effective brand awareness campaigns should create a powerful association between your brand, your products and services and your target audience. Think about all the campaigns that subconsciously plant associations between a problem and the branded solution. How many times do we use the term ‘binge watch’ to refer to Netflix or say ‘Google it’ rather than refer to the search engine itself?
Before you know it, we make the leap to the brand instead of the product. This is savvy, creative brand awareness marketing doing its job.
How important is brand awareness?
From an extremely young age, we are exposed to brands.
We instinctively just know brands when we see them; studies show that children as young as three recognise certain brands such as McDonald’s and Disney. But it can be difficult to define the meaning of the term ‘brand’.
A brand is a perception of a product or service. One writer states:
“Put simply; your “brand” is what your prospect thinks of when he or she hears your brand name. It’s everything the public thinks it knows about your name brand offering—both factual (e.g., It comes in a robin’s-egg-blue box), and emotional (e.g., It’s romantic). Your brand name exists objectively; people can see it. It’s fixed. But your brand exists only in someone’s mind.”
It is for this reason that brand awareness is a powerful weapon to influence consumer and customer decision-making and should therefore be part of your strategic lifecycle marketing efforts.
This can be leveraged across various marketing channels from social media, advertising, SEO, PPC, content marketing and offline activities – ensuring your target audience are exposed to and have awareness of your brand at this early-stage sets expectations and perceptions and creates resonance all in a coordinated and planned effort to drive brand recall so that your products and services are part of their consideration set for decision making.
Brand awareness is an important aspect of the marketing funnel and can help businesses achieve their marketing goals and KPI’s.
Brand Awareness Campaign Strategy
Creating brand awareness is not simply designing a pretty logo and writing up some values.
Your brand needs to tell a story and, most importantly, create tension.
Think of your favourite movie or book. There is usually a hero or protagonist who wants something. But something or someone is preventing them from getting or achieving their desire. The tension created by wanting something and not being able to get it results in the protagonist making a change. This change leads them to reach their goal and satisfying their needs.
Your brand experience needs to motivate people towards change so they can fulfil their aspirations. The client’s ‘change’ is the action of trying your product or service for the first time or switching from a competitor to your company.
Let’s look at an example. Take fashion retailer Kate Spade. Its brand message is one of joy, colour, and femininity. Before opening its flagship store in Paris, it teamed with three influencers to create a ‘joy walk’ video entitled My Little Paris which highlighted top spots in the city with an emphasis on joy and fun. Everything about Kate Spade creates a tension of aspiration, designed to encourage women to shake off daily drudgery and find more youth and happiness. The first step to accessing a part of the brand image created is to buy a Kate Spade handbag or a dress.
To create a brand awareness campaign, you need to identify how, what, where, when, and to whom you plan on communicating and delivering on your brand awareness messages.
Learn your consumers or prospective client’s needs, wants, habits, and where they hang out. Don’t just guess. This can be achieved by creating detailed personas of the people you want to reach or target.
We also recommend investing in data extraction tools that provide these answers and validate where your target audience is and how large it is – does your audience need segmenting further to target them more effectively by awareness ad campaign with different ad creatives and/or different ad messages?
You also need to understand what your brand awareness campaign stands for. What are its values and reason for communicating? What do you want others to feel, think, say, and act after being exposed to your brand awareness campaign?
Are you maximising brand awareness as part of your marketing strategy?
Are you exposing your target audience to your brand in a continuous and planned way?
Reach Revenue works with business owners, brands, leaders, and investors to develop high performing sales and marketing teams aligned to the strategic objectives of their business.
To find out how we can help you, please call 0203 858 8030 or email info@reachrevenue.net