What is Brand Awareness: Start a Professional Brand Marketing Recognition Rightly 2022

Someone who is new to business branding will ask “what is brand awareness?”. One truth about brand recognition is that it has a positive impact on any marketing strategy, customers’ perception and earnings.

Brand names like Apple, Nike or Google has proven to give its company more impact than any other marketing strategy employed by the company itself. And this is why you hear people saying we’re “Apple people,” “Nike people,” or “Trader Joe’s” people.

That’s what brand exposure and visibility is responsible for.

Getting to understand what is brand awareness, your business gets infused into your customers’ lifestyles and their buying habits such that they don’t think twice before becoming a loyal one.

This guide will provide you with a better understanding about why your brand needs visibility and exposure, establishment of itself amongst your audience and ways to create a campaign to let your brand continuously grow and blend with your business.

Let get started…

What is Brand Awareness?

Brand awareness is how used-to is your brand to your target audience or customers and how well your brand is recognized. Brands with high brand exposure are usually talked about and referred to as trending, buzzworthy, or simply popular.

Establishing what brand awareness is for your business is more valuable when you run a campaign and start promoting your company and products, particularly in the early stages of a business.

Brand recognition may seem like an unclear theory, and in reality, it is. But for marketers and business owners out there who loves to measure success with neat and tidy numbers, brand awareness will likely annoy you.

Now that we have dealt with what is brand awareness, let move on to why you need brand exposure in marketing – this section will help you understand the motive of brand knowledge.

Importance of Branding Exposure in Marketing – Brand Recognition

However, simply for the reason that branding isn’t a metric that can be absolutely verified doesn’t mean it has no value. Brand knowledge is very important for your business’s success and generally your marketing goals.

Here’s why.

1.    Brand Exposure Promotes trust.

Recently, in this era where almost everything is digital related, most online users rely on extensive research and others’ opinions before making any decision to make purchases, brand trust is everything.

As soon as a consumer connects to your brand, they’re more expected to make recurring purchases with little to no consideration. Brand knowledge and exposure is the one that bridges the gap between trust and loyalty leading to product awareness.

When a business establishes what is brand awareness into its image, it builds that brand trust. While you put a well-known face to your brand name, users can trust you easily. Your brand recognition efforts give your brand a public figure and an outlet to showcase sincerity, receiving feedbacks, and telling a story.

These are all techniques that we, as individuals, build up trust with one another. The human-brand relationship isn’t any different.

2.    Brand awareness builds relationship.

Okay, let’s get this: the minute you’ve had a paper cut, definitely you’ll put on a Band-Aid. Once you had a demanding question, your next friend is Google. While you needed to make a few copies, Xerox is your help meet. And as you pack for a nice picnic, I know your next companion is to a Coke to drink.

Am I being truthful? Most likely. But then again … notice how the some of the words above are bond and capitalized. Those are brand names, not nouns or verbs.

Now, let put aside their brand names and refer to them as for their functions, Band-Aid would be talked about to as bandage, Google, as a search engine, and Xerox as a copier or as a photocopy machine or a printer. On the other hand, it’s more fun to refer to the brand itself, still if we aren’t using their particular product.

Now this is what is brand awareness in its definition. It allies actions and products with specific brands, subconsciously encouraging us to interchange common words with branded names. And as you already know it, just a paper cut or picnic is doing the marketing for us.

3.    Brand recognition builds brand equity.

Brand equity defines your brand’s value, this is established by consumers’ encounters with and general view about your brand. Positive experiences and perception equate positive brand equity, and it also goes for negative views.

Here are a few useful things that come from optimistic brand equity:

1. Better prices due to higher perceived value
2. A higher stock price
3. The capacity to grow business through product or service line extensions
4. Greater social impact due to brand name value

Ways a brand establish (and increase) brand equity?

By creating brand awareness and regularly pushing positive experiences with the brand. Brand awareness is the ground work of brand equity.

The minute a consumer become aware of your brand, they start to identify with it without help, they seek it out to make a purchase, they’ll also begin to prefer your product or service over other related brands, and establish a loyalty that not only branches on other purchases but also inspires endorsements to family and friends.

This is why brand recognition and exposure is so important. Your brand creates trust with your customers, creates positive relationship, and builds invaluable brand equity that lets your brand to become an everyday name and consumer prime.

