There’s more than one way to peel an orange, is that how the saying goes? Anyways, if you’re trying to generate leads for your business, there are similarly several ways to go about things. Outbound marketing campaigns? Absolutely. Cold calling? An enduring classic. Appointment setting? Go for it!
An often-overlooked avenue of lead generation is brand awareness. Working to cultivate a familiarity with your brand within your target demographic can have incredible results for your business, as customers—when faced with two near identical options—will choose the option they are more familiar with. Improving brand awareness requires a solidly defined brand identity, and a marketing strategy to push that identity and simultaneously increase brand recognition. It is important to note that brand recognition is not the same thing as brand awareness, but it does represent a small section of brand awareness and what you ultimately want to accomplish.
But how does brand awareness help generate leads? Put simply, if people are more aware of your brand and its offerings then you will experience increased brand equity. Brand equity is the perceived value of your brand in the eyes of customers. It could be the perceived value of your stock, your product offerings, or your company’s impact. Working to improve brand equity can attract more people to your business based on the positive reputation you cultivate. Partnering with a professional marketing agency, like Clever Samurai can help you get the boost to brand reputation you are searching for.
How do you increase brand awareness?
To improve brand awareness, it is essential to first determine your brand identity and create a brand strategy. Your brand identity will be whatever sets you apart from your competitors and embodies the public facing image you want your customers to associate with your organization.
A brand strategy will dictate the methods you employ to increase brand recognition and brand awareness. This will be comparable to a marketing strategy, but the focus will be less traditional as you’ll be pushing your brand as a whole instead of individual products or services. Your brand strategy will encompass the methods you employ to increase brand awareness, as well as the metrics you will work with to measure brand awareness. Let’s go through five methods that help with brand building, and five metrics to measure the success of your brand strategy.
Content marketing
Creating and distributing free, helpful content does wonders for your company’s reputation, and serves to position your brand as both a thought leader and an organization genuinely invested in the wellbeing of its customer base. The connection between content marketing and brand awareness should be clear, as content marketing aims to attract customers to your business by making prospects aware of your brand by providing value to their lives.
Helpful blogs, articles, research reports, and other pieces of beneficial media simultaneously help with brand awareness and reputation and make up an invaluable aspect of any brand strategy.
Events
Consider running your own events to promote your own brand. These could be product showcases, community gatherings, concerts, contents, or anything that fits your brand identity. If running your own events is too tall a task, consider sponsoring events attended by relevant demographics. Simply pushing your company’s logo and presence will build association in the minds of potential customers who attend these events, and when they come to a purchasing decision they may think of your brand over others.
Cultivate personality
Ideally, when people think of your brand, they should have a clear sense of the personality you are trying to get across. As part of your brand strategy, your company must decide on what that personality will be as it will inform all aspects of your marketing and branding efforts.
Are you a helpful, friendly entity, with fast response times to customer concerns? A knowledgeable consultant with a team of experts ready to be deployed? A no-holds-barred problem solver who drops everything to help their clients? The choice is yours, but what’s most important is consistency. The brand identity you decide on, and the personality you choose to promote should shine through in your content marketing efforts and your presence at events.
Advertising
When you think of advertising, your mind probably sees classic advertising campaigns built around promoting a particular product or service. However, advertising can play an important part in your brand strategy and can build brand awareness in a similar way to how traditional advertising campaigns build product awareness.
Through advertising, whether it be digital, print, outbound or otherwise, your company can communicate your brand identity, personality, and a broad overview of what you offer. Advertising mediums also afford you greater control over how your brand is portrayed.
Public Relations
PR efforts refine how your company communicates with your target demographics. This makes public relations work along with earned media the perfect tool to boost public perception of your brand. This equates to increased brand awareness and brand recognition, and thus represents an essential aspect of any brand strategy.
Intelligent PR campaigns can influence popular public opinion of your brand and increase brand equity through a perceived rise in value as your company receives positive media portrayal.
How do you measure brand awareness?
Once you’ve committed to improving your company’s brand awareness, it is important to monitor specific metrics to ensure you are on the right track. For passive measurements, you can look at direct traffic to your digital channels, and web traffic to your site in general. Besides that, you can measure social engagement which is a good indicator of increased brand recognition. Google alerts can be set up to notify you when content about your brand is posted, offering a qualitative and quantitative insight into how your brand strategy is performing. There is also the option of conducting simple brand recognition surveys, in order to determine how familiar a particular demographic is with your brand.
All of this can be a lot to handle if you do not have an internal marketing and analysis team ready to perform the necessary planning, analysis and upkeep. It could be best for you company to reach out to a company like 360Leads, where we have decades of experience in crafting brand awareness campaigns to drive qualified leads to your business.
