Do you say Kleenex when you buy tissue? Do you say Band-Aid when buying bandages?
These companies have been successful at establishing their brand names in their corresponding sectors. People would mention these brands' names rather than their generic designations because they have gained so much notoriety.
And therein lies the power of increasing brand awareness.
Learn why brand awareness should be a priority in your digital marketing operations and what marketing techniques you can do to build your brand recognition among your target audience.
Brand Awareness in Digital Marketing: What Is It?
Brand awareness is a word that describes how well consumers are familiar with a product by name when it is promoted through various marketing channels.
It separates a brand's product from that of its rivals.
It is a gauge of how well your brand is recognised by your target market, to put it simply.
What does having a strong brand awareness entail for your company?
Customers are more inclined to choose a product from a brand they are most familiar with when given a choice.
Brand Awareness should therefore be a top goal for companies, especially for new brands.
In fact, 37% of marketers cite brand recognition as their top objective for 2022 since it is so important.
Making effective use of the various digital marketing channels at your disposal is one method to achieve this.
How Digital Marketing Can Raise Awareness of Brands
Digital marketing has changed the game for many firms over the years.
Given that the Internet is used by more than half of the world's population, it continues to dominate many marketing mediums.
Digital marketing allows you to:
Reach a more specific audience in a more economical and quantifiable manner.
Level the playing field, especially for small businesses.
Engage with potential customers and gain insightful information from them.
Be really peronalised with your audience.
Enlarge your audience and/or your global market
When you know where your clients are online, you can reach them through digital marketing channels, creating brand awareness in the process.
Here are some tactics you may use to enhance consumer familiarity with your product when you begin your digital marketing campaign.
SEO for Brand Recognition
You want your brand to outperform the competition by being found online. And search engine optimization (SEO) can help you do this.
SEO makes it easier to get your product in front of people. Using this tactic, your website can show up on the first page of search engine results, like Google.
The main objective of SEO is to increase organic, "unpaid," online traffic to websites from search engine results pages (SERPs).
This is accomplished through a variety of on- and off-page strategies.
Effects of SEO on Brand Awareness
A larger audience is exposed to your brand as a result of higher website traffic.
And with greater exposure, more people will be aware of what your brand does.
One case study, for instance, shows how digital marketing expert Hunter Branch witnessed personally how SEO could raise brand awareness.
How to Use SEO to Increase Brand Awareness
More than 64% of marketers are currently making active investments in SEO.
Here are some strategies for using SEO for brand building if you want to stay ahead of the competition.
Link creation
Your page will rank higher in the SERPs the more high-quality links pointing to it there are. How do you obtain those links, though?
Strong backlinks and valuable content are equivalent, in my opinion.
By content, I mean original, pertinent, and worthwhile material created for both people and search engines.
How-to manuals and no cost templates are a couple of examples.
Along with producing content, you may also increase backlinks by using email outreach, guest posting, and other strategies like public relations.
2. Enhancing the content
Optimizing material is a different process from creating it.
You must add keywords to your page to improve organic visibility so Google can find your material.
It's crucial to optimise your content for non-commercial keywords because you're specifically aiming for audiences who are in the awareness stage.
Increasing your focus on long-tail keywords is another crucial step. The click-through rate for these terms is 3% to 5% greater than it is for general searches.
Additionally, coordinating your keyword approach with your branding enables you to exert more control over how your brand is perceived.
It is essential to select keywords that are pertinent to your brand because of this.
3. Internal Linking
By using internal linking, you may make it easier for a potential customer to explore your website after landing on it.
Internal linking entails utilising anchor text to link to a different page on your website.
Your primary keywords, a variation of your primary keywords, or supplementary long-tail keywords can all be used as anchor text.
You may enhance user experience while increasing site traffic to your pages with a defined plan.
However, internal linking does more than just point users to other pages on your site. To raise your ranking in the SERPs, it also passes link equity.
4. Produce content to promote your brand
It enables you to demonstrate to your audience who your business is and what your brand stands for.
This kind of material departs from conventional advertising. Its goal is to engage consumers in meaningful ways by entertaining or informing them.
This comprises, among other things, essays, movies, infographics, and podcasts.
How Brand Awareness Is Affected by Content Creation
Marketing efforts aimed at raising brand awareness requires more than just getting your company's name out there. It demonstrates how effectively your audience comprehends the characteristics that distinguish your business.
Your brand will stand out from the competition when you create a successful content strategy.
Another method to express personality, communicate viewpoints, and position your brand on topics is through content. Simply said, content gives your brand a human face.
And customers would probably prefer to conduct business with people over a single brand.
How to Use Content to Increase Brand Awareness
Seventy-two percent of marketers, according to B2B Content Marketing, think that having a strong content strategy was crucial to their success.
Do you currently use a content strategy for your company's brand?
If not, these strategies can help you get going.
Recognize your audience
Who is your target market? Where do they go online to spend their time? What are their interests, inclinations, and likes? What issues require remedies, and what are they?
Since you are engaging them, you will inevitably start to comprehend them.
Additionally, you may modify your material to speak to your audience once you have a solid grasp of them.
2. Tell a brand story.
Along with your audience, you should be familiar with your brand.
What is your narrative? What visions do you have? What values does your business uphold? What is the voice of your business? What remedy do you provide for your audience?
Because these are the factors that will make your new clients care about your company, you must be aware of them in order to create an effective content strategy.
3. Selecting your digital marketing platforms
What kind of content are you interested in using for your brand? There are many options for the awareness stage.
The most popular types of content for the first step of the marketing funnel are blog posts and articles.