Ways to Create Brand Recognition in Marketing?

Building brand awareness for the general public don’t just start overnight but must follow particular precepts and brand exposure is not all about just mere advertisement or marketing campaign.

But it’s an outcome of many concurrent efforts that spread past trying to get recurring customer that buys.

If you anticipate to raising awareness about your brand by just running a few product ads on Facebook, sorry, you may not go far. Because what would happen is, your consumers will concentrate on the product not your brand, and also your ad will also lack impact beyond a simple sale.

So here are some ways to establish a solid brand awareness base and make a lifelong impression with your audience:

1.    Define Yourself More Than a Company that Sells Things.

The first step to establish your brand image is to define yourself more than what your business sells. Let say you meet a friend;

What are those things you’ll want to know about the person? their hobbies, passions, likes and dislikes, and more. The way they speak, what they like talking about, and what stuff gets them motivated.

These are the qualities your brand should be defined on and promote about itself. So to leave a positive impact with your audience, you’ll got to define yourself more than just a company selling stuff.

How different would you express yourself? What words would you use if you had to introduce your brand to a new friend?

Therefore, what is brand awareness? It’s about who you are and how your audience define you.

2.    Use the Social Media

Either been an introvert or extrovert, outgoing or quiet, every one humans gain from social networking and spending time with one another both online and offline. This is how we stay associated, acquire new things, and come to be known by others.

The same ripple effect goes for your brand. If the only time you connect with others is when you’re trying to make a sale or get support, then you won’t be known as anything away from a business with a particular target and the same goes for a person.

To increase awareness of your brand, you have to be social. Social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Quora and many other are great to socializing. That is, you’ve got to post on social media about things separate from your product or services but around your industry.

Network with your audience by asking questions, commenting on posts, or retweeting or sharing content you like.

Handle your social media accounts as though you were a person seeking to make friends, not a business trying to earn money.

According to Webershanwick, above 50% of brand recognition and exposure comes from online sociability. So being social leads to greater brand awareness and simply being exposed.

In conclusion; what is brand awareness? It’s how well you socialize with your social media networks.

Related Article: Reasons why social media is important to your brand.

3.    Use Storytelling

Storytelling is an exceptionally influential marketing tactic, whether you’re selling a products or advertising your brand. Why? For the reason that it gives something genuine for your audience to hold onto.

Creating a good story around your brand refines it and gives it penetration. And merging this said story into your marketing naturally sells your brand along with your products or services.

What should your storytelling be about? Anything, with the understanding that it’s true. It can be the storyline of your founder, the account of how your business had its original product idea, or the propelling story of how your small business made it in this big world.

General public like hearing stories about each other. Truthfulness is impactful, and it can lead to a big improvement in what brand awareness is to your business.

So, what is brand awareness? It is the quality and truthfulness in your storytelling.

4.    Make sharing easy.

As part of creating brand exposure, irrespective of your field, product or marketing strategies, it’s very important that you make it easy for your audience to quickly distribute your content. This content could be videos, product page, sponsored posts, blog posts. Irrespective of what it is, make it shareable.

Word-of-mouth marketing is the one of most effective technique to establish trust and awareness among customers. If somebody sees that a friend or family member vouch for a product or service, they’ll take notification of that product and brand.

Is this a brand worth looking at and into? Do they have other terrific products I can trust? What are their social networking accounts like, and what do they talk about?

If you make it easy to post about your product and service, consumers will raise brand visibility for you by humbly clicking “Share” button.

So what is Brand awareness? It all is about impact.

It’s about relating with your audience in ways that don’t simply ask for money, participation, or loyalty.

Suppose you made a new friend. If they asked for any of the above, you’d almost certainly laugh and walk away, right? Not only is that a small-minded style to friendship, however it also leaves no lasting impact on you.

So the same goes for creating brand awareness among your audience.

Getting Started with Brand Strategy for Your Exposure

What are things you can do to expand your well-known brand awareness and build on a strong foundation? What are you able to you do as a brand to campaign for awareness and constantly increase it?

Here are a number of campaign ideas to increase your brand recognition:

1.    Offer freemium.

Freemium is a business fashion that propose a simple product or product line for free, only charging for any products considered to be premium or enterprise-level. It’s a general pricing strategy for software service companies, like HubSpot and Trello.

