When a consumer has a specific need, and they consider your brand as the solution, you’ve effectively established a relationship that reaches far beyond awareness. Having your brand top-of-mind when a consumer is ready to purchase is the goal. Brand awareness can also reach such a level of success that it changes our language—as evidenced when we use the words “Google” or “Xerox” as verbs.
In order to obtain this level of success, a marketing strategy to increase brand awareness should be implemented that effectively reaches consumers who aren’t yet familiar with your brand. However, reaching a potential customer isn’t enough. Brands must make efforts to further the relationship, engaging customers to establish loyalty.
Forming a Marketing Strategy to Increase Brand Awareness
There are a few general approaches to achieving brand awareness that are usually taken, or combined, according to the needs of the specific brand. The biggest challenge in your strategy won’t be finding a way to increase brand awareness as much as measuring the effectiveness of your efforts. Here are some of the most commonly used and successful ways to raise brand awareness.
Establish an Online Presence
It’s hard to find a brand without an online presence today. Since 45% of consumers have reached out to a company on social media, companies can’t afford not to be there. But that doesn’t mean they all succeed in boosting awareness. To really shine on social media, and gain the awareness for which you are looking, you need to create:
- a presence on the media of choice for your customer demographic
- an engaging presence that continually elicits reactions and responses from your customer base
- a presence that is consistent across all media and easily recognizable
- technical conditions for your content to look good on all devices, from the smartphone screen to the computer screen
There are a few ways to judge the impact of your presence on social media. The number of subscribers you have to your social accounts is a good, basic indicator, especially when that information is compared to your competitors’ numbers.
Social listening is the tracking of the responses to your content. Comments, shares, backlinks, and hashtags can be monitored. By doing so, you can judge the amount of response you receive and keep a tab on customer service or UX issues that might arise, allowing you to respond to them promptly. You can use this information to gain new insights into your customer base as well when you discover new connections and analyze the comments.
Share of voice is another useful metric. It looks at all the discussion online of your brand or of keywords associated with your brand to see your brand’s relative weight in the total.
Advertise for Increased Exposure
Print, broadcast, and outdoor advertising can supplement your online presence and target your customers who are not active on social media. Once again, it is essential to understand your customer demographic to determine where to position this advertising, as choices are even broader than online. Online paid ad opportunities are abundant as well. Besides traditional ad formats, such as banners, native ads and pay-per-click, paid content is increasing as a medium for brand messages too. Caution is necessary when using paid content, however, consumers can tend to feel deceived if they don’t realize right away that content is sponsored.
Given the scope of possibilities paid advertising campaigns present, brand voice is particularly meaningful here. Creating an authentic narrative that defines or expands your brand’s perception—its personality, so to speak—makes your brand memorable and helps customers identify with it. Some brands may opt for likable quirkiness, such as GEICO with its decades-old gecko and sensitive cavemen, or Kentucky Fried Chicken with its lineup of actors who have portrayed Col. Harlan Sanders.
Advertising effectiveness is measured in impressions and clicks. A simultaneous uptick in visits to your brand’s website might also be credited to a new ad campaign.
Leverage the Power of Events and Sponsorships
Brands gain a quick boost in exposure by organizing events, especially because many attendees naturally create and share digital or social content surrounding an event. Just being seen in the right places can raise awareness of your brand and cast it in the light you want.
Events created or sponsored by your brand have the potential to create improved brand perception by thousands of people. Brand awareness and brand perception are important elements in brand equity, or the value of your brand itself. In addition, sponsored organizations often share valuable demographic information with sponsors.
Increase Brand Awareness with Shopkick
Brands can partner with a third-party mobile rewards app like Shopkick to drive sales, offering points to app users for brand interaction. These consumers may be familiar with your product already, or this might be their first introduction. Shopkick is a good way to introduce new products to the market or to raise awareness of existing products at a key moment for marketing, such as Tyson’s campaign to raise awareness of its Chicken Wings & Bites in the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl. Shopkick educates and engages shoppers with in-app content before their trip to the store. Once consumers are in-store, Shopkick encourages them to interact with products on the shelf and incentivizes purchase using a gamification strategy. Shopkick truly helps brands boost awareness and consideration at each stage along the path to purchase.
Shopkick offers a marketing strategy to increase brand awareness among motivated shoppers.
Shopkick offers a marketing strategy to increase brand awareness among motivated shoppers. Shoppers redeem their points for gift cards, so you preserve value, since you’re not using coupons or discounts. Shopkick can help brands and retailers track what’s going on in-store, at-shelf, in real time, allowing partners to make more insightful marketing decisions.
You can read more success stories, then contact Shopkick to find out about becoming one of our partners and begin raising awareness of your product and driving sales the Shopkick way.
Image courtesy of Minerva Studio
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