How To Get More Brand Awareness

Brand Awareness Definition

Brand awareness is the extent to which consumers are familiar with a your brand and what it offers to the market.

In other words, brand awareness is about making your brand familiar to the market.

If your audience knows who you are, what you do or even better, why what you do is valuable to them… then the chances of your brand being in the mix in the buying decision process is increased exponentially.

Why Brand Awareness Is So Critical

In short, if no one sees your brand, knows who it is and what it does then your offer of goods or services is irrelevant.

You could have the best service in the world with an extraordinary offer to boot, but if you don’t leverage techniques to tell people about it, then it might as well be a figment of your imagination.

Your job as a brand builder is to get your brand and it’s messaging in front of as many of the most relevant eyeballs as possible.

Only then, will you get the opportunity to engage with them and let them know what your brand does, and more importantly, why that’s important and valuable to them.

That’s why first establishing and then raising your brand awareness is so critical.

The more people that know the value your brand brings to the table, the more people turn into leads and then of course, sales.

How To Develop Brand Awareness

So now we know we need to raise brand awareness, how do we go about it?

This is where brand strategy meets marketing strategy.

Below, there are many examples of brand awareness techniques, but every brand is different and some of these techniques will be more effective for some brands than others.

Your marketing strategy therefore should identify where your audience is and how to engage with them to get your brand message under their noses.

Here are some of the most impactful ways to gain exposure and reach within your target market.

Brand Awareness Technique #1
Be Where Your Audience Is

Despite what some marketers say, traffic is not something you create. It’s something you tap into.

Your audience is already online.

They’re using search engines, they’re browsing social media, they’re reading forums or any of the other countless activates or tasks we partake in online.

They’re there and no doubt Google and Facebook have a million data points on their online activity.

The point is, that whether you’re online on not, your audience most certainly is. Congregating, contributing, digesting information on the very problem your brand solves.

Once you know where they are… you just need to go there too.

Brand Awareness Technique #2
Be Helpful Without Asking
(The ask comes later)

Building brand awareness is not about sales. Sales come later when the relationship is better established.

If, when you identify where your audience is, you go in like a gun slingin sales machine pushing your products or services on them, you’ll gain some awareness alright…but not the kind you’re after.

None of us like being sold to, least not from someone we don’t know.

Raising brand awareness is about showing why you’re relevant.

The best way to do that is to help your audience solve a problem around your area of expertise.

So when you arrive at where your audience is, be as helpful as you possibly can without asking for anything in return.

Over time, your audience will begin to position you in their mind as an expert.

Brand Awareness Technique #3
Create Useful Branded Content

Your audience has more than one problem you can help them with.

In and around your area of expertise, there are probably hundreds if not thousands of smaller challenges that they deal with every day.

By creating content that address these smaller issues and provides value in the form of an answer or understanding or direction, you extend your ability to help your audience with these small challenges.

Every challenge you help your audience with, is another valuable slice of trust earned.

A person that uses your content to improve their situation will remember that gesture and are far more likely to recall your brand or share the content with others.

Brand Awareness Technique #4
Use Publishing Platforms

As you create your content you have plenty of options to distribute it.

There are countless platforms you can post this content to where your audience are already congregating.

This means that even if your website has zero traffic, you can leverage these publishing platforms to tap into theirs.

Youtube, Medium, Likedin Publishing are all examples of platforms where the people you want to reach are going in search of answers.

Leverage this traffic and get your content under their noses.

These platforms are invaluable as it offers you the ability to put your content in front of people you might not have otherwise had the exposure to.

Brand Awareness Technique #5
Leverage A Human Brand Persona

A brand is an entity that people engage before ever becoming a customer.

This engagement could be with a social media post, a blog article, a how-to video or any number of touch points a brand may have with its audience.

If, when you engage with a brand, it feels like you’re speaking with a corporate entity with no feelings and no personality, you’re far less likely to want to continue that engagement.

If, on the other hand the engagement feels human, if the content is written in a human voice, the how-to video displays some personality or the social media post oozes character, you’re far more likely to want to stick around.

The days of corporate speaking entities are gone.

Brands today need to be more human than they’ve ever been before.

It needs beliefs, values, ideas, attitudes and opinions, which make human connections and establish real relationships.

Want actionable brand strategy tips & techniques?

Brand Awareness Technique #6
Engage Your Target Market With Personality

Through a human persona, your brand will have a fully-fledged personality to engage your audience with.

If your personality is developed with the audience in mind and considers their desires and motivations, then it is far more likely to strike a chord with who they are and ultimately resonate.

So get to know your audience on a human level. Understand the language they use and the characteristics they’re attracted to so you can approach them with a familiar and welcome personality.

Brand Awareness Technique #7
Utilise Brand Storytelling