You can spend all the time in the world working on the look and feel of your brand and mastering the quality of your products and services. However, without the brand awareness to match your efforts, you simply won’t make the impact you’re looking for. But we want you to succeed! That’s why we’ve distilled a list of the very best tips to send your brand awareness through the roof. Implement these strategies, and you’ll experience a boom in followers, excellent customer loyalty, more social media engagement, and the chief outcome of brand awareness: more conversions.
What Is Brand Awareness?
The concept of brand awareness simply revolves around directing as many eyes as possible to your business and the products and services that it sells. If people don’t know your brand exists, they’re far less likely to find, consider, and purchase what you’re marketing. In the modern era, both well-established and emergent brands have more tools than ever before at their disposal to increase awareness, from old-school billboards and radio advertisements to social media marketing and tailored emails. While this sounds like a great advantage, countless brands are using the same tools to target the same people. Therefore, it’s not the tools that you have available that will take your brand awareness to new heights—but how you use them.
In an ocean of competition, modern brands can only succeed when they innovate and find new and attractive ways to earn recognition, drive conversions, and retain loyalty. Keeping this in mind, the process of building brand awareness falls into four key stages:
- Recognition: Promotional materials will allow potential customers to begin recognising your brand based on its name, products, and logo.
- Recall: Over time, customers will recall your brand without external prompts. It will come to mind when they require the product or service your business offers.
- Preference: Eventually, recall will transition into preference—especially when the quality of your product or service matches the impact and marketing presence of your brand.
- Loyalty: All of these prior steps culminate in customer loyalty—one of the chief goals of building and maintaining brand awareness.
However, brand awareness requires constant maintenance in saturated and evolving markets where competition remains high. Continuously producing shareable content, thinking of new ways to communicate your authentic brand story, and putting out consistent messaging will cultivate brand awareness, assist your sales funnels, and consolidate your company in the minds of potential and current customers.
Cultivating brand awareness will help your products and services stand out in saturated markets. Establishing your brand’s presence and story will eventually lead to customer preference and loyalty.
Importance of Brand Awareness of Social Media
There are numerous communication and marketing channels that businesses can leverage to increase brand awareness. However, many of them pale in comparison to the power of social media. A massive 94% of business leaders agree that social data and insights have an important impact on building brand awareness, reputation, and loyalty.¹ Because of this, 44% of business leaders estimate that their social media investment will increase by over 50% in the next couple of years.² Marketing on social media comes with a wealth of benefits, especially when it’s aimed at a clear target audience. It allows businesses to rapidly and directly engage with customers, foster a sense of community, stay relevant, and drive conversions.
Social media serves as the most effective channel for developing brand awareness for modern businesses. These platforms are low-cost, have massive reach, and help customers develop a consistent relationship with brands.
12 Tips to Improve Brand Awareness on Social Media
So, what steps can you take to increase brand awareness? How can you ensure that potential and current customers not only see your brand from time to time, but actively recall it, trust it, and associate it with what they need, when they need it? Check out the 12 useful tips below on how to raise awareness. Start giving your brand a punchy presence online, offline, and in the minds of those for whom your products and services are designed.
Know Your Audience
Welcome to the most important tip! Without ticking this box, it doesn’t matter how well you pull off the information that follows. If your content doesn’t reach the right audience, you’re wasting time and resources. Start out by creating customer personas that include age, gender, values, location, and need for your products and services. Once you’ve identified the personas and psychographics that resonate with your brand, you’ll know exactly who to target. Social media analytics, observing your competitors’ audiences, and conducting marketing research will help you to further refine your ideal audience.
Choose the Right Platforms
You’re now aware of your brand’s target audience. But how can you reach them? Social media marketing encompasses a handful of platforms, but your target audience likely has a preference for particular corners of the internet. To find the best social media platforms, you first need to establish where your target audience spends their time. For example, 32% of X, formerly known as Twitter, users are aged 18–29, whereas just 13% of users are aged 50–64. Meanwhile, though Facebook has around 2 billion active monthly users, most of its users are slightly older. Of course, age is just one demographic variable to consider, but the takeaway is that not all social media platforms are necessarily worth your time and energy when it comes to building brand awareness.
Make Diverse Content
Even once you’ve nailed down your target audience and figured out exactly how to reach them, you need to consider that individuals within this group will have different preferences when it comes to content. Some will feel more attracted to reels (short videos) and podcasts, whereas others will enjoy simple images and written posts. To make sure you cover all bases, diversify your content strategy, creating and publishing content that appeals to all within your audience. After publishing short-form posts, long-form posts, reels, podcasts, polls, and other materials, review your social media analytics to see what hit the mark and what missed.
Be Generous
Being generous can significantly boost brand awareness through several simple approaches. Acts of generosity help to enhance consumer trust and loyalty by demonstrating your company’s ethos and giving attitude, which shapes a positive brand image. Social sharing incentives, giveaways, and frequent promotions and sales all help to achieve this goal. Likewise, holding charity events or fundraising through various promotions can help to build a sense of community and purpose between a brand and its key consumers.
