If you’ve ever studied marketing or sales, you’ll know that the first and biggest stage of any customer journey is awareness. Someone can’t become a potential customer if they don’t know anything about your brand.
Brand awareness campaigns can be a catalyst when building brand recognition and getting people into your marketing funnel. But it’s also important to have a brand that’s recognizable and relatable in the first place. Any good brand awareness strategy will focus as much on the brand and its style, voice, etc., as it will on outreach.
A good communications center like RingCentral can be key to your brand awareness. From simply monitoring brand awareness across your comms channels to being an active part of awareness campaigns, RingCentral can be a big asset when building strong brand awareness.
What is brand awareness?
Brand awareness measures how aware people are of your brand and its products/services. Ideally, you want the kind of brand awareness that goes beyond a vague understanding that your brand exists in the world. You want in-depth brand awareness – the kind that results in people knowing at a glance that a post is from your brand.
The holy grail of brand awareness strategies is for potential customers to instantly recognize a brand’s style, tone, products, values, etc., at a glance. No matter what channel they are on – be it social media, email, or even video call – potential customers should immediately recognize your brand’s style, branding, and tone.
Like anything else in sales and marketing, brand awareness can be broken down into a staged funnel. At the top of the funnel is ‘Awareness.’ This refers to basic understanding of what your brand is and what you do. This progresses down through ‘Knowledge’ (deeper recognition) and ‘Liking’) which hopefully comes as potential customers get to know your brand persona and branding better.
Finally, customers develop a Preference for your brand, followed by a Conviction that your product/service is the right choice. If everything goes well, this enhanced brand awareness should seamlessly funnel the customer through to Purchase/Conversion.
How can you measure brand awareness?
In order to get useful brand awareness metrics, you need to look at data-gathering methods that will give you a granular, nuanced view of your brand awareness.
You should use different sources of data to give you the best possible analysis. For example, a website visitor tracking tool will help you track your brand awareness by measuring how many people visit your site over time.
On the other hand, more qualitative methods will give you more in-depth insights. For example, RingCentral’s customer feedback surveys can be used to understand how existing customers perceive and recognize your brand and offering.
Alternatively, social listening can give you a nuanced view of how many people are talking about your brand and – even better – what they say. There are plenty of social listening tools out there that can help you create a highly targeted and accurate social listening process.
By combining these different tools and information points, you should be able to gain a full 360 view of the extent of your brand awareness and how customers view your business.
How to increase brand awareness
So, you’ve measured your brand awareness, and it’s not looking great. Or maybe it is, but you still want it to be better. What now? How can you get your brand awareness to where it should be?
Here are some ideas:
Create (and use) a brand persona
Free to use image sourced from Unsplash
A brand persona is like a ‘mascot’ that represents your brand on a relatable human level. You can create an actual mascot if you like, or a brand persona can be used purely for reference purposes so that your sales and marketing efforts know the ‘persona’ to use when creating branded content.
Ultimately, a brand persona will give your content a recognizable voice that your target audience can relate to. When done well, a brand persona should help people instantly recognize your brand’s ‘voice’ and values when they come across your social media posts or marketing strategy content.
It should also be used to guide the tone of voice across customer service and sales. So, regardless of who a customer talks to in your virtual call center, they should receive a familiar service and experience.
Here are some things to think about when building a brand persona.
- Your mission and values. Your brand persona should encompass and embrace your values and your brand mission.
- Your target audience. What kind of persona would your target audience relate to best? How would they talk? What channels would they use?
- What three personality traits most exemplify your brand?
- What sort of personas are your competition using?
Have recognizable branding
This may sound obvious, but a big factor in brand awareness is recognizability. If you want people to be able to instantly recognize your content as ‘yours,’ pick a unique style.
There are lots of elements that go into good branding. People have written an entire multi-volume book series about branding. So, if you are thinking of doing a major rebrand to build brand awareness, it’s definitely worth getting in touch with branding professionals for help.
But, in the meantime, here are a few quick tips to get you started:
- Establish the values you want to be associated with. This may not make much sense in the context of picking brand colors, but it’s more important than you might think. For example, an aromatherapy brand that specializes in calming, soothing scents probably won’t get the right reaction if they pink loud, clashing neons for their branding.
- Think about all graphic design elements. It’s useful to have a particular graphical style (ideally related to your logo, etc.) to use in your imagery.
- Look at what your competitors are doing. You want your branding to be unique, so it’s important to differentiate yourself from competitors. On the other hand, if a particular color is associated with your industry, it can be useful to have a color scheme similar to that of other brands. Think about how Facebook and LinkedIn (and Twitter before it became X) use similar shades of blue and white. The color scheme says ‘Social media platform’ while the rest of the branding differentiates them.
- Apply your branding consistently. Your website, your premises, your vehicles, your social channels, and all your marketing efforts should reflect your chosen branding in a consistent manner. Some brands also consider having a local or vanity phone number to suit their branding, create a feeling of familiarity, and be as memorable as possible.
Having devised a brand persona and a brand style, it’s helpful to put this together in a brand style guide to help out your content creators. Equally important is the impact of domain name on brand identity, as it can significantly influence customer perceptions and the overall memorability of your brand. Here’s a quick example of what a simple style guide looks like:
Collaborate with complimentary brands
Having a recognizable, unique, relatable brand persona and style is a huge step towards greater brand awareness. Now it’s time to put that branding to work by getting content out there.
As well as things like posting regularly on your social media channels, writing plenty of blog posts, and consistently creating shareable content, you can push brand awareness further by piggybacking onto other brands’ audiences.
Brands that complement your own brand will often be happy to collaborate with you. It’s free content for them and will get both of your brands in front of a wider audience. Perhaps you could swap guest blog posts, go on their podcast, or run a competition together.
Obviously, well-known brands are better to collaborate with than smaller brands, as they have a wider audience. But don’t discount smaller brands entirely. Smaller brands will often care more about the content you send them, resulting in a better quality campaign overall. What’s more, the positive experiences of collaborating with you could set you up with some great networking with this brand in the future as you scale together.
Engage with your audiences
Engagement is fantastic for social media algorithms. The more you engage positively with your audience, the more the algorithm will favor your posts.
So, monitor your communication channels closely (all of them, not just social media!) and engage in a timely manner when people reach out to you. Whether they’re simply making a comment under a Facebook post or they’re asking your website chatbot questions, it’s important to be aware of every engagement and to engage back as quickly as possible if need be. Omnichannel contact centers can help with this.
Raise brand awareness to scale your brand and strengthen your customer relationships
‘Awareness’ is the first stage of any marketing/sales funnel. By building brand awareness, you will increase the number of people entering the top of your funnel. If you can get the rest of your customer’s journey right, that should naturally translate into more conversions, loyal customers, and growth for your business.
FAQs
Can brand awareness directly influence sales?
Yes, increased brand awareness can directly influence sales by making consumers more likely to choose your brand when purchasing. Well-known brands often benefit from higher customer trust and perceived value.
What common mistakes should be avoided when trying to increase brand awareness?
Common mistakes include inconsistent branding, neglecting customer experience, over-promotion, not engaging with your audience, ignoring feedback, and failing to monitor and adapt your strategies. Increasing brand awareness is a constant process that relies on listening to your audience and reacting to shifting perceptions.
Originally published Sep 01, 2024, updated Sep 10, 2024
