How to Build Brand Awareness to Boost Your Online Marketing
Part of establishing a brand is making your target audience aware of your existence. Without brand awareness, your business will be lost in the sea of many competing brands in the same industry.
Brand awareness is the extent of how familiar people are with your business. It goes hand in hand with brand recall and brand recognition — all of which are essential in reeling in people to the first stage of the sales funnel.
The Value of Brand Awareness
With a solid brand awareness strategy, you can:
- Build trust — A familiar brand cultivates trust. It’s also human nature for people to trust something they are already familiar with or those that are recommended by their friends and family.
- Increase your conversions — A study showed that brand awareness campaigns increase conversion and click-through rates by as much as 3x.
- Influence purchasing decisions — Another study revealed that 71% of consumers consider it very important that they recognize a brand before they decide to buy from them.
- Build emotional connection — Brand awareness prompts people to make repeat purchases from you. The more touchpoints you have with customers, the more you can build an emotional connection.
5 Ways to Effectively Build Brand Awareness Online
1. Focus on your target audience
At the earliest stages of a new brand, it’s often tempting to reach the largest audience possible. However, it’s more effective to focus on a selected few who are more likely to be interested in what your brand is offering.
Find the right audience for your brand and focus on them. Identify who your ideal audience is — specify their age, gender, location, their pain points, their wants, etc.
2. Be consistent
In branding, consistency is key. It will be easier for your target audience to become familiar with your brand when all of your brand’s elements are consistent throughout.
This goes beyond staying consistent with your brand logo, colors, and visuals — your messaging, tone, personality, and values should be consistent as well. Your audience will recognize you better when they know what to expect from your brand each time they connect with you.
3. Identify what makes you different
What are your brand’s strongest traits that set you apart from the competition? What are you offering that others don’t?
By differentiating yourself from other similar brands, you’re giving people something to remember you for. Identify your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) and be sure to highlight that in your marketing campaigns.
4. Tell a narrative
Brand storytelling is an effective marketing tool, as it gives your business more depth, humanizes your brand, and cultivates authenticity. People prefer hearing real stories over generic, marketing-focused content.
Craft a narrative around your brand. It could be anything from how your brand started from the ground up, what inspires you to keep going with your business, who the people are behind your brand, what values you like to uphold — the sky’s the limit, as long as you’re being genuine.
5. Be social and authentic
As a related point, authenticity has so much impact especially when you’re marketing online. With so many brands vying for the attention of consumers in the digital space, your authenticity can often be your most distinguishing trait.
Treat your brand as a person, not as a business selling products/services to people. Personalize your messaging to add personality to your brand. And most importantly, engage with your audience.
A recent study showed that half of a brand’s reputation is associated with online sociability. Regularly engaging with your audience creates a deeper connection, and with that connection, you can build more than just brand awareness — people will be more than likely to stay loyal to your brand too.
Building your brand is an ongoing and dynamic process — there will always be new people to acquire, and your existing customers should always be valued and treated with care. If you want to learn more about branding and online marketing in general, head on to our blog at https://www.ilfusion.com/blog.
