Ever wondered why some brands are more popular than others? Or why do some consumers tend to purchase a specific brand over another without first giving much thought to it?
Have you ever stumbled across a scenario where you felt more attracted to one type of brand, not because it offers better variety, but rather because you can resonate with the type of quality products and services it has to offer?
In today’s modern consumer society, brand awareness has become a choppy pond that most digital marketers and business owners can struggle to navigate.
From an increasing number of market competitors to ever-changing consumer demand – brand awareness is no easy caveat to overcome, but without it, your business and brand will not survive in the daunting cutthroat marketplace.
Simply put, brand awareness is what drives consumers, both your target audience and those outside of your spectrum, to support your business through purchasing goods and services. More so, brand awareness has become a way for businesses and companies to distinguish themselves from other similar types of companies.
Building brand awareness means you’re creating a specific type of character quality that is directly linked to your business. From the fonts you use on your ads to the type of photos you share on social media – everything ties in with brand awareness in the growing digital world.
But today, brand awareness has become more than just the color of your logo or how your employees interact with customers.
As the internet places itself well within our society, allowing us to shop, socialize, and research nearly anything from our smartphones or computers, standing out from the crowd in a hyper-digital consumer era is what drives digital marketers and brand managers to find innovative ways to establish brand awareness.
So perhaps you’re thinking about where you should start then? Well, there’s a lot that one needs to cover to be able to ensure you can increase your brand awareness online. Here’s a look at some of the best ways to build online brand awareness.
How To Build Online Brand Awareness
As we know, it takes much more than just a few social media posts or even partnering with influencers to get your brand recognized. Here’s a list of what you can do to build your online brand awareness strategy.
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging remains one of the many fruitful ways business owners and digital marketers can increase brand recognition. Writing about a specific category of your business niche or informing people about certain things to consider before purchasing A, B, or C is a simple yet highly functional strategy one could start with.
Guest blogging involves writing a piece or blog post and publishing it on a popular and well-visited blog website. It requires one to research a bit about which bloggers are within your business niche and what are the types of blogs they write about. More so, you’ll need to make sure their blogs are high-quality and that they receive a lot of monthly organic traffic.
If you’re not convinced, consider the statistics. Roughly 62.96% of readers find blogs with more than one author to be more credible, and within the last few years, there’s been a 93% increase in blogs making use of promotional strategies to increase traffic. This means that bloggers are constantly looking to update their blogs with fresh and authentic content.
Infographics
According to an article published by SEMrush, infographics can be considered a vital addition to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as they can increase brand awareness, and online marketing establishes additional inbound marketing opportunities and can represent your message in a more pleasing and readable manner.
Infographics are a great way to compare your business against competitors (of course, within moderation) or the overall market. Consumers want to see why you stand out and how you compare with other leading names in your industry.
It takes a bit of design work, and it requires insightful and high-quality research that needs to support the points you’re trying to make. Infographics can also be a smart way to build backlinks to your website if third-party copywriters use your research in their content.
Start a Podcast
As of 2020, around 78% of Americans were familiar with a podcast, and 38% of those are active monthly listeners.
Podcasts are fast becoming mainstream, and not only in the sphere of pop culture and lifestyle podcasts but for businesses, too. Big names such as NPR, CNN, and even Nike have all jumped on the bandwagon and started their own podcasts.
As interest in podcasts keeps growing, businesses have a perfect opportunity to market themselves to millions of daily listeners. Podcasts would require you to conduct thorough research on your target market, but it doesn’t help you try to market to an older generation that doesn’t use podcasts or social media at all.
It’s not an easy road to becoming a popular podcast host, as you will require time and resources, as well as an intriguing angle from which you can keep customers actively listening without getting bored.
Voice for Your Brand
Sometimes also referred to as Tone of Voice or Brand Tone, it can refer to a wide spectrum of things, but most notably how you portray yourself to the market.
Take Coca-Cola or Coke, for example, their entire brand tone or brand voice is about being happy, delighted, excited, joyful, and sharing it with friends and families. It doesn’t matter what type of marketing campaign Coke runs, whether it’s summer or winter; its tone remains consistent and the same throughout.
This is where you need to find your brand tone. Ask yourself, what does your business do, and how would it change people’s lives? How do your branding and the products or services you offer to make people feel? What’s a memorable aspect about your current brand and business that could have a lasting impact on people?
Whether happy or stringent and stiff, you must remind yourself to remain consistent throughout the brand voice. This should include social media content, website content, comments, ad campaigns, emails, and newsletters.
The brand voice is the way people are left feeling when interacting or coming across it on the internet.
How does a Coca-Cola ad, with its red, flashing signage and brightly lit banners, with smiley Coke-drinking fans, feel after you’ve seen it pop up on your screen? It’s something to think about when building a brand awareness strategy.
Improve Your SEO
Now, search engine optimization or SEO is not something you can improve here and there, or you can update a few of your website blogs and think it will help boost your SEO or search rankings on Google.
