Of course, you’ve heard about Apple or Coca-Cola. According to stats, 94% of the world’s population recognizes the Coca-Cola logo. This is what brand awareness does: it embeds a brand into your life and into your purchase habits. Whether you are a small business or a big company, you definitely want people to know about you.
In this guide, we’re going to look closer at the definition of brand awareness, how to reach your audience, and what tools will help your brand become recognizable in your niche.
What is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness is a term used to describe the degree to which a brand is recognized by potential customers and associated with a particular product or service. Brand awareness is a vital part of any brand—be it a small company or a large corporation. What’s important is to establish brand awareness in the early stages of your business, so you can simply maintain it later on.
There are three types of brand awareness: brand recall, brand recognition, and top-of-mind awareness. They differ by the level of customer recognition.
- Brand recall refers to the ability of consumers to confirm that they have seen or heard of a given brand before. Basically, it’s about a customer's ability to recollect a brand name that they don’t hear or use often. For instance, the word “supermarket” should bring specific brand names to mind.
- Brand recognition is the extent to which a customer can differentiate a brand from various others when in contact with it. For example, it might be based on visual aspects like logos and colors—if you see the Dunkin' Donuts pink and orange letters up ahead, you’ll automatically recognize the beloved brand even before making out the words.
- Top-of-mind awareness is achieved when a brand is the first that customers would mention when thinking of a particular industry or category. Here’s a simple example: what comes to mind when you think of a fast food restaurant? McDonald’s.
Having a solid, trusted brand is important for your company to be successful. After all, if your target audience doesn’t know your brand or has doubts about it, how will you ever increase your customer base and sales? To make sure you know what to do, we’ve gathered some tools that can be a great help in building your brand and raising awareness about it.
Creating Content
Content is crucial for brands because it helps them tell their story. Whether it's a company blog, podcast, or social media post, it has to reach the target audience, engage them, and deliver your brand message to them. The stronger your content is, the better it shows your audience what your brand stands for. And recognition of your brand isn’t just about your audience knowing your name. The point is to ensure that they can tell what makes your brand unique. That’s why it’s important to highlight what sets you apart from the competitors in your content.
A lot of companies turn to content marketing tools to help them create quality content. Here’s what you need to think of when searching for such tools:
- What do I want to achieve with content marketing?
- What kind of content will interest my target audience?
- How to measure content marketing efforts?
There are plenty of different content marketing tools that enable you to create connections with your potential customers and deliver your brand message. We’ll look into some of them.
#1 FlippingBook
Brand awareness is about consistency—presenting your brand consistently across all platforms can increase revenue by up to 23%. That’s why branded content is important. With FlippingBook, you can draw attention to your brand and empower your content by turning static PDFs into interactive HTML5 flipbooks that reflect your company style. The tool allows you to design digital flipbooks according to your brand book: add your logo and favicon, set your corporate color palette and a unique background. You can also share a flipbook as a custom link that carries your brand name or embed it right into your website, making it an extension of any page. Thus, you’ll raise the chances for your brand to become recognizable and outrival your competitors. For instance, more than 50% of FlippingBook users apply logo, favicon or custom background to brand their publications.
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#2 Canva
Visual marketing plays an important role in building a brand. However, if you’re just at the start of your way, you may not have enough resources and money to produce high-quality infographics or images. Tools like Canva can become your handy assistant. Canva is easy-to-use and offers a variety of templates to create different kinds of content, be it social media graphics, presentations, posters, or other visual content.
Social Media Management
Each company, whether it’s a small coffee shop or Starbucks, has to manage social media accounts well. Research shows that over 50% of brand reputation comes from online sociability. Being social leads to greater awareness and simply being known, so don’t miss the opportunity to be among accounts that your target audience is following.
To use your social media correctly, you have to engage your audience, listen to customers, and entice new followers to choose your brand. Also, don’t forget to answer your customers’ questions on social media—over 77% of Twitter users appreciate a brand more when their tweet is responded to.
Of course, succeeding in social media management is not simple. But fortunately, there are tools that can help you with posting, managing accounts, and analyzing your social media campaigns. When looking for a tool that will suit your needs, keep the following questions in mind:
- What do I want to get from my accounts? Is it new leads, sales, or maybe something else?
