What is brand awareness?

Brand awareness, as the name implies, refers to the extent to which consumers know about the existence and details of the brand. In layman’s terms, it is whether consumers are “aware” of the product or not. The awareness includes the brand name, product features, quality, social status and so on.

Brand awareness is important for every business. It may be hard to build and may require a lot of time and money, but its end results are usually worth the investments. Brand awareness is considered to be one of the greatest assets for businesses.

If you do not build brand awareness, no one will know about your brand and products. And, if no one knows about you, how are they going to buy from you? A study has shown that 71% of consumers tend to buy from brands they are familiar with.

But why? Well, it’s because brands build trust and credibility. A brand is like an identity; you have to take care of it and do the right things. Do one thing wrong and you can wave goodbye to your consumers.

With diverse product options, it is undoubtedly that branding plays an important role. The brands and their messages are what differentiates them from one another.

Example of Brand Awareness:

Companies that build extraordinary brand awareness will see their brand name replacing general terms of the product. However, if a brand name does not replace the general term, it does not mean that awareness of the brand is low either. People can still be aware of the brand. Here are some extraordinary brand awareness examples:

Have you caught yourself mentioning a brand name when you wanted a generic product? For instance, whenever you want to look for answers on search engines, I am pretty sure you’ll say “Let me just Google that.” instead of “Let me use the search engine.”. Google is actually a brand name but it is so popular that it has replaced the generic term.

Another great example is the Jacuzzi. Jacuzzi is widely misinterpreted as a product. “Dad, can we get a jacuzzi for our new home?”. Jacuzzi is actually a brand name supplying hot tubs, saunas, gazebos, and pools. You’re not alone, I was as surprised as you…

That’s the power of a brand and the awareness. Wouldn’t it be nice if your brand could do the same?

You’re in luck. I am here to share with you how to build brand awareness. There are many brand awareness strategies, here are 10 of our favorites:

1. Use Branded Packaging

Let us begin with the tangible attribute first. A tangible attribute is what people can see and appreciate. Businesses should consider using branded packaging. The way you present your product is the most important impression you give to your consumers.

This method is used by most brands if you notice. After buying a product, you’ll be presented with packaging with the products in it. Businesses can use different packagings but they have one thing in common, they have their own brand names on it as well as graphics and logo for some.

Product experience does not begin at first use of the product, instead, it is at the unboxing stage. A beautiful package can go a long way. People tend to take photos of beautiful things and share them on their social media page.

Ultimately, they are actually unconsciously promoting your brand to more people. It’s time for you to invest in packaging, ladies and gentlemen..

It is the same for shopping bags. Shoppers carry your branded packaging around the mall. That is your free advertisement with zero cost. Well, not exactly zero but the cost of each packaging is usually insignificant

When other shoppers see that there are many people carrying a specific brand, the impression they get is that the brand is a popular and satisfactory one. Hence, they will go check the brand out.

2. Provide Good Customer Service

One of the ways of building brand awareness is actually focusing on providing great service to your existing customers. Interaction and the way you make your customers feel are very important factors that contribute to your brand success.

Good customer service leads to high customer satisfaction and satisfied customers tend to share their experiences with others. Word-of-mouth advertising is considered to be one of the most powerful ways to build your brand and credibility. Why? Because they are words that come from customers themselves instead of the brand.

So, how can you ensure your company provides good customer service? Let me share with you a brilliant quote.

“If you take care of your employees, they will take care of your business.”

Richard Branson

3. Take Advantage of Social Media

The next most widely used method, especially in the past two decades, to increase brand is through social media. Social media is the best platform to reach a wide audience.

There are billions of people who use social media. I would say there are no limitations to the geographical areas you can reach.

The three main platforms to be on and advertise now is Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The best part about this method is that social media is free to use.

These free platforms help you reach more people than you currently are reaching. Take my case, for example, if I did not use Twitter as a medium to share articles, I wouldn’t have gained this extra traffic.

