The Importance of Brand Awareness

In an ideal world, the product or service your small business offers would catch fire and everyone would want a piece of it. The good news is, we don’t need an ideal world to make this a reality. The trick is in knowing how to create brand awareness.

It is highly unlikely that you haven’t come across the term branding when shaping the business development strategy of your small business. But if it just so happens that you are unfamiliar with the term, your small business’ brand goes well beyond the logo and the colours you’ve chosen. In fact, a brand is the identity of your company. Exciting, right?

Creating a company brand is a vital step in planning the longevity of your business, as it tells your clients who you are as a brand and what they can expect from you. In essence, a well-created brand will instil trust in your target audience. But once you have created your brand, your job is not done. After all, you know that saying “You can have the best product/service in the world, but if none knows about it – do you even exist?”

What is Brand Awareness and How Does It Work?

Simply put, brand awareness is a measure of how familiar your target audience is with your brand. That means that if your target audience is well acquainted with your brand, they will easily recognise your products or services. Why is this important? Because it is the key element of your marketing strategy.

Multiple pieces of research has shown, again and again, the crucial part that brand awareness plays, and how it impacts the customer purchasing decision. Those customers who were aware of a certain brand were more likely to purchase the brand’s products or services in comparison to the same from the brands they didn’t know. That is why it is important to have ongoing brand awareness campaigns (after all giants like Coca Cola are continuously investing in their brand awareness campaigns for nearly 130 years).

How Does Brand Awareness Work? Well, creating consistent and informed marketing campaigns with a goal to increase brand awareness within your target audience can help you keep your brand current in the minds of your existing and potential clients. But, these campaigns can also help you increase the loyalty of your customers, and encourage word of mouth marketing. Upon catching your message, your customers will get reminded of your product or service, and if they had a positive experience, they’ll make a repeat purchase. The same goes with them referring your brand to their friends. After all, people are more likely to trust the referral from a person they know. Lastly, brand awareness will help you increase your sales.

Why It’s Important to Incorporate Brand Awareness in Your Marketing Strategy

Depending on your industry and the niche, your brand awareness methods might differ slightly, but the essence remains the same. You can create an online and/or offline campaign with a message that will resonate with your target audience. The goal is not to sell your product or service (or at least not a direct goal), but to introduce people to your brand.

Let’s take .ME domains for example. When it comes to this TLD, we run year-long brand awareness campaigns. These help us capture the attention of the audience that is either vaguely acquainted with our brand or not at all. Because our target audience is widespread, we have created different audience personas and have specific campaigns that adhere to our goals. This means that we create different sets of messages and formats to distribute them in places where these people ‘hang out’ online and offline. The format can be a podcast, guest blog post or an article, social media, live events, advertising efforts.

What do we achieve with our campaigns? We’ve noticed that a significant part of our customers need at least two ‘points of contact’ with .ME brand before they make a conversion, i.e. register a .ME domain name. Our brand awareness campaigns being one of them. More importantly, your audience will expand, new generations will arrive, and if you intend to grow, you need to keep in mind the tools that will help you achieve the longevity of your brand.  So without further ado, it is time to reconstruct your marketing budget and make some space for brand awareness campaigns. 

Let’s Go Over the Perks of Investing in Brand Awareness

As I briefly touched upon earlier, there are multiple perks of investing in brand awareness. But, here are some you should keep in mind.

Brand awareness…

… Campaigns help you expand your audience. If you research your audience well and target them with the appropriate messages, more people will become acquainted with your business. As a result, they’ll have it at the back of their minds when making their next purchase.

… Is the first step to driving performance-marketing goals. Why? Because by getting acquainted with your brand your target audience will trust your product or service. You know what they say, out of sight, out of mind. Or in other words, that we observe what is fresh in our memory with more confidence.

… Drives your brand equity, since the more they know about your brand (and its advantages) and trust it, the more they are willing to pay for it.

… Reminds your customers of your existence, which will help you increase customer loyalty. Brand awareness campaigns introduce customers to values and set the stage for everything that comes later. They build trust, address their pains, all through the prism of the company’s values and what it offers.

… Instigates social proof, and here’s how. When customers need a product/service similar to yours, they’ll remember you. Or, when they find themselves at the point of purchase, and see your product, they’ll recognise it as something familiar, something that is present, something that is useful to them.

Costly in the Short Term, but Pays Off in the Long Term

The question is always raised – how can we see the correlation between brand awareness efforts and sales? Especially when you take into account that you are investing your resources into something that does not directly promote a sale.

But is it worth the trouble and the effort? Absolutely! Investing in brand awareness might appear costly at first since you are not seeing the immediate return, however, the benefits of the brand awareness campaigns, when done well, will outweigh the costs of campaigns in the long run.

Written by Tijana Ostojic.

Tijana Ostojic is a writer at the .ME registry.