What is brand awareness? Do you have it? How can you get it? - by Cara Joyce

Simply put, brand awareness is the familiarity your desired customers have about your brand.  Do customers recognize your company’s name? Logo? Have they heard about the products or services your company provides? If they don’t know about you, they can’t engage with you. 

What is the impression of your brand? Do you even have a brand? Do you feel your brand appropriately or adequately represents the image of your company you want to present to potential customers? It’s important to create a consistent brand image. Having a steady brand message is important and should be communicated in ways through which consumers become familiar with your brand and recognize it. Strong brand awareness leads to more sales and market share, especially in a competitive market.

But how can you make potential customers aware of your brand?  There are many ways to build brand awareness through the established channels of promotion, such as advertising; referrals; social media; blogs and vlogs; sponsorships and charitable works; tradeshows and networking events; direct and indirect targeted marketing campaigns. You have to sow many seeds to grow the customers you want. You need to introduce or reinforce your brand to your target audience, build relationships with those customers through brand recognition and then, eventually, close those sales. But it all starts with brand awareness. 

Why is brand awareness important? Well for starters it helps increase customer loyalty. Acquiring new customers can be a costlier process than encouraging the repeat business from existing customers. In fact, the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70% higher in success than when compared to selling to a new prospect at 5-20%.

In addition to customer loyalty, brand awareness can also help businesses drive their digital impact, exposing their brand to a new audience. Not just relevant to those in e-commerce, having a digital footprint in a screen-driven society is important for reaching your target audience. Did you know that the average person spends an average of 100 minutes a day on social media? Think of all the imprints of your brand on the eyes of all those future customers. Up and coming decision makers have grown-up getting most of their information from a screen, seeing a constant stream of professionally created, eye-catching content. It’s important to stand out in the crowd if you don’t want to get lost in it.

Are you still using the first website your company built?  Does your logo come from the online printing company you bought your business cards from? Maybe it’s time for a brand refresh.  Times are busy, now is a good time to focus energy and resources towards the future, building on recent successes, using them to expand your brand awareness, shaping the image of your company for when there are less customers with the same or more competition trying to capture them.  

Menagerie Solutions provides a variety of on-call marketing services.  We manage the minutia required to successfully market your company and build your brand, allowing you to focus on your core business.  Our services are al a carte or contractual, so we have cost-effective solutions for all of your needs, large or small. If you’re interested in learning more about brand awareness or how to go about increasing yours, we’d be happy to talk to you about your specific needs and help develop and execute a strategy.

Cara Joyce is the founder/owner of Menagerie Solutions, Tewksbury, Mass.