How to Increase Brand Awareness for Your Business

The popularity of a brand in the business world can give an indication on its power in the market. Therefore, you must know how to increase brand awareness in the marketing strategy you apply today. Such a method can be beneficial for your business, whether it be from the product selling aspect or your brand equity.

Automatically, your brand can blend in with customers’ lifestyles. Popular brands will easily gain profits from the loyal customers who will not think twice to make a purchase for the newest products or do repeated transactions.

This guideline will discuss how to increase brand awareness for your business. Find out all the things about it here!

What is Brand Awareness?

Brand awareness is a term that refers to the measurement of consumers’ abilities to recognize and remember a brand. Their response upon seeing a brand or product can indicate how well the brand awareness of the business itself.

If the brand gets good responses from the customers, like indicating to choose it over the other brands in the market, then it can be said that the company promotes it well. On the other hand, if the customers ignore or avoid the brand, then it means the company needs to evaluate their ways to increase brand awareness.

Stages of Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is divided into three stages. Each stage reflects the ability of customers in recognizing a brand. The three stages are namedly brand recognition, brand recall, and top-of-mind awareness.

Brand Recognition

Brand recognition is the stage where the consumers see a product and recognize it. At this stage, they have not remembered the name of the brand yet. However, they are familiar with the characteristics of the brand from its audio or visual like its logo, color, packaging, and slogan.

Brand Recall

Brand recall is the ability of consumers in remembering the name of the brand on certain categories. The memories about the brand will resurface when they see a glimpse of the product or think about its category.

At this stage, consumers are able to remember the name of the brand due to several factors, which are their interest in certain categories and the times they purchase the brands in the categories.

Top-of-mind Awareness (TOMA)

Top-of-mind Awareness or TOMA is the highest stage of brand awareness. At this level, the leading brand in the market will be the first one to pop in consumers’ minds when they think of certain categories of products.

Why is Brand Awareness Important for Business?

Knowing how to increase brand awareness is a good strategy that can be applied to win the competition with the other brands in the market. That way, your brand may become the main choice in consumers’ minds. A company that has a good brand awareness can cultivate trust, form associations, and build brand equity. Here is more information about it:

Cultivate Trust

Today, consumers tend to be more selective in purchasing a product. Easy access to information helps them learn about products more and consider customers’ reviews before making a decision to proceed with the transaction. Therefore, gaining consumers’ trust becomes very important in this case.

Knowing how to increase brand awareness by building a good relationship with consumers can help them gain trust in the brand. This can happen since consumers tend to choose brands that are familiar and friendly in their minds.

Form Associations

Oftentimes, consumers will associate a product or an action to a particular brand. For instance, if you want to know something, then you will search it on Google. Another example is you will mention a particular brand name when you order a bottle of mineral water.

The consumers’ tendencies to replace general words into the brand names indirectly can be an effective brand awareness strategy. It can help the brand dominate the category if done properly.

Build Brand Equity

Brand equity can also be considered the value of a brand. This value is determined based on customers’ experiences and their perceptions of the brand.

Companies with high brand equity have a superiority compared to the others. Hence, they can sell their products at higher prices, expand their lines of goods or services, and even have an  impact on social culture.

The foundation of brand equity is brand awareness. Without the existence of brand awareness, consumers will not be able to gain enjoyable experiences and positive perceptions of the brand itself.

How to Increase Brand Awareness

How to increase brand awareness properly? Here are the steps you must do to achieve your goals:

Focus on the Character of Your Business

The first way to build brand awareness is to build a business character. The point of view used to increase brand awareness is a persona, not just a company that sells products.

Brands that have an impact on their audience are brands that feel like close friends to their audience. Therefore, it is important to determine how you define your brand as a persona.

Socialize Your Brand

Humans are social creatures who need communication in order to connect with each other. Like humans, brands also need to socialize in order to have a good relationship with consumers.