SEO comes with a lot of complexities, and while it may seem as if it requires an extensive team of tech-savvy digital marketers and SEO professionals – you, as a small business owner or entrepreneur, can easily do it yourself with a bit of online research.
Depending on your niche and the type of message you’re looking to get across, SEO can range from email marketing, keyword research, backlink networking, newsletters, content creation, off-page and on-page optimization, and data analysis.
SEO is simply an umbrella term that covers a lot under the surface, and it may all seem a bit intimidating – SEO is a crucial aspect to any business looking to increase its brand and grow its organic online traffic.
Think of it like this: the better your SEO performs, the more likely you’ll be able to increase your search rankings, the quicker clients will find you online, and the faster you can build your online reputation and boost your revenue or sales.
Start a Referral Program
When starting, referral programs can be a great way to boost initial interaction and support for your brand, business, and its services. A referral program is quite simple, as it entails encouraging existing clients to refer your business to their friends and family.
Usually, with a referral program, businesses tend to hand out a gift card or perhaps a discount on products and goods. It’s a straightforward way for you to let your clients do the marketing work for you, and in return, you repay them with some discount or offer something for free.
Referral programs make it easy, as you can leverage your existing clients without searching for a wider audience to work with. It’s also easier, as you may already have access to client information, such as an email account or a phone number which allows you to communicate with them openly.
It’s low cost and works if done properly.
Social Media Presence
The prospects of social media are looking increasingly promising each day, with more than 4.20 billion active social media users, accounting for 53.6% of the global population.
The accelerating growth of social media is not stopping or slowing down any time soon, and businesses that are keen on getting recognized should start considering how social media can work in their favor.
Research by Instagram found that around 83% of surveyed users claimed to have discovered a new product, service, or company on the popular photo and video-sharing app. The same research revealed that more than 200 million daily active users use the Explore Page, which features thousands of different pages.
Instagram is but one of the many powerful social tools available to increase brand awareness. From Meta (or Facebook), TikTok, Twitter, Reddit, Pinterest, and YouTube, there’s a plethora of platforms available, and with billions of daily active users, this is the perfect way to get your brand across.
Social media allows you to dive deeper into who’s visiting your page, the age groups, demographic, their region, how many clicked on your website link, how they found you, and many more. These platforms are not just great for building a brand; they are also an intelligent way to measure consumer metrics and interest.
Go Offline
With so much of our business and daily lives being online, it’s hard to think that doing brand building offline is even still possible. Perhaps not the most conventional method to include in your strategy at first, offline brand awareness is coupled with great networking capabilities and a few promotional tactics.
Think of this as using traditional forms of marketing such as business cards, posters, trade shows, fairs, direct mail, or newspaper advertisements.
While the internet has somewhat made these marketing features almost obsolete, some companies can still build their brand and tone of voice through more traditional means.
Going offline might seem a bit risky at first, but it will require you to do some research, as you should know exactly who to target and what type of format to use. Additionally, think about how these formats will be able to reach your target audience or even how they’ll interact with them.
There’s no real way to measure these metrics, as with online media, so it’s important to get the right message across to the right people.
Take Part in Brand Partnerships
So maybe doing it alone isn’t working as you’d hoped it would. Well, luckily, there is the option of partnering with an already-established brand to help boost your recognition a bit.
Think back to the brand partnership between Red Bull and GoPro, which saw both these big names combine their efforts to offer consumers an all-in-one experience.
Through this, both these companies were able to tap into each other’s consumer base but also establish themselves as lifestyle brands for athletes, action sports enthusiasts, or anyone who simply enjoys the thrills of an adventure-filled lifestyle.
While your small business is no GoPro or Red Bull or perhaps not close to partnering with such a major corporate brand, consider which channels you have available and can use. These may include a local grocery store, coffee shop, drug store, musician, artist, school, or community center. These are all smaller options, but they can still drive a noticeable impact.
For online means, consider partnering with an influencer or a micro-influencer to help promote services and products on their social media channels—partner with an app to advertise on their platforms or run a shared campaign with another similar business.
The opportunities are quite endless, and all you need to do is find a company or person you’d want to associate with or a brand that resonates with what your business stands for.
Check Out Partnerships, the Most Underused Channel for Your Marketing | Julia Briggs Parsons, Lyft:
Give Something Away for Free
Giveaways are always a way to attract a lot of attention to your brand, and why may you wonder? Because people love free stuff, especially if it doesn’t require them to do a lot to get something for free.
For example, many startups or small businesses might run a giveaway on social media, requiring followers to simply like, comment, and share their posts. The more they do this, the more entries it gives them in winning the final prize.
Other times, businesses tend to give away a free subscription or some goodies if customers sign up to their website, newsletter, or emails.
There are various ways you can market yourself as a new brand without selling yourself short. Giving away something for free could perhaps be a final resort, but it’s a proven method to get people talking about your brand and business without you having to do a lot for it.