Putting forward a freemium option lets customers to get a flavor of your brand and product previous to making a purchase. It’s a try-before-you-buy opening that can, technically, last forever (as contrasting to a free trial time that some companies choose).

It’s normal to offer a freemium option with the circumstances that the brand’s logo will be displayed on any public-facing parts of the product or service. This makes freemium a win-win state: The consumer gains the product for free, and the brand contracts free advertising as soon as consumers use it. 

TypeForm is an additional great example of this. TypeForm offers a freemium option of its survey software, but customers must append a thank-you page that showcases the TypeForm logo and message.

Although this is depending on your kind of business and product offer, Freemium may be the best approach to increase awareness of your brand among your audience.

2.    Create free content.

These days, creating content is simpler than ever, which is a worthy thing as today’s consumers rely on the internet for any and all questions, concerns, and DIY projects. 

Content is a fun method to increase awareness of your brand since it’s the easiest way to show personality and share opinions and positioning on issues — two major elements that bring alive and improve your brand.

Content doesn’t only come in written form, either. You can as well create videos, infographics, podcasts, and more. Definitely, written content like blogs and downloadable guides are perhaps the easiest, on the other hand they’re absolutely not the only option.

Also, content doesn’t have to be on just your website, either. Others like guest posting and sponsored content provide openings to get in front of new audiences and branch out the type of content you create.

If your brand isn’t creating content, you possibly will be missing out on some major brand awareness opportunities. Content affords an amazing method to genuinely connecting with your audience despite the fact that you’re getting your brand name in front of people.

To learn more about content, check out our guide on content creation.

3.    Sponsor events.

Just how many anniversaries, performances, traveling fair, and expositions have you attended? These categories of PR events are usually not possible without the assistance of brand funding.

Take a look at a T-shirt, koozie, or string backpack you likely grabbed from the event. Do you see any brand names? 

Sponsoring events is a guaranteed way to get your brand in front of hundreds, thousands, or millions of people that will possibly fall into your target audience. Starting from banners to flyers to water bottles, your brand name will be all over the place if you sponsor an event.

Sponsoring an event also lets you to secure your brand name on an event that matches your personality, interests, and passions, implying that consumers will at that point associate your brand with that event and its image and character.

So again, what is brand awareness? It’s securing a brand name that matches people’s interest and personality.

Let’s consider Red Bull  as an example. Red Bull is an energy drink, and aside from any brand awareness efforts, we’d just consider it an energy drink. But then, thankfully, Red Bull took their marketing campaign to the extreme — plainly — by sponsoring risky sporting events like cliff diving and motocross.

They as well champion athletes. Today, we naturally relate Red Bull with bold and adventurous … and have confidence in that, if we drink it, we can be the same.

4.    Give your brand a personality.

Treating and handling your brand as a person and defining your story are the first steps to giving your brand a public figure. The next step would be instilling this personality into your marketing strategies. 

When you promote your products and services with personality, you can’t dodge but boost your brand awareness for the reason that your brand will stand out right through. Definitely, your buyers will take note of the pants or pasta you’re marketing, nevertheless they’ll as well experience your personality during the course of your advertising.

This is a pronounced strategy when combining your traditional marketing campaigns with brand awareness campaigns. Although they don’t at all times have to be one in the same, but they certainly can be. 

            *get the image of old spice man and append here*

Consider Old Spice..

Did you just picture the man on the horse? I did.

Their ads for their hygiene products are brimming with personality and humor, and they still reference their products throughout. The advert not only makes an impression on its viewers, but then again, just mentioning of the “Old Spice man” as well sends consumers back to YouTube to watch the advertisement … and to the store to buy some deodorant.

Again, what is brand awareness? It’s personalizing your brand image.

5.    Creating a Podcast.

In America today, more than one-third 12 and older listen to podcasts on a regular basis. There’s no doubt podcasts play an essential role in our lives … and marketing efforts.

Before now, podcasts used to be a difficult process, simply created by those with a studio and decorative microphone. Now, it’s straightforward than ever to create and publish a podcast, and doing so can do wonders for your brand awareness efforts. 