If you do not have a business account, what are you waiting for? Go create it now! They do provide free statistics for business accounts! However, they do charge if you want to go for advanced advertising where they allow you to target specific target audiences and have your advertisements pop up on their news feed.

To engage with customers and build recognition, brands should create content that makes people engage. A few methods you can to keep users engage are contests, videos, polls, surveys, and most importantly, good content that educates people about your brand.

People share content that they love and this results in more people reading your content and getting exposed to your brand.

We have here some additional social media tips and tricks you can use to build awareness for your brand.

4. Reach Out to Influencers

Next, influencers. Influencers are people that affect other people’s behavior and lifestyle. For instance, if a celebrity uses Brand X shampoo, you would give it a try too although you haven’t really heard of the brand before. This is because the celebrity passes down credibility to the brand.

It gives you the thought that if the celebrity uses it, it should be good. It is one way that helps in creating brand awareness but hiring a celebrity to advertise your product isn’t cheap at all. There is another type of influencers besides celebrities.

They are social media influencers. These social media influencers are deemed to have expertise and knowledge in that particular field (niche), for instance, cars or makeup and beauty. Eventually, they gain other people’s trust and follow.

You can try to reach these influencers in a few ways. Influencers usually include their email on their profile for contact and sponsorship purposes. You can also try leaving comments on their posts as well as sending them direct messages to contact them.

5. Sponsor Events

Sponsoring events is a good way to get your name to not just big, but targeted audiences too. For better results, you need to sponsor events that are relevant to your brand.

What do sponsors usually do? Sponsors bear parts of the costs for organizing an event in return for advertising. Sponsors can choose to give out free products as prizes or put in money (which will be used as funds) to get their brand and logo around the event area.

Different types of events have different types of audiences. For instance, marathon events are mainly attended by athletes.

If you are a new brand that sells running apparel, a marathon event is a perfect event to sponsor. The audiences are the type of people who would buy your product because they use them.

6. Offer Freemium with Credit

Freemium is a blend word formed from the word free and premium. It is a way to let consumers try your product or services for free. People love it as they get a taste of what the product or service does while not having any risk.

However, consumers are limited to several features and are required to pay a fee for additional features. Let’s take Spotify as an example, for the free version, they allow people to create playlists and save songs.

The free version includes non-skippable advertisements and does not allow users to shuffle their playlists. If users think the app would be great if it’s not for the two inevitable functions, people would not mind paying the small fee to enjoy the application fully.

Another benefit of offering freemium is that you can have your brand’s watermark or credit line. Some people may pay to have it removed while the others who don’t will see your brand every time they use it. Also, if they share your products, other people will be able to see it which indirectly promotes your brand for you.

Yes, giving out free things do cost us. But they bring good returns. Let’s talk about another method related to free stuff called freebies.

7. Give Out Useful Freebies

People love, enjoy, and appreciate free things. You can print your brand name on everyday items like shirts, pens, water bottles, and USBs so people can use them and carry them around. In other words, it is advertising for your brand wherever they go and having your brand in their home.

8. Do Advertising

Advertising is a great way to increase awareness. You can do online advertising as well as offline advertising and both will help you reach a wide audience. However, television, radio, and social media advertising costs are usually high. If you have the budget for advertising, I would recommend you to go for a press release. I’ll explain why in #9.

Instead of spending a huge amount of money to advertise on television, radio, and social media, you can go for car wraps. Cars wrapped with advertisements are a guaranteed way you can easily attract attention and reach a huge number of people unless they drive and walk with their eyes closed.

It is fairly obvious that in most areas, the number of cars on the road has increased dramatically compared to the past few years and is projected to double in the coming years.

You can definitely increase awareness by car wraps! Imagine the numbers of people on the road and sidewalk that will come across your advertisement!

Due to the distance between one place to another, people are required to drive. People drive to work, lunch, events and etc. Basically, people travel everywhere! Cars wrapped with your brand is a moving billboard for you.