Your knowledge of your audience will be helpful if you're trying to come up with content ideas.
Infographics are a great option if you're trying to reach a group of people with a short attention span. This is due to how simple it is to read and comprehend this kind of stuff.
In the meanwhile, videos are a fantastic way to demonstrate the personality of your brand. Statistics also demonstrate that video has surpassed the first two types of content mentioned above to become the most popular kind of media employed in content strategy.
Therefore, using videos is a surefire approach to boost audience engagement. Depending on the kind of platform you want to put your branded videos on, you may utilise a video maker to produce short or long videos.
What could be more advantageous for a brand than social media?
Billions of social media users are eager to become your customers on these platforms. Additionally, opening an account on social media is free. Additionally, you may accomplish a lot with a small budget if you run advertisements.
You don't want to overlook this crucial marketing technique given the variety of options offered by social media marketing.
In order to increase brand awareness, it is essential to develop your presence via social media marketing, whether it be on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, or other platforms.
Effects of Social Media on Brand Awareness
Your target audience spends a lot of time perusing their feeds.
According to Statista, internet users use social media for 144 minutes on average each day.
This is a fantastic opportunity for your company to connect with them online.
Having a presence on social media makes you more noticeable to your clients.
It enables you to engage with them, establish connections with them, and most crucially, grow brand recognition and cultivate brand evangelists.
You may increase awareness of your company by expressing your brand voice and story on social media, whether by publishing interesting content or running advertisements.
How to Use Social Media to Increase Brand Awareness
You're losing out on a lot if you're still not using social media advertising.
To keep up with your rivals, regardless of whether you're new to social media marketing or are currently utilising it, you need to have a thorough understanding of your brand and your audience.
Set SMART objectives.
When using social media marketing, you must be certain of your objectives, and the SMART goal structure will help you with that.
The SMART framework mandates that your objectives be:
Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Time-bound
Identify important metrics
You can develop crucial measures to evaluate the effectiveness of your plan with the use of a SMART goal.
Depending on your campaign, you can monitor various social media analytics. It's crucial to decide which metrics apply to you personally. Metrics like reach, impressions, shares, and mentions can reveal a lot about your development for high brand recognition.
Select a platform.
Every social media site is distinct. You must choose the platforms that best match your objectives and strategy if you want your endeavour to be successful.
Not every platform needs to have you on it. Choose the option that most closely aligns with your brand and target market.
Analyse the locations of your potential consumers' hangouts. For instance, visual channels like Snapchat and Instagram might be more advantageous for a beauty firm.
Once you've chosen the platform, finish creating your profiles by adding your cover and profile photographs, as well as your bio and other details. Include search terms that customers might use to find your company as well.
Five Crucial Metrics to Assess Brand Awareness
1.Traffic
Traffic to your website is a reliable sign that more people are becoming aware of your brand. Your brand awareness marketing efforts may be succeeding if your website is seeing an increase in visitors.
However, we expressly refer to tracking direct traffic and net-new visitors to your site when we mention "traffic." Direct traffic is when users enter your URL into the search field directly.
Net-new traffic is the total number of new users who have visited your website over a specific time frame. These two traffic sources show shifting brand awareness.
Google Analytics will show you your direct and net-new traffic.
2. Sponsored Search
Branded searches occur when users enter the name of your company instead of the URL in search engines like Google.
If they are unaware of your brand, they won't be looking it up, will they?
As a general rule, individuals are more aware of you when they are searching for your brand name, goods, or services.
You may monitor changes in public awareness of your brand by tracking the volume of searches for your brand name.
Fortunately, Google provides a wide range of tools to track the volume of branded searches. For this purpose, you can make use of Google Analytics, Google Ads, or Google Trends.
3. Brand References
The number of times your company's name, goods, or services have been mentioned online is known as a mention.
Mention may be on social media, in the news, or in a publication specific to your sector.
You can find out if people are mentioning you and what they think of your brand by keeping an eye on these mentions.
Are they describing you in a favourable, unfavourable, or neutral way? In any case, you can use this to gather crucial data for next goods, services, and digital marketing initiatives.
Use a variety of tools, such as Google Alerts or Mention, to keep track on brand mentions.
4. Social Impact
A measure of engagement called social reach illustrates how your message affects individuals. It is typically a sign that your material is connecting with your audience when it is widely shared.
The amount of people who share your posts with their networks serves as the gauge for this indicator.
Your social reach grows the more people share your content. What does it mean for your company, too?
Your material will be seen by more people, increasing brand awareness.
5. Feedback
Reviews and surveys are two ways that people provide feedback. If you want to know how people perceive your brand and how to enhance it, do this.
Surveys are a terrific way to find out how customers learn about your company. You can either use online or offline methods to ask a group of people if they are familiar with your brand or to ask current consumers how they learned about you.
Reviews offer you similar insight into how real customers see your brand.
Reviews have a big impact on how prospective customers see you, so it's important to keep an eye on review websites like Yelp to learn how you may enhance your offerings and boost public opinion of you.
In conclusion, if used correctly the aforementioned strategies, along with regular tracking and some excellent digital marketing tools, can help you raise brand recognition, boost growth and revenue, and foster brand advocates.
If you need help in implementing these digital marketing strategies, DigitalxMarketing can help.
DigitalxMarketing is a digital marketing agency based in Wellington, New Zealand that offers services such as Facebook Advertising, LinkedIn Advertising, Google Ads, SEO, Email Marketing, Content Marketing, Wix Website Development, Social Media Management, Digital Strategy, and Digital Audits.