Establishing Brand Awareness
How can you establish brand awareness?
Understanding how to establish brand awareness is important to ensure that you don?t throw all your time and energy into random ideas only to find you have to go back and create structure and focus to make the best impact.? While it does take more effort upfront, it saves you in the end.
Four Ways to start establishing ?awareness:
- Be a Person, Not a Company
Create a brand persona.? What would your brand look like if it were an actual person? What would it talk like??Is it serious, or laid-back? Is it inspiring or entertaining? Give your brand a face and voice.? This will also help you so that there is a guideline that allows consistency if there are multiple people working with the brand.??A fantastic example of creating a brand persona is Kate Spade.? The essential tone, feel, and look of the brand has been consistent regardless of the different hands it has been in.
- Socialize
Engage and socialize with your audience and target audience. ?Hang out where they hang out, be part of the community. ? Socializing helps to build trust with your audience as well as build authority that you are knowledgeable in the topic area.
3. Create the Narrative
Setting up the narrative for how you want the brand to be perceived is important. ?Having a brand story helps people to relate and understand your business.
4. Make Sharing Easy
Have easy share icons at the top and/or bottom so that it is easy for people to share. ?It’s so frustrating when you want to share an online post but can’t find any way to easily do it.
Building Awareness
Once you have your foundation, it is now time to build upon it. There are several ways to do that such as:
Create free content
You could offer a helpful checklist, ebook, digital organizer, something related to your business that will help your audience.
Sponsor Events
Remember that building your awareness offline is important as well. ?This can be done by sponsoring local events or charities. ?There are online events that you can sponsor as well, but don?t discount the value of offline methods as well.
Create a personality
Using your brand persona you want to further develop that with personality. ?Create and understand the personality of your brand both to ensure consistent messaging and because it allows people to connect more on a personal level.
Create a Podcast
Use topics to relate the overall brand message and products/services. ?This is a great way to share information as well as make connections with other people and businesses. ?Podcasting is a growing market that can definitely open new doors.
How Do I Measure It?
There are qualitative and quantitative ways to measure awareness. ?Quantitative data will tell you where traffic comes from and what it does on your site. Qualitative data will help you understand why it happens.
Quantitative
Direct Traffic
Site Traffic
Social Engagement
Qualitative
Social Listening
Surveys
Measuring your awareness will help make it easier to see what is working and what isn?t. ?You can make changes/tweaks to improve. ?It?s important to use a baseline so that you can see how your changes have affected the awareness of your brand.
