Marketing News
Brand awareness – benefits and best practice
Interest in brand awareness keyword searches online continues to grow amongst businesses that want to market their products and services to new customers, showing how important organisations are taking the topic in 2023.
In fact, such searches on Google have tripled with further research by Nielson revealing that marketers state that their utmost priority for the year ahead is to build brand awareness.
So how do you make your brand stand out of the crowd?
With budgets under pressure, the customer funnel is crucial to making your spend work as hard as possible.
Put simply, the funnel is the journey a buyer takes to become your customer and it starts with awareness and that is why so many companies are concentrating on it.
Most importantly, the upper-funnel marketing efforts are a lever to drive future sales. They also generate an array of ancillary benefits that can drive efficiency of sales activations.
From awareness, the potential buyer moves to considering your product, preferring it over your competitors, then purchasing it.
Best practice
To build awareness, businesses need to employ various strategies such as valuable content creation, influencer marketing, interacting in real life with customers at events and trade shows, as well as utilising social media.
Why is the user journey online becoming so important to customers in terms of brand awareness and what does it take to convert them?
Brand awareness can have a staggering effect on sales with 91% of younger customer (pre-family) taking just one click to purchase compared to 84% of those with families and 67% in the older (post-family) generation.
And what’s more buyers are ignoring the served suggestions from browsers and going straight to what they know. That is why, for many, brand awareness is seen as a priority.
Get some insight!
Start by researching both existing and prospective customers, analyse when and how they became aware of your brand, identify key touchpoints and how best to reach them.
You can conduct a survey, with limited outlay, by using your own comms channels from your website, mailing list and socials, to connect with respondents to understand and measure brand image and make data-driven decisions. Or, if you can meet with your customers, you could organise a focus group, or hold face-to-face interviews – both of which are ideal for asking open ended questions, which can be crucial for assessing sentiment.
Take inspiration from the best brands
Look at how the big brands create awareness and mirror their techniques. One of the most cited examples is the ‘Share a Coke’ campaign, which at its core was a sampling campaign. Something most businesses can do, whatever your budget.
Apple, also makes the grade when it comes to awareness with their innovative launches and events, as does Dropbox with its ‘refer a friend scheme’ giving extra storage to those who signed up friends.
Whatever your business, making your brand known is certainly one of the key tenets of any marketing this year and one most marketeers can do with some creativity and customer insight.
Reading / Sources
The Era of Alignment. Nielsen’s 2022 Global Annual Marketing Report Neilson
Children and parents: media use and attitudes report 2022 Ofcom
