Brand Awareness in Marketing

Brand Awareness - Image created by AW Digital Marketing LLC

Pairing brand awareness and brand identity are important pieces to achieving brand positioning. If your brand identity becomes synonymous or similar to your competitors (or even other brands outside your industry) it may be hard for consumers to remember your business as a unique brand.

A few great brands that do this are Apple, Amazon, and Nike. When you simply see their logo or product (without words) you can determine which company they belong to. How many competitors create their brand to look like their competition? Wouldn't this be confusing to see Apple's logo and another competing company with an apple as its logo without the bite?

What is brand awareness?

It's exactly how it sounds. This is how well consumers or customers are able to recognize and remember who your brand. When a consumer knows your business they have an impression of what you do, how well you do it (or how great your products are), and what they feel about it.

This relates back to brand identity (what your brand looks like, how your logo is designed, color scheme, etc.) and how a consumer can identify your business. If you own a company that sells clothing, does your business name and logo represent what you do? Don't worry about creating one logo for the lifetime of your business. MANY businesses rebrand. In fact, rebranding can be beneficial as your business grows and brand positioning takes place.

5 Marketing strategies to grow brand awareness:

An important detail to remember, is your brand awareness is like a muscle. If it's not being exercised, it will not (or be hard to) grow. Different tactics and measures can be used to keep on growing (Marrs, 2022).

1. Increase your exposure: Get your brand out there! Let people know who your business is and what you do. This can range from social media posting regularly, print advertisements,

2. Advertise in the right spaces: Its crucial to ensure you are advertising to your audience in the right place. You wouldn't advertise cat food at a dog store or a social media dog group. Everyone is not your target audience. Identify who your consumers are with a buyer persona and begin to learn where and how to market directly to them. If consumers find cat food products by searching brands on Google, it may be beneficial to set up a Google Ad and utilize other digital marketing tactics to reach consumers.

3. Referral Programs: This is a relatively easy and cheap way to spread awareness of your business to others that your consumers know. Whether this means implementing a small discount or returning discount for the referrer, this method alerts and informs consumers of the impression a customer has about your business.

4. Offer promotional items: Who doesn't love leaving with a new pen or free trial products that consumers can advertise for you. That's right, (almost) free marketing! This gives your business the opportunity to be seen in the groups of people who have already visited or showed interest in your brand.

5. Social Media: Look into posting content regularly on your social media accounts. This does not mean you need to post something everyday to be constant. But, find a schedule that fits for you. This could be 1-2 times a week or even 3 times a week. Another tip you can offer are giveaways or contests. Boost your consumers engagement! Get them to share your post, comment, like, etc. The more popular your post becomes the more it becomes available to potential customers. Or even try influencer marketing! Start small and begin growing. Remember, you have to lift 10 before 100.

How can I ensure consumers know my brand from others?

Continue to focus the brand on your key differentiators from your competitors. What makes your business unique? When we can highlight how we are different from the competition we are paving the way to brand awareness. Allow customers to give reviews, whether they're good or bad (this is apart of user generated content). This gives you the opportunity to lean in and learn how your brand can improve its service/products while catering to consumer needs and wants. These impressions can be used to illustrate what and how your brand is doing for new, existing, past consumers.