Create an Emotional Bond
Why is creating an emotional bond with your audience important for brand awareness? Excellent question! Consumers are twice as likely to share videos imbued with emotion.³ On top of this, 71% of customers recommend brands to others based on their emotional connection with them, and 70% of digital marketing professionals focus on building emotional connections. Furthermore, emotional materials are linked to a 70% likelihood of achieving a conversion. So, there you have it. Add emotional weight to your content in an authentic way, and you’ll reap the rewards in terms of brand awareness, customer loyalty, and conversions.
Maintain That Bond
An emotional bond can easily fizzle out if you fail to maintain it. So, how should you go about keeping that relationship alive and kicking? Aside from consistently producing emotional content, you should direct your social media team to strive to communicate directly with your audience. Quickly responding to comments and messages and creating interactive content will help to strengthen that emotional bond. Here, customers aren’t just passively watching your brand from a distance. Instead, they’re frequently interacting with it and, at times, steering the content rudder themselves. That sense of participation will augment any emotional bonds, resulting in a long, loyal, and meaningful relationship with a brand.
Build a Community
Creating a relationship between your brand and its customers helps enhance brand awareness and loyalty. However, creating a community among customers, with your brand at the centre, takes things to another level. Creating a dedicated community platform that encourages user-generated content can deepen the sense of involvement and investment in a brand. Likewise, bringing your community into virtual and real-world gatherings, such as online webinars or offline meet-ups, can consolidate these connections to the point where it builds an unfaltering loyalty—a priceless customer trait in highly competitive markets.
Work With Influencers
Working with social media influencers provides a fast and effective shortcut to drastically increase brand awareness. These online figures have already completed the hard work of building a large audience. Thankfully, many of them are open to pay-as-you-post or long-term sponsorship deals that will expose your brand to thousands or even millions of people. Simply find the influencers that have access to your niche and strike a deal that benefits both parties. In just a short time, with several effective posts from the right collaborator, you’ll be surprised at how fast your brand starts to grab attention.
Use Call-to-Actions
Well-crafted call-to-actions (CTAs) can help boost brand awareness by sending engagement through the roof. After finding out the exact angle that works with your audience, consistent CTAs across marketing platforms will help you maintain momentum and brand recognition through repetition. As well as improving engagement, CTAs that prompt the sharing of certain materials can also enhance the reach of your brand. Using brand-centred language, offering value in terms of discounts or free bonus content, and creating a sense of urgency are all factors that improve engagement with CTAs.
Leverage Trends
Trends in the world of social media marketing truly change like the wind. Although sometimes unpredictable, you can easily keep on top of them by assessing analytics, utilising social listening tools, and monitoring social media platforms. After identifying trends, you need to pull your marketing team together to figure out a way to align emerging trends with your brand’s identity. You can unlock an authentic link between your brand and a trend in several ways, including partnering with influencers, creating timely content with relevant hashtags, using your platforms to spark trend-related discussion, and even putting together trend-related events.
Consider Promoted Posts
Promoted posts are an easy and effective way to bring your brand awareness to new heights. Using advanced targeting options on different social media platforms, you can easily reach potential customers belonging to certain demographics with particular interests. Pair engaging content with platform analytics, and you’ll soon create a formula that allows your promoted posts to heavily augment organic reach efforts. Experiment with different formats as your promoted post campaigns develop, such as video ads, story ads, and other options, to see what works the best.
Track Your Brand Awareness on Social Media
So, how do you know all of this effort to increase your brand awareness is paying off? Well, you can simply keep track of particular metrics that show you’re moving in the right direction. For instance, monitoring engagement rates, impressions, and mentions are reliable markers for assessing the success of your brand awareness strategy. You should also routinely take a look at hashtag performance, follower growth rate, and referral traffic. These numbers will inform you on the effectiveness of your strategy, and whether you should produce more of the same to continue your success, or change things up for better performance.
Implementing diverse strategies, from leveraging trends to teaming up with influencers, can have a substantial impact on brand awareness. Follow up with each big move by tracking your efforts to ensure you’re making the correct choices.
Improve Your Brand Awareness Now
There are countless potential customers out there waiting to form an emotional, engaging, and loyal relationship with your brand. The key to reaching them? Cultivating brand awareness. You’re now equipped with the very best tips to bring your brand out of the realm of obscurity and into the spotlight! Using the right social media platforms, publishing promoted posts, teaming up with compatible influencers, and harnessing eye-catching CTAs will all help to rapidly grow your brand awareness. So, what are you waiting for? Use these and the other tips we shared to place your brand among the greats!
References:
1. Gomez R. 7 statistics that prove the importance of social media marketing in business. Sprout Social. Published September 18, 2023. https://sproutsocial.com/insights/importance-of-social-media-marketing-in-business/
2. Sprout Social. The 2023 State of Social Media: AI & Data Take Center Stage. Sprout Social. Published 2023. https://sproutsocial.com/insights/data/harris-insights-report-2023/
3. Alcantara FJ. 21 Statistics That Prove Emotional Marketing Works. Spiralytics. Published April 17, 2023. https://www.spiralytics.com/blog/statistics-prove-emotional-marketing-works/
