You do want to expand your brand awareness but don't know-how.

Speed SEO provides a detailed guide to help you build your brand awareness.

This guide to brand awareness provides you with a list of the key benefits you need to build your company's brand awareness from the ground up. We do not focus on any one strategy but take a holistic approach to build your online presence as a business owner.

Read on to learn more about increasing your brand awareness.

Introduction to brand awareness

Most small businesses fail, and it's not because they do not have a great idea or a poor marketing strategy. According to Trading Economics, the number of bankruptcies in the United States dropped to 16.140 in July 2021, down from 22.232 in January 2020.

Sound familiar? ¿No? Let me help you out... More online activity due to the current world situation motivates companies to be more present in the online marketing industry.

The reason for this is that most entrepreneurs have no idea how to build a brand and market their business online, offline and in person.

Building a strong brand is the first step to success. This guide will help you to do just that.

What Is Brand Awareness?

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Brand awareness is the extent to which an individual or a product, service or idea has been made known in public. Brand awareness can be achieved through many different methods including advertising, product placement and word of mouth. Brand awareness can be achieved through advertising, word-of-mouth referrals, and other forms of marketing.

By definition, brand awareness is the process of making your company, product or service known to the public through advertising, word of mouth and other marketing activities.

In other words, brand awareness is the degree to which your customers know your brand. Is a marketing term that describes the degree to which consumers recognise a product by its name.

Creating brand awareness is an important step in promoting a new product or reviving an older brand.

Ideally, brand awareness encompasses the features that differentiate the product from the competition. Brands with high brand awareness are generally referred to as "trending", "buzzworthy" or simply "popular".

Building brand awareness is important for marketing and promoting your business and products, especially in the early stages of a business.

The importance of brand awareness

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With low brand awareness, you are invisible. If you have a strong brand, people remember you and want to work with you or buy your products.

A big part of marketing is building a brand. We will talk about the basics of branding, how to build a brand and what makes a good brand.

The importance of brand building for a startup is obvious. It's not enough to have a great product that solves the right problem, you also need to get the word out.

Many startups make mistakes in branding when they are just starting out. They focus on the features and benefits rather than the brand itself. But not you, you are reading this guide!

Bad branding can, for example, lead to a company becoming known for its poor customer service.

A good example of good branding is Apple. The company is known for its design and innovation, not just the products themselves. This is a big advantage in a crowded market like smartphones.

How Brand Awareness Works

Brand awareness is an important component of brand communication and thus a key component of marketing. Brand awareness can also serve as an economic moat that prevents competitors from gaining additional market share in a category.

It is increased through the use of advertising and marketing strategies.

The way it works is as follows:

- a company wants to increase the awareness of its brand and therefore uses advertising, marketing strategies or both to achieve this goal.

- the target audience sees the advertising and becomes aware of the brand as a result.

- the target audience becomes more familiar with the brand.

- the familiarity leads to an increased preference for that brand, which means that the public may prefer it to a competitor.

- if another brand tries to take some of the market share from the company, it will have a hard time because people have already developed a preference for the company's brand.

The process of brand awareness is not difficult, but it can be very expensive. Companies competing in the same market, for example, may spend millions of dollars on advertising to make their brand name known.

Types of Brand Awareness

There are different opinions about how many types of brand awareness there are. Some say there is only one type of brand awareness, others claim there are two types, and still others believe that the number of different types is even greater than this. In this article, we will try to unravel the mystery.

Wikipedia tells us that brand awareness is divided into two groups:

- Brand recall 

- Brand recognition 

Now, following our experience in the industry, we agree with Wikipedia, but we call these two types of brand awareness "Awareness from Within" and Awareness from Outside.

-Awareness From Within.

This is when people know about your product because they have seen it, read about it or heard about it. This type of awareness occurs when your target audience is close to your product.

-Awareness From Outside.

This is when people have heard of your brand but do not know much about it beyond that. This type of awareness occurs when your target audience is far away from your product. When they know about your product because they have seen it in advertising or because they have seen someone else use it.

These types of brand awareness work completely differently. If you have brand awareness from within, it is important to get the message out there so that word gets around and more people become aware of your product.

If you have brand awareness from the outside, then you need to design your product to catch the attention of people who are close to your product. It is important that they know what makes your product so special.

The reason why it is important to gain brand awareness from the inside and not just from the outside is that a person who is only made aware of something from the outside will not know what makes your product so special. They will simply think that you are a generic product and they will not understand why they should buy your product instead of the other one.

The "first-come, first-served" rule:

This principle applies not only to SEO but to all online marketing. You should always try to be the first option that comes up before your target group.

It's not a good idea to have your brand name appear on the second or third page because it does not get as much attention there as it does on the first page. If you appear on the first page, people will see your brand name frequently and may even remember it.

