When you need to cover a cut, do you grab an adhesive bandage or a Band-Aid? Do you store left-overs in food storage containers or Tupperware? Do you conduct an online search, or do you Google it?
It’s the ultimate goal for any business – create a product or service that becomes so popular, so well known, that your brand becomes a regular noun. These are examples of ‘brand awareness’ in its ultimate form – the destination that every brand hopes to get to.
But brand awareness is a spectrum – something that you need to work hard to build over time. It’s not realistic to aim to become the next Band-Aid, nor is there a shortcut to getting there. But the good news is that you don’t have to become Coca-Cola or Nike – just a little bit of brand awareness can go a long way.
In this guide we’ll put the microscope on brand awareness, looking at what it is, why it’s important, and how to use digital marketing to generate more of it.
What is brand awareness?
Brand awareness is a measure of how well your target customers know your brand, or as the Oxford Dictionary puts it, “the extent to which consumers are familiar with the qualities or image of a particular brand of goods or services.”
Choose one of earth’s eight billion inhabitants at random, then show them the Apple logo. Unless you somehow plucked out an Amazonian tribesman, you can almost guarantee that the person will know exactly what they’re looking at.
Now think of how well your brand is recognised by your target market. Think of a residential plumber in Christchurch – let’s call the business A+ Plumbing. When a local homeowner has an issue with a leaking pipe, a plumber with good brand awareness will pop into the customer’s head. Instead of Googling ’emergency plumber Christchurch’, they instead go direct to ‘A+ Plumbing’, as they know the name and associate positive feelings with it.
This is the power of brand awareness. It can prime a customer to head straight to you when they have a need that you can fill, reducing your need to fight with your competitors for business.
Why is digital marketing important for brand awareness?
Digital marketing is an incredibly powerful tool for getting your brand in front of the right sets of eyes. The average Kiwi spends over six hours on the internet per day, and the overwhelming majority begin their search for products and services online.
This makes digital marketing critical for brand awareness. By using digital channels to put your brand up in lights, you build familiarity with your audience. Over time this familiarity turns into trust, this trust turns into the customer making a purchase or some other form of conversion, and this purchase (hopefully) turns into brand loyalty.
When compared with traditional marketing, digital marketing is a far more efficient and cost-effective way to generate brand awareness. Google Ads and social media marketing are so much more targeted than broadcast, print and display advertising, which tend to be blasted out to everyone in the hope that your message hits a few of the right ears and eyes.
1. Search engine optimisation (SEO)
More than two-thirds of all online experiences start with a search engine. And if you’re in New Zealand, there’s a 95% chance that search engine is Google. This makes Google the single most powerful brand awareness tool at your disposal… but how do you make the most of it? The answer is search engine optimisation (SEO).
SEO is the practice of making your website more Google-friendly, with the aim of pushing your website up the Google search results page for relevant search queries, thereby increasing brand visibility and awareness within your target audience. It encompasses a wealth of tactics and techniques: inserting relevant keywords into your web copy, creating useful content, improving the structure and performance of your site, and earning backlinks from other websites, to name just a few.
Your aim should be to get to at least page one of the search engine results for the most relevant terms, but if you’re looking to turbocharge brand awareness, the higher the better!
2. Paid advertising
SEO is often referred to as organic search, as it is a long-term effort that aims to organically push your website up the search engine rankings. But if you’re willing to pay, you can get to the top of the page straight away, with the help of paid search, specifically Google Ads.
Like SEO, a Google Ads strategy is built on a foundation of keywords: the most relevant search terms that potential customers are keying into Google. When you’re looking to generate brand awareness through Google Ads, it’s important to strike a balance between general search terms that will reach a wide audience, and niche search terms that will reach a very targeted, but far smaller audience.
Paid advertising goes well beyond pay-per-click (PPC) Google Ads too: social media ads, display ads on third-party websites, even pop-up ads can have their place in brand awareness campaigns.
3. Social media
While Google might have the biggest reach, social media can have the greater potential impact on brand awareness. The reason? It allows your brand to form deeper connections with your audience – the type that last longer and mean more.
Social media gives your brand an opportunity to also show a bit of personality, and to interact with potential customers in a more intimate way. Social media users are there to be informed or entertained, which gives you free licence to engage with them in a less formal way. How you communicate will depend on the social media platform, ranging from the slightly more prim and proper atmosphere of LinkedIn to the perfectly casual world of TikTok.
You’ll rarely see brands posting obviously salesy content on their social media feeds or in their stories – that’s what social media advertising is for. Facebook, Instagram and the like offer brand awareness in its purest form: the opportunity to project a feeling, a vibe, that your audience will remember and hopefully connect to.
