Tips & Guides — 29 Apr 2022
7 Digital Brand Awareness Strategies
Whether it’s donuts and Krispy Kreme, coffee and Starbucks, or online shopping and Amazon, the biggest brands out there have the best brand awareness. So much so, that you can’t help but think of them when the product they sell or the service they offer is mentioned.
Brand awareness is key to the growth of any business. If you want to bring in new customers, build loyalty, and increase revenue, you need a brand awareness digital marketing strategy in place.
In this ultimate guide to brand awareness strategies and metrics, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about brand awareness, how you can improve yours, and how you can track it.
Digital brand awareness refers to how familiar online consumers are with your brand. That means for your brand to have high digital brand awareness, it needs to be recognizable, well understood, and trustworthy to online consumers.
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Brand awareness has three key components:
Customers need to know you exist. An awareness of your brand – its name, its logo, its social media presence – is the first building block of brand awareness.
It’s not enough for potential customers to know about your brand, they also need to know what you sell. Whether it’s a product or a service, there should be a clear association in customers’ minds between your brand name and what you sell.
The final building block of brand awareness is what makes your brand unique. What attributes and qualities does your brand have that make it stand out from competitors? Building brand awareness is about promoting more than a brand name and products, it should promote a range of associations, emotions, and qualities that you want attached to your brand.
Whether you’ve just started a software company or you want to improve your ecommerce marketing strategy, brand awareness should be a central part of your marketing campaign. Having a clear idea of your brand identity and brand voice is the first step, but once you have that down it’s time to prepare your brand awareness campaign.
Trust is essential to the success of any brand. A 2019 survey found that 81% of consumers need to trust a brand in order to buy from it. Brand awareness plays a huge part in this.
Brand trust means that customers are confident that your business is reliable, safe, and honest. These are the qualities of a trustworthy business that customers will be happy returning to again and again.
Digital brand awareness is even more important for companies that conduct business or sell products and services online. Customers hand over their data via your website or digital platform, so they need to trust you.
A strong digital brand awareness strategy will help ensure that when a potential customer needs to buy the product or service that you offer, your brand comes to mind.
High brand awareness creates an association between what you sell and your brand. Brand awareness campaigns can also create other positive associations with your brand, such as trustworthy, high-quality, safe, ethical, and so on.
Brand association is essentially the mental cues that your brand generates in your potential customer’s mind. Having a clear idea of what mental cues you want to generate will strengthen your campaign.
Brand equity is when the brand itself has value and not just the products or services it sells. High brand equity means your business has enough brand recognition that selling products with your brand name can generate more revenue.
For example, if you visit your local supermarket you’ll see lots of cola drinks for sale. The price of these varies but often the most expensive cola drink is the branded Coca-Cola drink. That’s because Coca-Cola has a high enough brand equity that it can sell its products for more than non-branded cola drinks.
Customers are willing to pay more for brands they recognize and trust – that’s what makes brand equity so valuable. By building brand awareness, you can add value to your brand identity.
But how exactly can you go about building brand awareness? It’s not enough to have a unique selling point and great products – you need to get your name out there. Here are seven proven strategies:
Content marketing is an important way to get your brand name out there, drive traffic to your website, and boost brand awareness. One tactic used by content marketers is guest posting on other websites.
Guest blogs should include original, relevant content that’s aimed at your target audience. Within your guest blogs there will be links to your website – known as ‘backlinks’, which also help your website’s search engine results page (SERP) ranking – and content within the post that recommends products or services like yours.
To score guest blog posts, look for websites, blogs, and online magazines that cater towards your target audience and get in touch with them. Content marketing agencies can also do this for you, and if you’re lacking in writers, even write the guest posts.
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is essential if you want to gain new customers and increase brand awareness. With 68% of online experiences beginning with a search engine, appearing high on SERPs continues to be essential for online businesses as one of the main ways new audiences will find you.
Search engine optimization can be performed on your website in a variety of ways. Creating content and webpages with relevant keywords is the first step, but there’s more to SEO than just keywords.
Ensuring your website has a fast loading speed, is mobile friendly, and is easy to navigate with a tight site architecture will help improve your technical SEO factors. Any piece of content uploaded to your website should be relevant, original, and unique.
Another type of content that is popular in digital marketing campaigns is infographics. Infographics are an exciting and accessible piece of branded content that will interest your target audience and (hopefully) encourage them to share it.
There are plenty of tools and templates online for creating infographics. Make sure your infographic uses your brand’s colors, name, and logo as well as images and information that is easy to read and digest.
Infographics should be made so that they can be shared across different social media platforms. They should contain relevant information to your target audience, clearly showcase your brand, and be worthy of sharing across social networks.
Infographics can work especially well for SaaS brands and other B2B companies. A company offering hosted PBX solutions, for example, could create infographics on business telecommunications that other companies can share on their own social pages, website, and blogs.
Referral marketing is a marketing strategy that allows you to leverage your loyal customers to reach a new audience. A referral program motivates customers to spread the word about your brand – essentially doing marketing on your behalf.
That said, creating a successful referral program that boosts brand awareness isn’t as simple as setting one up and letting your customers do the work for you.
