Every marketer should learn and understand the definition of brand awareness. After all, for consumers today, recognizing or being aware of a brand is often an influencing factor in their purchase decisions.
Customers most often purchase from companies when they are familiar with the product or service category as well as the brand associated with that category.
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Brand Awareness: Definition
What is brand awareness? It is the level of consumers’ familiarity with your company, products, and services.
Without awareness of your brand, your target audience will not be in a position to learn about what you do and what you have to offer. Building brand awareness is crucial if you want to spread the word about your new product or service. It’s also crucial for communicating your brand personality, values, and messaging and helping people remember what your brand stands for.
Read more: What is the Difference Between Brand Awareness and Reputation?
Why is Brand Awareness Important?
Brand awareness is important because it helps potential customers understand, remember, and become comfortable and familiar with your company, brand, products, and services.
Have you ever heard people describe themselves as “Tesla people,” “Costco people,” or “In-N-Out people”?
This is what brand awareness can do for your company. If consumers have a high level of familiarity with your brand, and if you’re able to provide superior customer experiences to those who purchase from you, you can embed your brand deeply into consumer lifestyles and purchase habits.
Not only does this make it easier for you to learn how to build customer loyalty — your customers don’t think twice about making repeat purchases; it also powers your customer acquisition strategy and reduces the amount of time, effort, and resources you spend on acquiring new customers.
Best Practices for Increasing Brand Awareness
Here are some examples of strategies and tactics marketers use to build brand awareness:
- Brand development and design
- Paid advertising and public relations
- Various types of social media marketing
- Search engine optimization
- Blogging and content marketing
- Influencer marketing
- Local listing management
If you’re just getting started with your strategy or just learned the brand awareness definition, you can apply some of these best practices to ensure that you’re doing it right.
Track Your Brand Awareness KPIs
It’s important to know how to measure and track the success of your brand awareness efforts. This means setting your brand awareness key performance indicators (KPIs).
Here are some indicators or metrics you can use as you learn how to increase brand awareness:
- Website visits (traffic and new users)
- Social media engagement, including likes, comments, shares, and followers (you can use these free social listening tools)
- Branded searches
- Quantity/volume of online reviews across all relevant business review sites
Claim and Manage Your Local Listings
If you’re managing a brand with multiple business locations, it’s crucial that you are able to plant your brand flag on all the digital properties where potential customers are looking for information about your business.
These digital properties include directory sites like Google, Yelp, Facebook, Tripadvisor, and Trustpilot, among many others. (View this updated business directory list to see the top directory sites for each industry.)
Your local listings on these sites can serve as powerful marketing assets that can improve awareness of your brand. They can do the same job as traditional advertising and marketing, but where offline or print efforts may fall short — specifically: getting your business found online — a sound local listing management strategy can make the most impact.
Develop a Referral Program
When making a purchase decision, consumers often trust the recommendations made by friends and family. This is where having an effective referral program comes in handy.
By incentivizing referrals and offering discounts, gifts, and freebies to your most loyal customers, you can create rewarding experiences for them, spread the word about your brand, and expand your reach.
Don’t forget to check out these referral program examples.
Improve Your Social Media Presence
When you begin to truly grasp the brand awareness definition, you’ll quickly realize that social media is such an important part of getting your audience to become familiar and engaged with your brand.
This is why you should focus on maximizing your social media presence. Publish relevant content, engage with your followers, and implement a social listening strategy to understand the full spectrum of conversation around your brand.
Not only does social listening allow you to track social mentions; but it also lets you discover trends and patterns that define the customer experience — helping you achieve a more accurate, complete, and unified view of the customer, as well as implement changes based on solicited and unsolicited feedback.
Final Thoughts
As a marketer, you should have a strategy for understanding the brand awareness definition and improving your audiences’ level of familiarity with your brand. This will help you achieve better results from your campaigns, setting your brand up for future growth and longer-lasting customer relationships.