5 Ways to Increase Brand Awareness
Now that you have a firm understanding of how to build brand awareness through different tactics, it’s time to consider ways to increase your brand recognition online.
Native Advertising
Native advertising is the practice of including an online ad or pop-up banner within a webpage or website. Usually, these ads are more natural, making it look as if it belongs on the website without drawing attention away from the original content.
Native advertising is used on different platforms, and it is more popular among news and media outlets such as Forbes and even The New York Times. Companies will pay these websites an advertising fee that will allow them to have their ad displayed alongside an article or other type of written content.
While many businesses use this format, as it drives online traffic and click-throughs to their website, it does however mean you will need to pay for a specific slot or advertising space.
There’s also a host of prerequisites that some sites require, and if your brand or business does not fall in line with their specific guidelines, you might find it difficult to make use of native advertising altogether.
Social Media Ads
Although the primary function of social media is to connect people with brands and businesses with consumers, it can also be a way to establish a loyal customer base.
Social media ads help you turn followers into paying customers, allow you to interact and communicate with them through comments and messages, and share a transparent image of your brand or business.
Social media ads are also a bit more affordable, and depending on the message you’re trying to get across, in this case, your brand, you can modify how long an ad should be active, the area that it should cover, and control how much you’re willing to spend on each ad.
Current statistics indicate that of the more than 295 million U.S. citizens, roughly 84% thereof made use of social media in some way. This gives you a massive consumer market with which you can work and interact.
Use SEO
As already mentioned, Search Engine Optimization includes a plethora of concepts and strategies, but most importantly, these can ultimately help you increase brand awareness, as better SEO improves your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) ranking.
When using SEO, and whether you’re doing it yourself, or perhaps using a digital marketing firm to do it for you, it’s important to consider how your brand will be communicated throughout different ads, social media platforms, websites, and web pages.
While high-quality SEO strategies can ultimately improve Google rankings, it’s also good to consider how you will implement a solid strategy that can deliver the Return on Investment (ROI) you’re looking for.
SEO and brand awareness go hand-in-hand, and however you’re looking to use it, consider how you can improve small things such as website content, social media presence, or even the communication tools used to liaise with current clients.
Have Influencers Review Your Brand
Whether you want to believe it or not, influencer marketing is a massive industry that’s rapidly taking shape. In 2021, the market value reached more than $13.8 billion, with estimates for 2022 reaching more than $16.4 billion.
So why is influencer marketing so lucrative, and how can you monetize this to build brand awareness?
For starters, consumers are a lot more prone to purchase goods and services if they have been reviewed or endorsed by an influencer or celebrity they follow. Influencer social media accounts already have an established following, some having followers in the millions.
Influencers also communicate differently to their audience, and if it’s a brand or company they strongly resonate with, then they’ll go above and beyond to help boost awareness for your line of products.
It does, however, come at a price tag not many small business owners or entrepreneurs are ready to pay, but it does give you the ability to leverage your audience and build a relationship with a trusted social media personality.
Have Influencers Create Content
Now influencer marketing may be big, and sometimes you may have the chance to give them content they can work with, other times you can give them a bit more creative freedom to create content for you.
Companies may know how to work with their clients or reach out to them, but influencers know how to talk and communicate with them.
Allowing an influencer to create content for your brand on their platforms comes across as a lot more natural and can be tailored to a select demographic of followers. Influencers also know how to work with their followers, and create content they want to see and interact with, this leaves all the guesswork for them, without having to conduct copious amounts of market research beforehand.
FAQs
How Does Digital Marketing Increase Brand Awareness?
Digital marketing can help increase brand awareness through Search Engine Optimization, guest blogging, infographics, generating backlinks, and establishing a tone of voice that resonates with your brand.
What is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness is what drives consumers to support a specific brand over another through instilled consumer loyalty and brand reputation. Brand awareness can also be the way consumers differentiate between your business and that of a competitor.
Why is Brand Awareness important?
Brand awareness can help increase online reputation and keep consumers engaged at all times. Additionally, it’s a way for companies to monetize on their tone of voice through how they communicate their products and services on the internet and social media platforms.
What is a Brand Awareness Strategy?
A plan designed and tailored specifically for a business to help them increase brand visibility. A brand awareness strategy can include tactics such as native advertising, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), influencer marketing, or social media ads.
Depending on your business and its niche, your brand awareness strategy will be different from that of your competitors and other businesses, as you will need to consider who your target audience is and how you will be able to communicate your tone of voice directly to them.
Final Thoughts
Brand awareness is a crucial aspect of the overall longevity of any business. As we now see, brand awareness consists of various aspects but mainly concerns how a business or entrepreneur can instill brand tone within their target audience.
Additionally, brand awareness is a way for businesses to differentiate themselves from their competitors, stand out in the marketplace, and, more importantly, instill customer loyalty to build a retaining client basis. Finally, it also represents what consumers feel resonates with their desires, habits, and lifestyle choices.