Check this video to complement the information above:

https://youtu.be/ZdH2u_DEIbw

How to build brand awareness

There are several ways to increase brand awareness. You can use advertisements, events and sponsorship, online and offline.

Building brand awareness with Advertising:

To increase brand awareness through advertising, you need to promote your product or service in a way that is different from the other brands. You can use a catchy jingle or slogan that always refers to the product.

You can also use a celebrity to promote your brand so that people remember and associate it with that person.

Building brand awareness with Events:

Another way to increase awareness of your brand is through events. You can host a launch of your product or service and invite the media to cover it.

Events are a great way to get your brand known.

To create an event that increases awareness of your brand, you need to make sure that the event is different from other methods such as social media, local events and advertising. 

Building brand awareness with Sponsorship:

Sponsorship is also a great way to increase brand awareness. You can sponsor events, sports teams and even individual players to get the name of your product or service out there.

Stay consistent with your branding and voice so your audience can easily identify you.

Measure the effectiveness of your strategy to make necessary adjustments.

How to Increase Brand Awareness

A few ways to increase brand awareness are by developing a strong social media following, creating content that is relatable to different demographics and creating a personalized experience.

Now that you know where brand awareness comes from, you need to know how to increase it. It is not enough to just be present in the market. You have to make sure that your brand is perceived by as many people as possible.

To increase brand awareness, you need to have a strong brand that people can trust and rely on. You also need a strong marketing strategy to make your brand known.

Brand awareness can be increased through a carefully planned marketing programme in line with your brand strategy.

A balance must be struck between short-term acquisition and long-term brand building.

Do not forget long-term customer acquisition!

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🏆 Pro Tip: Create killer, branded content

Content is one of the best, if not the best, ways to build and increase awareness of your brand. Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach that focuses on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and engage a clearly defined audience - and ultimately drive profitable customer actions.

Bill Gates said back in 1996 that content is where the real money is made on the internet. The newspaper is no longer live, but Web Archive is our option (Link)

It's easy to find something you like, but it's hard to get people to like and share what you like.

Every time you publish a new piece of content, you are competing with millions of other pieces of content that are similar to yours.

How to Measure Branding effectiveness

"Is it possible to measure brand awareness?" you may ask, "do not I need a big market research company for that?"

Yes and no.

Although brand awareness cannot be measured in the traditional sense, it is something that every business needs to track. One way to do this is to survey customers or track customer recall. This can give a general idea of how well the company's marketing efforts are working and where improvements are needed.

You can use aided and unaided surveys:

Aided and unaided surveys measure different aspects of brand awareness. Aided questions ask respondents what they know about a particular company or product, while unaided questions ask them how likely they are to recognise a particular company or product when presented with logos/brand names.

In addition, companies can use various methods such as focus groups and interviews to measure brand awareness. Finally, reach should also be measured. To calculate reach, the number of people who have seen or heard about the brand in the last month should be taken into account.

The truth is that tracking a brand internally has never been easier. But before you play with the wide variety of brand tracking tools, do your research:

- Social Media Monitoring

- Hashtag Tracking

- Competitor Spying

- Brand Mentions Monitoring

You better start with a good strategy.

For example, if you want to track mentions of your brand on Twitter, it's important to know what you are looking for and why. You might want to find out what people think about your brand, or you might want to know how often a competitor's brand is mentioned compared to yours.

The strategy should also depend on the type of data you want to collect. For example, if you are looking for mentions of your brand or your products on social media, the data should be in text form, not images.

Mentions on social media related to branding:

There are three main aspects of social media that contribute to brand awareness:

- reach

- sentiment

- engagement.

Reach is the number of people who see an update to a social media account.

Sentiment is the response of people who see your brand and how they feel about it.

Engagement measures how often or not someone shares or likes something about your brand on social media.

https://youtu.be/Gc2ifVqR_EU

Hashtag Tracking in relation to branding:

Hashtag tracking is also a way to measure awareness of your brand or product on social media. It can help you see what people are saying about it and how often they share posts with your hashtags.

#Hashtags are created by using the pound or number sign before a word. Hashtags can be used to find posts on any topic, but are most commonly used to find posts about events or a brand.

#Hashtags can be used in your posts on social media and on photos and videos you upload to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google+. it. The three main ways people use hashtags are to search for posts on a topic, to interact with other users and to share content.

Competitor Spying and how it works with your branding measurement:

The best way to measure the effectiveness of your brand awareness is to follow a competitor and see what they do and how their customers react. In this case, you need to take into account that you are also following your competitors and that they may be doing the same. The best way to do this is to use a "Brand Mention Tracker" like Google Alerts.