If your brand only contacts consumers when they want to sell products, of course, the consumers will only perceive your brand as a business, so it will be difficult to gain their trust.

Create an active social media account that actively uploads useful or entertaining content. Actively interact by answering questions, replying to comments, and engaging the audience. Research shows that brand reputation is mostly affected by online interactions.

Create a Narrative Around the Brand

The way to increase brand awareness is to look different and better than the competitors, which is by creating an authentic narrative. The use of narrative through storytelling can be a powerful marketing strategy because it can make the brand more approachable.

The brand narrative can be built based on the story of the founder, the background of the business, or the process of creating an idea for the product. As long as the narrative has authenticity and is based on facts, you can use it.

Use the Social Media Share Button

One of the most effective marketing strategies that you can apply in this case is word-of-mouth. This strategy is intended to spread brand awareness quickly through consumer recommendations. People also tend to trust a brand more if they see a friend or relative directly promotes it to them.

One way to build brand awareness is to encourage your audience to share your content on social media. Something as simple as using the share button on a website page can be an effective word-of-mouth strategy.

Strategies to Increase Brand Awareness

It is difficult to build brand awareness without a strategy. Therefore, you need to have a definitive plan on how to increase brand awareness to win the market.

Produce High Quality Content

The first strategy to increase brand awareness is to produce quality content. Content that is useful and relevant to your audience will make them revisit your website to read other content.

High quality content can also increase shareability which makes audiences willing to share content on social media.

Make the Most of Social Media and Websites

The second strategy on how to increase brand awareness is to use social media and websites. To do that, your brand needs to be present on every channel used by the audience. Today, two popular channels that you can use to build brand awareness are social media and websites.

Do Guest Posting

Guest posting is a strategy to increase brand awareness by publishing user-generated content on other websites. Content published on well-known websites will help you get audiences outside your domain. You can include your brand name and website address on the content.

This type of brand awareness strategy does not only profit the brand side, but also for the SEO itself. This is because guest posting plays a role as a backlink that may increase website authority.

Apply SEO Principles

SEO can be an effective way to increase brand awareness on search engines like Google. By applying SEO principles, your brand will have a strong topic ownership, so the audience will easily find your website on any search related to a particular topic.

To be able to apply SEO principles well, you need to make various SEO efforts. One of the SEO efforts that you can do is through link building. You can get quality backlinks by using backlink services from cmlabs.

How to Measure Brand Awareness?

You already know how to increase brand awareness. Next, you have to find out how effective the efforts to increase brand awareness are. There are two methods of measuring brand awareness, namely quantitative and qualitative.

Quantitative Measurement

Quantitative measurement of brand awareness is carried out using numbers from the following metrics:

• Direct traffic - How many people type in your domain and go straight to your website? The amount of direct traffic can indicate how much of your audience already knows your website's domain.
• Organic traffic - The number of website visitors who come organically from the SERP can also be used to measure brand awareness. In this case, you can use metrics like impressions, clicks, CTR, pageviews, and users.
• Brand search volume - You can also find out how many people are searching for your brand name in search engines. Use keyword research tools to get an exact number of search volumes for your brand name.
• Social media metrics - Measuring brand awareness can also be done through social media channels. You can see the number of brand account followers, impressions and reach of each content, or engagement on your account.  

Qualitative Measurement

The next measurement to use in the brand awareness strategy is qualitative techniques. To do that, you can do a survey. In conducting the survey, you can choose the two types of surveys below:

• Brand recall test - Respondents are asked to name as many brand names as they know when we mention a product category.
• Brand recognition test - Resource persons are asked to explain the details about the brand they know when a specific name is mentioned, such as its color, logo, sound, and other things.

That was a complete explanation of what brand awareness is, how to increase brand awareness, and measure it.

In order to increase brand awareness, especially through SEO strategies, cmlabs provides content marketing services as well as SEO consulting services that can be a solution for your brand.