Firstly, referral programs should be genuinely motivating and they should offer something to referrers that benefits both them and you. Future discounts, freebies, or gift vouchers are popular rewards in referral programs.
You might also need to invest in a referral marketing platform. This will allow you to manage your referrals and any brand ambassadors you work with (more on that below), control your budget, and analyze the success of your program.
Brand partnerships are collaborations between two non-competitive brands or between your brand and a social media influencer, also known as influencer marketing. Brand partnerships are popular digital marketing strategies as they allow both parties to promote themselves to new audiences and build trust.
It can be tough for a small business to convince others to collaborate. Fortunately, you don’t need to find brands or influencers to work with on your own. Using platforms like Affise Reach, you can connect with networks and agencies relevant to your industry, recruit new partners, and boost brand awareness.
Brand partnerships can also be a part of your content strategy. Collaborating with brands or influencers who can promote your brand through blogs, video, social media posts, or podcasts will take your online marketing to the next level.
If you think about somewhere you can buy coffee, does a deep green logo with a crowned mermaid on it appear in your mind? The Starbucks logo is iconic and is an important part of the global coffee shop company’s brand identity.
You don’t need to be Starbucks to make use of a great, eye-catching logo.
A brand’s logo is often its most recognizable brand identifier, with 75% of people recognizing a brand based on its logo alone. A logo is more than just an image – it’s a symbol that represents your brand and should come to your customers’ minds when they think of your brand or even your product.
A brand ambassador can act as the face of your brand or a mascot for it and their identity will become tied to yours. With the right brand ambassador, you can reach more customers, nurture trust, and improve your brand equity.
Although brand ambassadors act as a mascot for your brand, you don’t need someone dressed up as an animal to show up to your next event. Instead, brand ambassadors can be online influencers who contribute towards your social media marketing strategy.
It’s important to find brand ambassadors who are relevant to your brand as not only will they already have followers who are the right demographic or target audience for your brand, their promotion of your brand will be more authentic too.
It’s a common misconception amongst business owners that you can’t measure brand awareness. There are actually a selection of metrics and KPIs that you can track to see how well your digital brand awareness strategy is working.
Website traffic is a clear indicator of the success of any online marketing strategy. Just as you would track website traffic after investing in a pay-per-click (PPC) ad, you should do the same whenever you launch a new online digital marketing campaign.
Your website hosting platform may have a website traffic tool, but for more comprehensive results you should make the most of tools like Google Analytics.
Imagine you’re marketing a company that offers VoIP hosting. Other businesses looking for VoIP solutions may search for ‘VoIP hosting’ on Google, but if you have high brand awareness then those companies would search directly for your brand. This is called a branded search.
Using Google Analytics, you can measure how much of your website traffic comes from branded searches. If your marketing strategy is focused on increasing brand awareness, an increase in branded searches should be your main KPI.
Brand mentions mean that on social media channels and across the web, people are talking about your brand. The more brand mentions you get, the better your brand awareness is.
To track brand mentions effectively, you’ll need a social listening tool. This can create reports based on brand mentions across multiple channels and help you visualize how much of a difference your digital marketing strategies are making.
You’ll need to keep an eye on how you’re being mentioned too, however – brand awareness thanks to negative mentions is simply not worth it.
Social media reach shows you how many users have come across a piece of content you’ve shared on social media. Increasing your social reach will help you reach new customers and improve brand awareness, but it also reflects how well your strategies are performing.
Wondering how to track this ?Don’t opt for any old social reach tool. Using tools like Affise BI you can integrate your marketing channel reports into one place, compare data across different channels, and get deeper insights into your social reach and performance.
Ultimately, brand awareness is best measured through what your customers have to say. That’s why feedback is essential to your digital marketing campaign.
Customer surveys are already a popular tool for gauging the quality of the customer experience on your website or with your sales teams. They can also be leveraged for measuring brand awareness.
When customers visit your website, buy products, or speak to your sales teams, asking them to tick a box for how they found out about your brand and rating how likely they are to recommend you can give you a clear metric for how aware customers are of your brand.
Feedback tools can be a part of your enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform, such as a Shopify ERP. They can also form a part of the post-purchase process and be integrated with your customer relationship management (CRM) system.
Keeping track of brand awareness metrics can quickly become a full-time job. With Affise’s analytics and business intelligence tools, you can track and measure the success of your marketing campaigns in one platform.
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Digital brand awareness is about establishing your brand voice and making it heard across the internet. With the right strategies and tools, you can create a community of customers who celebrate your brand, recommend it to friends, and remain loyal to you.
Whatever format your brand awareness digital marketing strategy takes, the main takeaway is that you make sure you measure your campaign’s success (and failures). From branded mentions to social reach, measuring and analyzing brand awareness will help you understand what works for your brand and where to focus your marketing efforts.
Written by
Richard Conn is the Senior Director for Demand Generation at 8x8, a leading communication platform with integrated contact center, voice, video, and chat functionality. Richard is an analytical & results-driven digital marketing leader with a track record of achieving major ROI improvements in fast-paced, competitive B2B environments.
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