7 Powerful Strategies to Escalate Brand Awareness

by SONIKA DHALIWAL Professional

Building the business from scratch is no task of a layman. Proper expertise and knowledge is the most crucial aspect if one is looking forward to building a brand. Let’s say you have a brand and a good product/service but are still facing obstacles to raise awareness about what you do. Now, to raise awareness about it and to actually make sure that you are doing well in the market, you need to build a presence. A market presence that you will only be able to achieve by resorting to various marketing, sales, and promotional strategies. Well, this article will surely hit a nail on your head while taking you from 0 to 1 and will give you a basic gist of what is required to achieve a stable and well-managed business that is known by people.

So what exactly is Brand Awareness?

Brand awareness refers to the extent to which the brand is known by potential customers or in the locality they perform their operations. Brand awareness and brand recognition are two different terms. Brand recognition is basically people knowing that you exist but are ignorant about the exact kind of work you do. Brand awareness is when people are well-versed and know what kind of work you do and acknowledge it either by referring or talking about it. Brand recognition is basically the first step to reach brand awareness. When a business reaches a favorable level of Brand awareness, there is a connection with the customers.

The importance of Brand awareness

Let's separate the brand from the business, if I had to spell it out in a simpler manner, ‘business’ is the product/service that you are selling and ‘brand’ is the identity and how people perceive your business. No matter how impressive your product is or how much you spend on advertising, that won’t suffice if you haven’t built a brand around your business. Building a brand leads to customer loyalty. And customer loyalty is what makes the businesses reach heights and get way ahead in the line. So after talking about brand awareness and how crucial it is for businesses to stand out, let us get to the next step which is “How to build brand awareness?”

How to build brand awareness

Using billboards, advertising everywhere possible, spending an extravagant Amount Of Money on billboards and advertising, Sure! That will get you brand recognition and exposure but this won’t guarantee brand awareness. This won’t convert your leads to potential customers or clients. And most importantly, many businesses don’t have that much budget to spend on these things. So a business may want to:-

1.       Sponsor local events.
2.       Building a social media presence.
3.       Run google ads.

4. Use specific custom hashtags for your brand.

Strategies for building brand awareness

1. Referral programs

Referral programs are an amazing way to reach a large number of audiences and that won’t just give you brand recognition but also awareness among the people because they will actually come and try your product/service. The referral programs will help you generate an adequate amount of word-of-mouth publicity which is considered to be the most effective one as your product will be referred to someone by the people they already know and that helps you build trust.

2. Local Partnerships

This can work wonders and can put you on the radar if done correctly. Proper research needs to be done in order to decide who you want to partner with. You could arrange open mic events and arrange small gatherings on festivals, sponsor local sports teams, or conduct charity events or anything that you deem suitable as per the locality of the business. Getting into partnerships and organizing such events will do big things for your brand.

3. Freebies

Who doesn’t like freebies? And I can tell you for sure that every customer will walk away happily with a freebie no matter if it’s cheap or expensive. The thing is it gives the customer a sense of familiarity and a sense of connection with the brand. So every time the customers think about you or that freebie, they will associate it with the experience they had while trying out your product/service. Just don't forget to put your brand name on it.

4. Social media contests

One other way to establish a social presence is by conducting contests on social media. You could keep the criteria to enter into the contest at your own convenience. Like, you could ask for customers’ email addresses for them to register for the contests. Their email addresses will help you with email marketing so that you know for sure that they are being updated about the latest offers and new products. You could ask them to tag their friends or share the post. There are literally hundreds of ways you could choose as per whatever suits your needs and there are already enough platforms where you could run these contests.
5. Podcasts

Commencing your own podcast by interviewing relevant people and people who are a part of the industry you are working in can be a great example of making people aware of your business and giving them the required knowledge about the industry. This will also help to build relations. Industries like marketing already have a number of podcasts which could make it difficult for a newbie to get on board with this strategy.
6. PPC Advertising

With SEO becoming more competitive each day, while organic Google real-estate shrinks, PPC could be a smart solution for getting your brand seen on Google. With targeted keyword research, you may be seen at the highest of Google for relevant searches. Whether or not users don’t find themselves clicking on your PPC ad, seeing your name at the highest of the search results makes a sway and is incredible for building brand awareness.

7. Unique personality

One ‘out of the box’ way to build brand awareness is humor. Everyone loves to laugh, right? Of course, this won’t work for every industry. But if you work in an industry where you think a little comedy or personality will be permissible and appropriate, then this is a bang-on idea to get the attention of the people and building brand awareness. This will also make your brand extremely memorable. Some examples of brands using humor are- Netflix, McDonald’s, Old spice.

Executing these tips and strategies appropriately by studying your market could help your brand reach the next level.