As a small business owner, one of the most difficult realities to face is the fragility of small companies. In truth, nearly 50% of small businesses fail within the first five years. However, there are things you can do to ensure you end up in the 50% of businesses that go the distance.
Obviously, successful businesses make more money than they spend each month. However, if that was easy, much fewer businesses would fail. The key is learning how to market your company and increase brand awareness.
But what is brand awareness and how do you improve it?
Not sure where to begin with all of this? Don’t worry, we’re here to help. Keep reading for everything you need to know.
What is Brand Awareness?
Before we can dive into how to increase your brand awareness, we need to discuss what it is. Brand awareness refers to a consumer’s ability to remember and recognize your brand. Your brand includes everything from your logo, name, and message, to your products and services.
Brand awareness is important because the more a consumer recognizes and is familiar with your brand, the more likely they are to invest in your products and services. That’s because consumers are more likely to trust and find credibility in well-known companies.
How to Improve Brand Awareness
After “what is brand awareness?” the next question we need to ask is “how do you improve it?” What can you do in terms of marketing to increase the public’s knowledge and recognition of your brand?
Ultimately, it comes down to being able to understand your audience and cater to their needs. In doing so, you can effectively market your products and services.
Establish Your Niche
To find success in any industry, you need to establish your niche. What is different about your company, your products, or your services that set you apart from your competition? Why are you better for consumers than other companies that offer similar products or services?
Establishing a niche is essential for brand development and can be as simple as catering to specific demographics of people. For example, a bakery may specialize in vegan or gluten-free options. A personal trainer could specialize in training pregnant women or the elderly.
Identify Your Target Market
This leads us to our next topic of your brand awareness campaign – identifying your target market. These are the people who are most likely to invest in your products or services. Using the bakery example from above, your target market would be consumers who adhere to a vegan or gluten-free diet looking for baked goods.
Knowing your audience helps you develop a marketing message specific to their needs, desires, and ideologies.
Build a User-Friendly Website
When answering “what is brand awareness?” you need to understand the importance of your digital or online presence. Most consumers use the internet not only to shop for things online but also to research their best options.
In fact, nearly 88% of consumers research products, services, and companies online before making a decision.
Therefore, you need to build a user-friendly website to represent your company and serve as a digital storefront. It needs to be optimized for mobile devices and load quickly. It also needs to be intuitive and easy to navigate.
Use SEO to Direct Traffic to Your Website
Having a website is essential for your brand awareness strategy. However, you must implement a way to drive online traffic to your site. This is where search engine optimization comes into play.
SEO is the algorithm used by search engines to find relevant content based on keyword searches. The higher your SEO rating, the more quickly consumers can find you online.
You can boost your SEO by creating a blog on your site full of relevant articles. Use effective keywords and multiple forms of media embedded with metadata. You should also use internal and external links while ensuring you get backlinks from other credible websites.
Get On Social Media
Over 72% of Americans are on social media. We go there to connect with friends, check up on current events, answer emails, and more. It’s also a great platform to increase brand awareness.
You can use organic social media marketing to expand your audience by publishing engaging content. Encourage your followers to like, share, and comment so their friends and followers can be exposed to your content.
You can also use paid social media advertising to tap into a wider audience. You can target specific groups of people based on location, gender, age, interests, and more. Furthermore, paid social media marketing provides valuable insight into ad performance which allows you to perfect your strategy.
Use Email Marketing to Stay Relevant
Most consumers need to see marketing messages multiple times before they’re pushed in the right direction. Therefore, you should also ask “What is brand awareness in terms of re-targeting?”
The answer lies in email marketing. Encourage consumers to subscribe to your email by offering exclusive offers and access to important information and other content. Once they’ve subscribed, you have a direct line of communication with them.
Use your emails to remind consumers about your amazing products or services. However, it’s important to provide valuable content to ensure they continue opening your emails. If you use your emails to flood their inbox with advertisements, they’re likely to unsubscribe.
Expand Your Reach Using Paid Advertising Strategies
Finally, there’s nothing wrong with investing money in your brand awareness campaign. We recommend looking into pay per click and search engine marketing.
Search engine marketing is similar to SEO in that it uses keywords to direct online traffic to your website. However, with SEM, you pay the search engine to bring your website up at the top of the results pages for specific keywords. However, you only pay the search engine site each time a user clicks on your website.
Pay per click marketing works similarly. You can publish your ad on a host website. You pay the hose site for every click your ad receives.
Want Your Brand to Stand Out?
If you want your brand to stand out in today’s capitalistic business world, you must perfect your marketing strategy. This means answering the essential questions like “What is brand awareness?”
If you need more help, our blog was created for people just like you. Be sure to check out some of our other articles before you go.
