Brand awareness. What is it, how do you get it and what does it do?
Well, basically, brand awareness is the extent to which a brand and company, your brand and your company, is recognised by potential customers. It encompasses product and practice association and is the key to increasing customers and sales. Increasing brand awareness is about increasing exposure, influence and engagement with the express aim of culminating in action being taken by your targeted customers.
‘Creating brand awareness’ should be an element of your marketing strategy with your marketing department, or outsourced agency should you be a smaller venture with big ideas, offering practical and tactical ways to reach more potential customers. You should aim to have your brand and message seen by as many people as possible with specific targeting being done where possible. Raising your brand awareness will not happen over night so be prepared for a lengthy mission…
You want exposure, you want people to be made aware of what you do and you want to convince them to use your services or buy your products – so how are you going to achieve all that? Here are some great ways to get your name out there that don’t cost the earth and are very effective. We can help you with any of these methods – all you have to do is ask.
Visual aides
These consist mainly of outdoor billboards, bus banners, wall posters and prominently placed flyers. These are very effective as when strategically placed they will be seen by many people, many times throughout the day. If your message is clear and simple then the chances of the passers by remembering it are quite high indeed.
Make use of your website
One of the easiest things you can do instantly to raise brand awareness is to optimise your existing web page. Keep it current, add newsworthy topics and have social media icons present and working…
Get involved with social media
Be active, share, comment, like and follow until the cows come home. A good way to do this is to segment the people you follow into groups of different interests, that way you will always post relevant content to the right people. It is also an idea to get yourself known for something. Start a feature like Monday marketing muses, Tuesday tips, Wednesday web discussions, Thursday’s thoughts or Friday fun, this is a good way to get people to interact and remember you plus you get the opportunity to participate in word-of-mouth marketing and listen to consumer opinions.
Blog your way to being recognised
Blogs are a great way to become an authority voice on something and really simple to set up. You don’t have to blog on a weekly basis but you should do it regularly enough so that you can build up the interest of an audience. There is also the potential to guest blog for businesses that are similar to you or for review type publications.
Traditional advertising
In most areas local papers hold a lot of sway and are read religiously. Consider advertising in your local rag or industry specific publications to reach a targeted audience. You can combine it with social media by incorporating Twitter names and hashtags in your advertisement as the next step.
Sponsor events or teams
Sponsoring events or teams gives you the opportunity to have your company name, logo, brand or product on display in a very public way. This is a great way to seek out and target specific audiences too, especially if you sponsor a networking event like Aberdeen Business Networking’s F2F events as you can get in among the crowd and mingle.
PR
Got anything newsworthy to say about your business? Get us to do a press release for you to create brand awareness in the right circles.
There are of course many, many more forms of promotion you can do or use but the important thing to remember when putting yourself in the public eye is to target the correct market, there would be no point in mobility scooters sponsoring a 10k run now would there?
So, if any of the aforementioned tactics grab your attention and you would like to find out more about how Début Marketing can help you make them a reality then we would love to hear from you.
Next week I will talk about the fundamentals of, and tips for launching a new product. Until then my friends …