Why? For the reason that podcasts, similar to written or visual content, provide a way to connect with your audience genuinely. In its place of deliberately promoting your product or service (which isn’t the best way to boost brand awareness), podcasts give you the chance to teach, enlighten, entertain, or advise your audience and build trust by doing so.

What is brand awareness then, it is offering educative, entertaining content to your audience.

With podcast help you to talk on topics that relate to your overall brand message and products or services. Doing this helps them communicate the podcast back to your brand and continue to promotion awareness, too.

Building and increasing brand awareness is a continual process, just as sustaining a friendship or relationship at no time actually ends.

Increasing your brand awareness through campaigns gives you an opening to experiment in marketing and advertising prospects you’d lest not invest in — meaning new, great ways to connect with your audience.

You can now see the true definition of what is brand awareness? Now let talk about ways to evaluate the exposure of your brand.

Now that we’ve dealt with what is brand awareness and ways to create brand recognition, let move to the next stage.

How to Measure Brand Awareness?

A number of persons supposed that brand awareness couldn’t be measured! You might surprise to hear that brand awareness can be measure. But come to think it, how do you evaluate the success of your awareness efforts? How do you know which is working and which one is not? How do you top up your competitions?

Just the way other marketing metric works, so you can measure your brand awareness efforts.

The truth is that brand awareness can’t be evaluated in the traditional viewpoint. However, you can even review events and metrics that’ll help you measure where your brand stands in terms of reputation and consumer awareness.

Quantitative Brand Awareness Measures

Currently are a few ways to measure your brand recognition and find out where you can fine-tune your efforts: To measure quantitatively, check out these metrics:

1.    Direct traffic. 

To begin with, direct traffic is the outcome of users with intent typing in your URL and visiting your website. Your direct traffic figure will tell you by what means your marketing is prompting people to visit your website.

This is an essential metric, as many users today finds brands through social media, advertisements, or by typing in specific keywords associated to your brand or product. When buyers go directly to your site, it signifies they were aware of your brand previously.

2.    Website traffic numbers. 

Your website traffic numbers this the number that just echoes your overall site traffic, it’s also how much of the over-all internet users is checking out your content and spending time with your brand. It won’t to a certain extent tell you where your users are coming from, but that doesn’t matter, because they’re cognizant of your brand already to check it out.

3.    Social engagement. 

Engagement can be your social media likes, comments, followers, retweets, and more. It’s a mirror image of how many people are aware of your brand and socialize with it, along with how impactful your content is.

For instance, sites like Sparktoro can give you a detailed score for your Twitter impact.

Qualitative Brand Management Measures

This stage is the position your brand awareness “score” gets a little foggy. Nevertheless, these tactics can also assist you measure who and how many people are identifying with your brand. So to measure qualitatively, try:

1.    Searching Google and setting up Google Alerts. 

Following this step gets you up to boost how your brand is being spoken about online. It will notify you of whichever news or mentions by any third-party press. As your brand flourishes, its internet actual estate will magnify beyond your website, so keep an eye on that.

2.    Social listening. 

Social listening is observing social media management tools for organic comments and engagement. Who’s labeling your brand, mentioning it in commentaries, or using your hashtag in their posts? These softwares can help you find out that. And the more your audience is talking about your brand on social media, the more they’re aware of it.

3.    Running brand awareness surveys. 

This practice consists of getting straight feedback from your customers and audience and can be exceptionally helpful with not only identifying with who knows of your brand but then again also what they think of it.

SurveyMonkey or TypeForm  can help you release one and share them on social media or straightforward with your customers. This guide will assist you craft and promote them.

These measurable and qualitative metrics will help you figure out your brand exposure among your audience and the general public. It’ll certainly not be a perfect number, but keeping your rhythm on this measure will assist impact campaigns and stay associated to your audience.

Irrespective of how you measure brand exposure for your business, shun these common mistakes when measuring brand awareness.

Over to You on what is Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is a powerful although unclear model that can have the most important impression on your marketing efforts, consumer insight, and returns.

Keep an eye on these techniques for starting and building brand recognition for your brand, and you’ll discover yourself with a steadfast audience that identifies your brand among competitors, decide on your products time and time again, and vouch for their friends and family do the same.

I hope this guide help you, if I have missed anything please let me know in the comment box and don’t fail to share.