Earlier, it took businesses years to grow brand awareness.
Today, the road to recognition is not as long and bumpy, but achieving brand awareness still requires all your effort and dedication.
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It’s Competitive Out There
Businesses employ a wide variety of methods to build brand recognition.
One of these methods is social media marketing. According to statistics:
- 140 million businesses are actively using Facebook for their marketing efforts
- Brands are also active on Instagram, posting 1.7 times a day
- Twitter is popular among brands for its advertisement potential, as Twitter users linger 24% longer over ads than on other platforms
- LinkedIn also hosts over 30 million brands, most of which are B2B
This competition only keeps growing, as 89% of marketers name brand awareness as one of their top goals.
Although today brands have a variety of tools to build brand awareness with, and most of them are automated, there are still many nooks and crannies to explore before your brand starts getting the recognition it deserves.
So, let’s guide you through the steps you need to take to build brand awareness.
Get Visual
Close your eyes and think about brands like Nike, Adidas, or McDonald’s. Try to recollect what their logos look like, what shapes they have, and what colours they use.
Easy to recollect, isn’t it?
Your business’s logo matters a lot when it comes to building brand awareness. The logo is what your consumers explore before getting to know your business more. Creating a logo is also one of the strategies to increase brand loyalty and visibility.
Here’s how to create a logo that will get your brand recognized:
- Work on defining your brand’s identity. This is a crucial step in marketing and building brand awareness. Establishing brand identity involves answering a series of questions:
– What are my brand’s underlying values?
– Why is my product/service unique?
– Which three words I would use to define my brand?
– Which three worlds I would want my customers to use to define my brand?
You can use the same questions to come up with your brand’s signature slogan.
- Study your competitors. Competition analysis doesn’t only ensure the uniqueness of your logo, you can also use it for inspiration. Many small businesses were inspired by bigger brands and borrowed their ideas. You can do the same as long as you keep in mind the things that make your brand unique.
- Choose the design of your logo. All the shapes and typography you use for your logo should represent your brand’s identity in the most precise way, up to the point of being obvious. This will ensure that consumers will automatically identify your logo with your brand.
The colour of your logo is also due in no small part to building brand awareness. Before you decide, which colours to use in your logo, consider what your use of colour will say to your customers.
- 95% of brands use only two colours in their logos
- Blue is used by 33% of brands, which makes it one of the most popular colours for logo design
- 29% of brands use colour, and 28% of businesses select black or grey for their logos
Once you have your core visuals developed for your brand, you can move on to the next step, which would be bringing your brand to the top of search results.
Up Your SEO Game
Following SEO trends goes without question when it comes to building brand awareness.
Today, however, your approach to SEO should be comprehensive than just doing keyword research. In fact, keyword research is slowly moving to the background, giving the first place to newer SEO trends, among which is user intent.
Now, Google gives its preferences to content, which is written with user intent in mind, rather than simply inserting a selection of keywords into the text. Thus, user intent will also define the keywords you choose, keeping in mind the reason why a user would be interested in your content.
How to up your SEO game to build brand awareness?
You should develop a comprehensive SEO routine, which would include the following steps:
- Developing SEO strategies according to your brand identity. This involves the analysis of your customers’ needs and requirements, which will be the foundation of keywords research and on-page SEO strategies.
- Daily analysis of technical SEO, which would include improvements to website design, changes to code to build up the reputation of your website.
- The evaluation of results, which includes conversion and competitor analysis.
Your SEO efforts should be aimed at getting your brand recognized by bringing it to the top of search results.
Employ the Potential of Google Ads
There is, of course, another way to get to the top of search results.
You’ve seen plenty of businesses building awareness for their brands using Google Ads:
Google Ads allows you to pay a certain fee for brief advertisements on different websites as well as on relevant Google search results. As a result, your website receives paid traffic.
This traffic, however, is the fastest way to get your brand recognized. “Our research shows that Google Ads helps businesses build brand awareness 50% faster than through organic channels”, says Richard Nilsen, head of research at Subjecto.
With Google Ads, you’re creating a shortcut to the audience you want to target. When creating an ad, you enter the information that Google will use to categorize your business and to match it with the audience your products or services are intended for.
Recently, Google also added AdSense Auto ads – a service that uses machine learning mechanisms that automatically optimize your ads and post them on the website that would work best for building brand awareness.
Google Ads service is a great way to increase the recognition of your brand. However, like with search engine optimization, Google Ads requires daily performance monitoring to make sure that you’re getting a decent ROI, and all your KPIs are met.
Hop on Board of Popular Social Media Trends
Google Ads works great to attract instant attention to your brand. But, to build brand awareness that lasts, you need to work on your organic reach.
In this case, your top priority would be your social media accounts.
We already mentioned how competitive brands are on social media. Today, you will hardly find a consumer that doesn’t follow at least one brand, and some internet users create social media accounts just to reach out to brands.
To step up in this competition, you need to actively engage popular social media trends that will get your brand recognized. One of these trends is influencer marketing.
Influencer marketing is one of the most sustainable social media trends. Many brands prefer to outsource content creation to influencers, as they also get access to niche audiences.
As a result, according to BigCommerce:
- 65% of influencer marketing budgets are expected to increase this year
- 17% of companies are already spending more than half of their marketing budgets on influencers
- brands are satisfied with the results they get from influencer marketing, as 89% of marketers say influencer marketing ROI is better compared to other marketing channels.
Brands often engage influencers who are their loyal customers. For instance, Scramble’s (the brand that sells martial arts gear) recent “fanny pack” (bum bag) collaboration involved Julien Solomita, a famous YouTuber and jiu-jitsu enthusiast.
As a result, Scramble released collaboration fanny packs several times, and each time they were sold out. This is an example of a great collaboration with an influencer who is also a loyal customer of your brand.
Many businesses also hire influencers to make entrees to their blogs. Such content outsourcing is very common in influencer marketing, and can potentially bring a new fresh perspective to your blog.
However, along with these benefits come plenty of hazards. The content may not correspond to the style that your blog follows, or the content may be poorly written.
To avoid this, make sure that every contribution that influencers make to your blog are thoroughly proofread. You can also automate this task by using different online proofreading software, such as Grammarly.
However, these hazards don’t overshadow the benefits that your business can get from influencer marketing when it comes to building brand awareness:
- You quickly build trust. Influencer marketing gives you instant access to a niche audience that trusts the recommendations of the influencer, and, consequently, will trust them if they recommend your business.
- Influencers make your content strategy richer. Content created by influencers has great potential and represents your brand from a different, fresh perspective.
- You deliver value to your target audience. Together with an influencer, you create a collaboration, from which your target audience will get valuable benefits. The influencer’s audience, for instance, can get special offers, discounts, or customer loyalty bonuses.
By collaborating with an influencer, you also expand your reach, which positively impacts brand awareness and recognition.
Are You Ready to Bring Your Brand to Another Level?
For sure, you will have to face a lot of competition when working on building your brand awareness strategy.
Acknowledge the competition, but focus on the identity of your brand, which is the core of your brand awareness strategy.
Start with developing a logo that represents your brand in the best way, up your game on social media with engaging social media trends, like influencer marketing. Make use of the benefits brought to you by Google Ads, and make sure you follow a comprehensive SEO routine.
Keeping up with all the factors mentioned above will guarantee the success of your brand awareness strategy.