Business Mentions Monitoring and strategy:

Monitoring brand mentions is an important part of your brand awareness strategy. There are many ways to monitor mentions, both online and offline:

- - Monitoring brand mentions can be done through social media, blogs, forums, etc.

- - Offline monitoring can be done via print media, radio interviews or public appearances.

Monitoring mentions gives you a sense of how well your brand is performing, and Google Alerts helps you find mentions of your brand online for free. While it's not possible to monitor every mention, it's important that you keep an eye on the most important ones.

Your customers are saying something about your brand you need to know that and understand how they perceive it. It also helps you improve your brand and take corrective action when needed.

There are many easy ways to check your brand's awareness. It just depends on how deep you want to dive, and which metrics fit the campaigns and strategies you are using. 

From this point on, you can (and should) measure brand awareness without the help of outside experts. Ultimately, all the relevant data already exists within your organisation, you just need to know where to look.

The tactics we are about to share with you range from simply monitoring certain types of website traffic to conducting regular brand tracking studies throughout the year. Ideally, you should combine these tactics to get an accurate overview of your brand awareness.

One final point before we begin: It is important to know that brand awareness and brand recognition are two different things, but they often go hand in hand.

Some methods of measuring brand awareness include surveys and tracking customer recall.

10 simple and effective methods to measure branding effectiveness.

Method #1: Internet Brand Mentions Frequency

Let us start with a simple but very effective method for measuring brand awareness, the Internet Brand Mentions Frequency. The formula is as follows:

IBMF = (number of mentions / 365 ) X 100

We created this formula with very simple logic. We wanted to know how strong the awareness of a brand is over the course of a year. 100 is the maximum score.

Method #2: Google Forms

Method two is also very simple. It consists of launching a brand awareness survey. All you need to do is use a tool like Google Forms. The survey can also be conducted by a professional survey company. The formula to measure your brand awareness via a survey is as follows:

BA = (number of people who know your brand/number of people who have heard about your brand ) X 100

The survey should be conducted with an appropriate number of questions to give you the input you need.

Method #3: direct traffic growth

Method three is related to your direct traffic growth, which is the number of people who visit your site directly. You can measure this by using Google Analytics or other similar tools.

Method #4: organic traffic growth

The fourth method is related to your organic traffic growth, which is the number of people who visit your site via search engines or targeted keywords. You can measure this also by using Google Analytics or other similar tools.

Method #5: referral traffic growth

This method involves measuring your referral traffic growth, which is the number of people who visit your site via links from other sites. You can measure this also by using Google Analytics or similar tools.

Method #6: social media growth

The sixth method is related to your social media growth. You can measure this by using Facebook Insights or analytics tools provided by major social networks.

Method #7: email list growth

The seventh method involves measuring your email list growth, which is the number of people who subscribe to your email list. You can measure this also with tools provided by your email platform.

Method #8: earned media

The eighth method is related to your earned media, which is advertising you receive organically, or without you paying for it. You can measure this with tools like Ahrefs or SemRush.

Method #9: earned links

The ninth method is related to your earned links, which are links you receive organically, or without you paying for them. You can measure this with tools like Ahrefs or SemRush.

Method #10: number of followers

The tenth method is related to major social media networks and their number of followers

Method #9: share of voice

The ninth method is share of voice, which is the ratio between the number of shares, likes and comments your content receives, compared to other competitors in your niche. The bigger this ratio is, the better you are doing.

Method #10: bounce rate

The tenth method is your bounce rate, which is the ratio between visitors that visit only one page on your website and leave without viewing a second page. The lower this number, the better.

There you have it, 10 very powerful and proven ways to measure brand awareness. If you know other methods, which there are, please share them in the comments.

Which are the Branding metrics you should take care of?

These are the KPIs or Key Performance Indicators you need to track for your brand awareness campaign.

- Internet Brand Mentions Frequency

- Traffic growth

- Organic traffic growth

- Referral traffic growth

- Email list growth

- Bounce rate

- Total Followers (in all your active social media channels)

- Conversions

- Click Thru Rate

7 Main benefits of brand awareness:

The more people know your brand, the more people will buy your products and services. If you are a small business, brand awareness is one of the most important things you can do to increase your sales. And if your business is growing, it will still be one of the most important things you can do to keep growing.

We can list the most important benefits as follows:

- more people will know about your brand and maybe even buy from you.

- you will have more visitors to your website, which means more sales of products and services.

- more people will follow you on social media.

- improved customer retention and loyalty.

- you will have more people recommending you to their friends.

- you will have a better chance of finding investors, i.e. you will be able to hire new employees and grow your business.

- stronger brand equity, i.e. the value of your brand, which essentially depends on how many people like it. A strong brand means more sales, a stronger business and more money in your pocket. https://speed.cy/business/the-power-of-brand-awareness-for-businesses