In every industry, no matter what type of product or service you sell, standing out from the crowd is pivotal to customer acquisition and retention. In the marketing world, brand awareness is how you get your business out there and stay on the minds of potential and existing customers.
Building brand awareness refers to marketing strategies that help you pop into the minds of customers when they’re considering a purchase. It’s about how they’re able to recognize your brand and what makes you stand out from the crowd in a positive way. While it can take approximately a year to build brand awareness, you can decrease that time frame with the right strategies and by looking at the right metrics.
4 strategies for building brand awareness
Brand awareness is about more than a person thinking of your name in relation to your product or service. It’s about how you’re perceived by your current and past customers that influences their decisions to purchase from you for the first time, as well as every time after that. That’s why strategizing is key.
When you’re considering how to focus on brand awareness, here are a few strategies that are worth adding into your marketing efforts:
- Philanthropy — Standing up and taking action on an important cause that’s relevant to your business, as well as your values as an organization, can make a huge impact on how your brand is perceived. Whether that means donating to a charity or participating in community outreach programs, you want your brand to be associated with empathy, integrity and equity. The key is make sure that philanthropy is built into your brand, not just during marketing opportunities.
- A focus on consistency — An important brand awareness strategy is more of a value: consistency. One of the most effective ways to stay on people’s minds is for them to become familiar with your particular brand image, principles and personality that’s uniform across your products or services, website layout and social media. You want to be recognizable from your competitors, which isn’t possible if you’re always changing your image.
- Disruption — While the phrase “be disruptive” can have a negative connotation in some instances, it simply means to be bold. With dozens of other businesses in your industry doing something similar to you, making noise is one of the best ways to build brand awareness. Whether that means having a funny slogan that pushes the envelope, witty responses on social media comments or a creative format for your video content, disrupt what customers are seeing on a day-to-day basis from your competitors.
- Partnerships — Sometimes the best way to build your own brand awareness is to have the support of someone else. That’s why partnering with influencers or figures who can relate to your brand’s mission can be so effective. Partnerships help your brand by broadening your reach and showcasing how you can relate to their existing customers. They can even contribute guest content to your social media and blog in order to steer their digital audience your way.
4 metrics to measure how you’re building brand awareness
It’s one thing to put brand awareness strategies into action, but it’s another to look at the results and track the progress. It’s impossible to build brand awareness if you’re not continuously elevating what works and tweaking what doesn’t. That’s where metrics come in.
At BURG+CO., our services like search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing incorporate effective strategies that can provide measurable results for your brand awareness. Here are just four out of the many brand awareness metrics that we like to focus on with our marketing efforts:
- Backlinks — A backlink refers to your website being linked on another’s site. It shows credibility that another organization or source wants to reference you in their own content. Credibility is vital in building brand awareness because your customers should see you as trustworthy and knowledgeable. They also play a large role in keyword ranking.
- Branded search volume — If someone is typing your exact brand into a search engine, that’s a great sign of brand awareness. By measuring how many people are searching for you by name following a marketing campaign, you can see how many people you’re truly reaching, even if they don’t initially engage. It also indicates intent to purchase.
- Web traffic — When you’re going through your marketing strategy, increasing your web traffic is often one of the major goals. Web traffic can indicate your brand awareness because it directly connects to visibility in search engines. It shows how your brand stands out to the potential customer over your competitors in the search engine.
- Conversions — Whether it occurs immediately or down the line, conversions are what you should strive for. Conversions are a good representation of your brand awareness because having a strong, recognizable brand will increase the likelihood of a conversion, even if it occurs far after the customer sees your name. It means you stuck in their mind and made enough of an impact that they wanted to make a purchase.
Want to build brand awareness online? BURG+CO. can help
Increasing traffic to your website plays a role in increasing conversions and leading to new clients. However, it’s difficult to attract visitors to your site when you don’t know what to do. Fortunately, this is what we specialize in at BURG+CO.
Our team has years of experience in helping businesses improve their digital presence to attract new leads and retain existing ones. If you’re looking to perform better in search engine results and attract more visitors to your site, we’re ready to talk to you to see how we can help. Contact our team today for more information about digital marketing or to schedule a complimentary consultation.