4. Branded content
Content marketing is the fuel that drives many aspects of your digital marketing campaign forward. It’s the blog packed with keywords that pushes you up the Google rankings, and the video that you post to Instagram Reels that answers a common customer question. But if you’re looking to boost brand awareness, you should aim to produce branded content.
Branded content is designed to entertain, educate or a little bit of both. It can come in the form of blogs, infographics, videos, podcasts or ebooks. The key is in the branding – when the audience ingests the content, they also ingest your name, whether as a watermark on an image or video, or a mention in the article or audio.
The best branded content is of the highest quality and eminently shareable – something that will be sent far and wide to build awareness of and trust in your brand.
5. Sponsored/influencer marketing
A quick, easy and potentially highly effective way to reach a wider audience is to simply gain access to someone else’s. By identifying a social media influencer whose audience aligns with your target demographic, and paying for a sponsored post, you can gain the sort of brand awareness that can be hard to find elsewhere.
The best bit about influencer marketing is how it can shortcut the journey that a potential customer makes from brand awareness to brand trust. This is because the trust is implicit – the right influencer will be seen as trustworthy by their followers, and this trust will extend to any product, service or brand that the person chooses to align themselves with.
6. Remarketing
Remarketing is the strategy of repeatedly exposing your brand to an audience who has previously shown interest in it. It is a form of paid advertising that targets people who have searched for your products or visited your site before. You will have seen remarketed ads, like when you browse an online clothing store, then continually see the items you looked at popping up on banner and display ads in the days that follow.
The best bit about remarketing? Not only does the repeated exposure drive home brand awareness, it’s also a form of advertising that many people actually enjoy! 77% of people would rather filter ads than block them, and 3x the amount of people feel positive about retargeted ads than feel negative about them. You’re reminding the audience of something they want, after all.
7. Video
If a picture tells a thousand words, video tells about 25,000 every second. The growth of video has been incredible in recent years, with TikTok leading the charge. With modern consumers preferring less edited, more authentic video, it has become a particularly efficient means to increase brand awareness. You can turn your front-facing camera on, share a nugget of knowledge or a behind the scenes look at your day – a process that can take just a couple of minutes – and get people more aware of and excited about your brand in the process.
More than 90% of people want to see more video from their favourite brands, so if you want to increase awareness, now is not the time to be camera shy!
1. Interact and engage on social media
Set aside a couple of hours every week for social media engagement: replying to comments on your posts, leaving comments on other people’s posts, getting active in relevant groups. Social media is exactly that: social. If you simply use it as a bulletin board, you won’t get real value out of it. By regularly contributing to the discourse on each platform, your impressions, and brand awareness, can skyrocket. Don’t have the time? Hire a professional!
2. Run competitions
Everyone loves a freebie – an inarguable truth that you can use to your brand awareness advantage. Run a competition that requires participants to like, share, and/or tag a friend in a social media post to enter. If the prize is juicy enough, you can expect a lot of entries, and if friends are tagging friends, you’ll enjoy the implicit trust that comes with a personal referral.
3. Host an event
Events offer two servings of brand awareness: the buzz that the event itself generates, and the social media reach that content from the event can offer. You can pick any reason for your event: a business anniversary, the launch of a new product or store, an industry networking night. Whatever the occasion, be sure to capture it in all its glory to share later. Consider hiring a PR team to get the word out to traditional media too.
4. Partner with other businesses
Is there a business that complements your own? One that has a similar ideal customer, but that doesn’t sell what you sell? If so, you can team up and gain access to one another’s audiences. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. This partnership could take any number of forms: hosting a combined event, offering a deal or discount when someone buys from both of you, or simply tagging one another in a social post.
5. Encourage user-generated content
Why create content when your customers can create it for you? User-generated content (UGC) can be a boon for brand awareness, as it can see your customers creating content for you, for free, then sharing it with their networks. Consider incentivising UGC, like a pub that offers a discounted meal when a patron uploads a post and tags the venue.
Traction: Your Christchurch brand awareness experts
In today’s attention economy, brand awareness can be a difficult thing to generate, even when you’re armed with all the tactics and techniques listed above. That’s why many brands seek help from professionals.
At Traction we boast a local team of brand awareness experts who can generate real buzz around your brand. We use a full complement of online marketing tools and techniques to get you in front of more (and more relevant) eyes, including social media, Google Ads, search engine optimisation and CRO.
Brand awareness is the first step on the road to increased revenue. Let us light your path. Get in touch with our friendly team today.
About the Author: Jordana Clarke
