Why is brand awareness so important for you and your business? Probably this is what most of small businesses are asking themselves after making some crucial mistakes in the past.
Often misconceived, a branding strategy is not the sum of your logo, color palette, or website; though these creative elements are integral to a successful branding strategy.
A branding strategy revolves around all the intangible elements that over time drive brand awareness, brand equity, and brand sentiment.
Let’s give an example here: if Nike would like to make a hotel, I guess we’ll all know what it’s gonna be like. We know how we would feel in it. But if Ibis hotels would like to make a shoe company, we don’t know what to expect. And that’s because Ibis has a logo, not a brand.
Why is brand awareness important in business
Brand awareness is a general term that describes how familiar (aware) consumers are with a brand or its products. Put simply, brand awareness is the measure of how memorable and recognizable a brand is to its target audience.
Establishing brand awareness is a powerful marketing strategy that leads consumers to develop an instinctive preference towards a brand and its products. Making a brand recognizable and memorable is at the heart of most marketing strategies because it is a major force behind brand trust, and ultimately, sales generation.
What is brand awareness and how do you build it?
You have your brand strategy, your brand identity system, you have your collateral, your website, now you’re at the point where you got a brand and you now need to put it on the map. And here is when brand awareness and brand strategy comes into plan.
It can be a bit of an enigma for business owners and entrepreneurs.
By the definition, Brand Awareness is the level of consumer awareness of a brand, its idea and offered value as a market provider.
Every potential customer that you might have is on a journey. They have different phases and when the time comes to decide what brand product or service they’re going to purchase they consider the brands that are out there, on the market place. And if your brand isn’t on their mind in the consideration phase, then it’s not going to be considered and you’re brand it’s not gonna grow within that space.
That’s why brand awareness is VERY important.
It’s about getting your message out there so more people know about your brand, so when it comes for them to make a decision, they have you in their mind.
Where do you start?
Is this branding, or is this marketing?
Well, when it comes to your brand awareness campaign, here is where the two meet.
You will have built your brand way long before your marketing strategy comes into play and this is about having the vehicle ready to go.
So your brand awareness tactics and your marketing strategy are one and the same thing, essentially your marketing is your frontlines of the branding but they share the same overarching goal and that is acquire and nurture customers to build the business.
Your audience is always the focus
Who is the audience?
If you’re thinking of that overarching goal, you’re trying to influence the mind of your audience. (here it is an awesome Personas Template to help you find who’s your audience)
So if you don’t have them at epicentre of what you’re doing, then your messaging or your strategy or your communication or your ads they’re not gonna be aligned to whom your audience is.
It’s imperative that there’s where you start.
The brand strategy will define who that audience is, where they are, where they hang out, where they go to for information around the problem that your brand solves.
And then it becomes about defining where the most open to a message from your brand about solving that problem.
And that’s what the marketing strategy and the brand awareness strategy defines.
What your audience is and what messages are best suited to hit your audience where they are most likely to be open to your solution.
Brand Awareness Strategy needs to be based on value
You can throw your hook on Facebook Ads but if you don’t have some kind of bait representing value on that hook, people are not gonna bite.
You have to get your brand associated with some kind of value in the mind of your audience.
How to define the value of your Brand Awareness Strategy?
You do it in the Brand Strategy.
If you’re able to associate the value of the position that you want to own in the mind of your audience with your brand well then that’s the first seed you need to plant in the mind of your audience.
Wherever they go and being open to the solution that you bring, there’s where your brand needs to be.
We did so far a few brandings, so if you’re still finding everything too overwhelming to do it yourself or your team partners, give us a shout!