If you’re a business, you’ll know that one of the biggest challenges of reaching success is gaining an audience. Unless you have millions of dollars to pump into campaigns and some amazing business connections, it’s a long journey! But, it’s definitely worth it. There are ways you can increase your chances of becoming a successful company, too, like increasing your brand awareness via branding.
Brand awareness is basically how well your target audience recognises your brand when they see it. Nike, for example, has amazing brand awareness; you only need to show their iconic Nike Swoosh logo and most of the world will know who it is!
If you’re looking to increase your brand awareness, we’ve put together our top five tips to help.
1. Create Branded Content
Nowadays, most small businesses find marketing online the best approach. It’s often cheaper than marketing in the real world, can be more easily adjusted as you receive data, and brands can reach a much wider audience with ease. All of these – and more! – make the online world the base for brand awareness.
To start gaining awareness, you need to be building an online presence, and the best method to do that is with content. Content is an umbrella term for anything your brand makes that you can then share online, including:
- Images
- Text-based content (e.g. blogs)
- Video content
These assets can be entirely geared towards building brand awareness for your target audience. By creating relevant, engaging content you can catch the attention of your audience and start spreading the word about your brand. You can also use them to help your audience understand more about your brand, including things like your visual aesthetic, your tone of voice, and the ideas and morals that your brand believe in.
2. Distribute Your Content
When it comes to small business branding, creating the content is often the easier part. The hard part comes when you try and get people to see your content. With 95 million videos and photos posted daily on Instagram, 7 million blogs published daily around the web, and 720,000 hours of video uploaded daily on YouTube, there’s an extraordinary amount of content out there that you’re competing against. How do you even start to get noticed?
Content distribution is a key aspect of brand awareness. The top techniques to get yours out there include:
- SEO
- Social media sharing
- Email marketing
- Niche platforms (e.g. Reddit and Quora)
Usually, business branding will incorporate multiple channels of distribution. Look into a few to find the best options for your company.
3. Use Advertisements to Gain Visibility
There’s no doubt that adverts still have a place in the modern world, and this branding guide wouldn’t be complete without mentioning them! Nowadays, though, it’s not just traditional methods of advertising (like billboards, TV, and leaflets) that can get you noticed; there are digital methods too. Let’s take a look at some of the top options in both categories and the pros and cons they come with.
Billboard Ads
When it comes to small business brand awareness, billboards are probably going to be out of your budget. They’re brilliant for reaching a wide audience and you can target your audience based on where most of your demographic lives, but they’re incredibly expensive. Big brands tend to have a monopoly here.
Leaflets
Leaflets are a much better way to reach local areas than billboards. They’re cheaper to produce and distribute, and people tend to pay more attention to the post through their letterbox than a sign on the street. However, they can seem a little cheap if not done right and annoy your audience, which could tarnish your image.
Social Media Ads
The modern age of ads has introduced the world to social media advertising, and it’s a goldmine for small businesses. Easy to tailor and incredibly affordable, you can reach a highly targeted audience with minimal effort. Test it out on an Instagram post, putting only around $20 into your promotion, and see what happens!
Search Engine Ads
Google and other search engines are great for generating brand awareness, but you need to be spotted for it to work. With just under 60 billion websites on Google, that can be tricky! Search engine ads give you a leg-up over the big brands who might have a monopoly on your search results, letting you pay to be seen on popular searches.
4. Team Up With Influencers
Influencers already have a lot of brand awareness of their own, and by teaming up with them you can ride a second-hand wave of the benefits. Choose an influencer who has a similar target audience to yours, similar morals and beliefs, and who ties in well with your brand image. By promoting your business through their platform, you can reach a wide, trusting audience who are ready to be influenced.
This is instantly going to bump up your brand awareness. Even if a follower doesn’t decide to follow you there and then, they’ve been exposed to your brand and who you are, which is the very start of the sales funnel.
5. Keep Your Business Branding Consistent
One last point we’d like to make is that to build brand awareness, you must be consistent. Brand awareness that’s reached the pinnacle of success is when it takes just a color, a logo, or even a font to remind the audience of the business that uses it. McDonald’s have their arch, Apple has their… well, apple, and Coca Cola has that iconic font and standout red.
By sticking to the same messaging, colors, and general aesthetic, you can generate more recognition every time you put out a piece of content. Eventually, some members of your audience will only need to see a snippet of your content to know it’s you. Now that’s brand awareness!
Get Help Building Your Brand Awareness
If you have a small business in the Greater Houston Texas area, our team at REFUGE can help you build your brand. We have experts in branding, design, social media, advertising, and more, giving you a full-spectrum team to start building awareness using multiple approaches. Get in touch with our team today to find out more or let us know if you have any questions – we’ll be more than happy to help!
