Brand Awareness – What Is It and How Can Social Media Help It Grow?

Brand awareness is how a business presents itself to potential customers. Social media marketing has changed how customers interact with businesses or brands. In the digital age we are currently living in, almost everyone owns a smart device (smartphone, tablet, smartwatches, etc.) They have brought the businesses and their customers closer than ever before. New audiences are continuously getting to know about your business through social media.  

Every business has at least one social media page which it uses to reach its customers. But the question is how you are doing it. Is it an online billboard? Or is it simply transferring your traditional advertising to social media? What else can you do to grow the brand awareness of your business?

What Is Brand Awareness?

Brand awareness is when your target audience knows of your brand’s existence, its values, and its products. It generates impressions about your brand values and brand voice. With many brands competing to reach the audience, your marketing strategy should be able to create a positive brand perception and add brand value. Creating awareness  of your brand will increase brand recall and brand trust 

The first step of creating brand awareness is letting the potential audience know that you are out there. It may not look like much, but building brand awareness is the foundation of your marketing strategies. Without building brand awareness first, you can’t engage your audience to tell them about your business. Once the target audiences are aware of your brand, the next step is to build brand recognition and turn potential customers into business opportunities. 

What Is Brand Recognition?

Brand recognition is when your audience identifies your brand among your competition. They may not be considering doing business with you or sometime’s may not even know what you offer. But, at this stage, they definitely know your brand, either logo, name, or a slogan you have used. Given the choice to select a product between two brands, there’s a good chance that the audience will pick the brand they recognize. 

The Importance of Brand Awareness

Strong brand awareness is important in digital marketing. It makes your target audience choose you over your competition. Let’s take a look at some reasons why brand awareness is important.

Increased Sales

As we have mentioned earlier, customers prefer to buy from a brand they are aware of rather than an unfamiliar brand. Consumers rely on familiarity when they make purchases. Therefore brand awareness will lead to generating more revenue.

Emotional Connection

A familiar brand creates trust and good impressions. This emotional connection created with consumer awareness of your brand will encourage paying customers to do business with you. 

Customer Loyalty

With emotional connection, a brand gets another advantage; customer loyalty. A loyal customer would return to your brand for another business. It is also a sign of customer satisfaction. And there’s a good chance of them recommending your brand to new customers.

Acquisition through Referrals

Like we said, loyal customers, will recommend a brand to their peers. People trust recommendations coming from a friend and this will create more opportunities to raise brand awareness. In turn, this will lead to generating more revenue.  

How Can Social Media Help to Grow It?

A successful brand will have a commanding social media presence. There are many conversations happening on various social media platforms and some of them are about your brand. Listening to those will help you to measure the brand awareness of your business on social media. It will give you a better understanding of what you are doing right and what you can improve on. Here are some tips to build brand awareness on social media. 

Right Platform and Right Content

You need to select what is the right social media platform for your business. Only a few social media platforms will work for you. If you are an accounting firm, LinkedIn will be your best option and TikTok would be the worst platform for you. Apart from the platform, you need to make sure you create the right content for each of your platforms. Creating specific content suited to each platform like short posts for Twitter, longer content with images for Facebook or high-quality images with captions for Instagram will be much useful in growing brand awareness for your business. 

Engage with Your Audience

Your audience will love it when you interact with them. It will build an emotional connection that leads to customer loyalty. Respond to your audience and trends. Your responses can be fun and witty, but they should reflect your brand and professionalism. It is essential to build and maintain a healthy relationship with your customers on social media.

Furthermore, creating engaging content, and encouraging your audience to share your content will spread and increase brand awareness. Younger consumers are more active in social media and engaging them through a social media contest or referral programs will work wonders to increase brand awareness.

Measure and Promote 

Measuring brand awareness is necessary to assess the effectiveness of your brand awareness campaigns. Analyze the engagement statistics of your content and make adjustments. Use your website analytics to measure brand awareness through referral traffic and their origins. With these metrics, you will be able to identify brand promotion opportunities. With the high level of competitiveness, it is necessary to use paid promotion and advertising to build brand awareness. This will help you reach new audiences increasing brand awareness of your business. 

Brand Awareness Strategies

The organic reach of brand awareness is limited. To build brand awareness, a business should engage in a well-planned brand awareness campaign. Identifying social media channels, your target audience, and the type of content to use will help improve brand awareness. Your brand awareness campaign should make it so that your brand becomes a household name. Here are 6 features that you need to consider for your brand awareness strategy. 

Guest Blogging

Guest blogging or guest posting is a great way to increase your brand awareness. You can take advantage of the traffic already generated by another website to get increased brand awareness for your business. 

Try Co-marketing

Join with another brand that already has a large audience. This kind of brand partnership is especially helpful for emerging brands to build brand awareness. But if you are an already established brand, use this as an opportunity to reach a new audience.

Advertise Everywhere

This may cost you a lot of money, but it is necessary if you want to raise brand awareness. Running advertising campaigns will generate more visibility for your brand. The more visibility you get, the more brand awareness it generates. 

Face of the Brand 

Influencer marketing is one of the most effective ways to build brand awareness. Attracting digital influencers with a larger follower base can increase brand awareness. You can also hire a spokesperson to become the face of your brand. Another way of building brand awareness is using a mascot as the face of your brand. 

A Symbol to Represent You 

Creating a simple yet unique image or a symbol that represents your brand can be a great way to increase your brand awareness. Look at Nike or Apple. The simple checkmark or the bitten apple is recognized by most of the world.

A Short, Catchy Slogan

Compressing your whole brand image and services to a short sentence is challenging. But done right, it will be one of the best ways to build awareness of your brand. Nike’s slogan “Just do it” is a great example of this.

Conclusion

Brand awareness is one of the key elements of a successful business in the digital world. It affects many aspects of your marketing efforts. From generating leads to customer acquisition and generating revenue, brand awareness lays the foundation for all of these.