Building Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is what dictates whether your business succeeds or fails in today’s market. On its own, this fact should come as no surprise—marketing, after all, exists for a reason. However, there is a difference between marketing for sales or leads and for brand awareness. The reason behind this discrepancy is that a lack of brand awareness makes traditional sales-oriented marketing far less effective. If consumers have never heard of your company, products or services, then they’re far less likely to follow through on a purchase. Still, getting to the point where prospective customers are familiar enough with the values and ideals of your business to drive conversions is never easy. In fact, entire courses are taught exploring the ways in which Apple, Coca-Cola, and Samsung achieved near-global brand recognition and awareness. What lessons can we extract from their marketing endeavours that can be applied to your own? Let’s find out.

Understand Your Business

Building brand awareness requires that you present to your audiences the niche that your business intends to fill. This doesn’t necessarily have to be in the form of a physical product, either. Attitudes, beliefs, philosophies, and emotions can all play a central role in the image that you’re trying to project—think, for example, about Apple’s recent public statements extolling the virtues of digital privacy. Insight into the everyday concerns expressed by your target demographics gives you the knowledge needed to fine-tune your messaging accordingly. In general, it’s important to remember that you should keep these values highly specific. The aforementioned brands might be widely recognised now, but they didn’t start that way. Cater to your niche and expand organically from a dedicated, loyal base, rather than trying to be all things to all people at all times.

A good way to accomplish just this is to engage in social listening. Regardless of whether you manage an active online presence or not, your name will undoubtedly come up in conversation. By monitoring the positive and negative aspects being discussed, you can build a better picture of how your business is perceived by the community at large. You can quickly and easily uncover what they like, dislike, and what values are important to your core clientele, and position yourself to embody them accordingly.

Align Your Marketing

Around the world, individuals are being inundated with advertisements on a daily basis. Studies suggest that between television, radio, billboards, and the myriad of internet sites visited daily, consumers in first-world countries are subjected to more than 4000 advertisements per day. It’s an astronomical number, and paints a much clearer picture of the competitive field that you’ll be thrown into. Since it’s unrealistic for any customer to register even a minute fraction of the ads available to them on a day-to-day basis, aligning all of your materials according to a few core themes ensures that they’re instantly recognisable at a glance. Think of McDonald’s, the fast-food chain. Its iconic yellow and red colour scheme adorns everything that the company produces, and has for more than 60 years. Its level of brand awareness is such that among the thousands of competing ads, the colour scheme alone is all that’s needed to register as McDonald’s. No profound messaging, unique branding or alluring images are required. In such cases of extreme brand recognition, the customer doesn’t even need to see your ad for it to have an effect—just its immediate impression is enough for your business to occupy the minds of your customers, which is what brand awareness is truly about.

Taking a lesson from this example then, we can glean a few insights. First, make sure that your unique branding focus is evident across all of your marketing materials. Logos, colour schemes, and any relevant iconography should be utilised as much as possible in order to leave a lasting impression. Second, try to carve a visual niche for yourself along these themes. The more iconic and easily distinguishable your branding, the more you can stand out among the crowded field.

Brand awareness is critical to your success, and while most would argue that any publicity is good publicity, marketing actually needs to be conducted in a specific way to ensure that it has the greatest reach, discoverability, and memorability. Thankfully, by following our advice, you can ensure that your business is in a much better position to capitalise on its improved mind and market share. Simply remember that it’s a process, one that needs to be consistently adapted to fit the nature of your industry and market.