On a side note, kudos to countries that are trying their best to reduce the number of cars, by setting up convenient public transportation, encouraging cycling, and many other ways, resulting in lesser carbon dioxide. Wraps can also be done on bicycles and public transports like buses and trains as well.

9. Post Brand Updates Frequently and Send Press Releases

A good brand consistently updates its customers about what’s happening around the brand. It allows customers to get up-to-date information and stay engaged with the brand. It also gives customers something to talk about among themselves.

The brands notify customers about new products, update to existing products, participation in a community event and many more. More updates mean greater brand awareness!

We observed that many brands have moved towards sending press releases as one of their brand awareness strategy. There are a number of press release services now that distribute your news to thousands of end-points including Reuters and Vertical News Network which explains why brands are heading to that direction.

Imagine the number of people who will come across your news and updates!

There are additional benefits to using press release services! Your news published by authoritative sites passes authority to your brand. It builds trust between customers and your brand.

Next, it is related to SEO. Based on a case study, it is discovered that press release works and affects SEO. The case study involved press releases which helped a blog rank for a meaningless word “leasreepressmm” which is the anagram created out of “press release”.

Read more about the case study here: CASE STUDY: Do Press Releases Work?

With press releases, people can find your news easier on the search engines which ultimately create brand awareness.

So, in #8, I’ve suggested you go for sending out press releases instead of advertising. Why? Here’s why. Sending a press release is more worth the money as compared to advertising. Don’t believe me?

Read more here where a press release has generated advertising 18 times its value.

10. Do SEO

Last but not least, if you own a website, SEO is a must to invest in. You want your website to be shown on the first page on Google when users search for something.

The first page is where website owners enjoy the most traffic share, from 71% to as high as 92% in recent years. You might want to try to be in the top 5 as it was discovered that the top 5 results receive 67.6% of clicks while the remaining five receive only 3.73% of clicks.

In most cases, websites after the first page do not get any traffic and visit. Just like I mentioned in my previous article, Page 2 onwards of a Search Engine Result Page (SERP) is widely known as the best place to hide a dead body.

Although you may not be a popular brand, it is possible to rank on SERP when you optimize correctly and effectively.

Just maybe you are already ranking for some keywords that you are not aware of, try using BiQ’s Rank Intelligence to uncover the keywords your website is ranking for. 

The goal here is to look for low hanging fruits, which are keywords ranking at #4 to #10, and optimize them to go up in rank or better yet be selected for the featured snippet.

Or uncover those rankings from #11 to #20 and further create a content silo to strengthen the keywords and get the prime estate on page #1.

Opportunities are endless when you are aware.    

Also, if you are looking for a way to better optimize your content, you can also find it at the same BiQ SEO Suite with Content Intelligence.

It is especially helpful in helping you strengthen your content’s contextual relevance by mapping your WordVector to the Top 10 ranking SERPs and letting you know what part of your content is not relevant enough.  

You can then dive deeper into the paragraph and analyze how to better improve its relevancy to your target keyword.

The best part is, you can access both these features for free especially if you are new to BiQ. Sign up now and get free tier access to explore BiQ! 

This 10th way is especially important. Because after all, having your website on the first page due to good optimization allows users to discover and read more about your products and services through your website.

Increase Brand Awareness Checklist

Here’s a quick recap of ways to increase brand awareness.

1. Use Branded Packaging
2. Provide Good Customer Service
3. Take Advantage of Social Media
4. Reach Out to Influencers
5. Sponsor Events
6. Offer Freemium with Credit
7. Give Out Useful Freebies
8. Go for Car Wraps
9. Post Brand Updates Frequently and Send Press Releases
10. Do SEO and Start with Low Hanging Fruits

With these tips, I believe that increasing brand awareness will not be an issue for you anymore. If you have any thoughts about brand awareness, do share with us and fellow readers in the comments section below.

Updated: 15 April 2024