- How am I going to achieve my goals?
- What data from social media accounts do I need to make my brand look trustworthy?
#3 Hootsuite
One of the first tools that comes to mind when we talk about social media management is Hootsuite. It’s a great tool for scheduling posts across multiple social media accounts. Also, it allows you to find, distribute, manage, analyze, and optimize your social content. However, if you're looking for Hootsuite alternatives, there are several other social media management tools like Buffer, Sprout Social, and Later, each offering unique features that may better suit your specific needs.
#4 Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a social media management solution. This tool is mostly for experienced marketers, as it provides great deep analytics and options to optimize your social campaigns. Sprout Social helps brands find and create real connections with their audience to widen their brand awareness.
Analytics
So you’ve written great content, published it on your website and social media. How to understand whether or not it’s performing well? This is where analytics comes into play. One of the most important rules of digital marketing is if you don’t have data on something, it didn’t happen. So you need to collect data on your every marketing effort and check what has worked best for you and what hasn’t. This way you can make changes and improvements.
Here are some questions to keep in mind when choosing the right analytics tool that will help you get better brand recognition:
- What do I want to know about my audience?
- How will this information help me improve my strategies?
- Which KPIs do I care most about?
Though it might be hard to collect information about your audience and analyze their behavior on your site, there are tools that will make it simpler. Take a look at some of them below.
#5 Google Analytics
When it comes to basic website analytics, this tool immediately springs to mind as one of the most important tools to analyze your website. With Google Analytics, you can get information about your visitors: what pages they’ve seen, how long they stayed on the site for, what country they came from, and other data. Once collected, these basic data can be used to optimize your site. And if you’re an experienced marketer, then Google Analytics will provide you with insightful information for creating a customer portrait.
#6 Ahrefs
Ahrefs lets you learn more about your website and get deep insights. The tool helps to build a semantic core of your site, check Google search results related to your business, which topics interest users the most. This information will become a foundation for creating relevant content with the correct keywords, so your audience can find and recognize you online. What’s more, with Ahrefs you can learn why your competitors are ranking higher and adjust your marketing strategy to outrank them.
Brand Perception Analysis
It’s essential to know what your audience thinks about your brand. Customers might tell you about their experience in your social media accounts, but it’s a small percentage of all the feedback you can get. Customer feedback plays a central role in any business—it provides a way to build lasting relationships with your customers, improve the experience of unhappy customers, innovate your product development or service according to customer needs, and help generate more revenue. Moreover, you can also use VoIP to let them record and post their voice recorded feedbacks. Speaking directly to your audience and gathering feedback is easy to do through customer survey tools.
With a brand perception survey, you can get honest feedback from your customers and discover how customers feel about your brand, what they like or dislike, and more. The survey will provide you with invaluable information that will help guide your future brand awareness campaigns and improve various aspects of your company.
To choose the most suitable tool for your needs, make sure you answer the following questions:
- What kind of feedback do I need from my customers?
- How often do I want to request feedback?
- How am I going to analyze and present this feedback?
#7 Typeform
Typeform is a platform where you can design a brand awareness survey that will help you gather valuable feedback. The platform has a user-friendly interface, equipped with custom-designed themes, templates, and other interesting options you can use. If you need to gather information, streamline internal team communication, and capture leads, Typeform is definitely worth checking out.
#8 SoGoSurvey
SoGoSurvey is a tool that offers a set of features to design surveys and choose channels to distribute them. The tool allows you to make the process of collecting feedback seamless. Moreover, SoGoSurvey can integrate with your CRM, allowing you to collect feedback automatically and analyze it for insights into customer satisfaction.
Public Relations
Telling your brand story in a way that resonates with the people you want to reach is a vital part of building brand awareness. 77 percent of consumers buy from brands who share the same values as they do. But how can you ensure your target audience knows all about your values? Through PR.
Though it’s hard to get attention from journalists and relevant media, it’s not impossible. You have to build a strategy so that the right reporters can write about you. Of course it takes time and effort to build communication and find stories that will fit naturally in the relevant media.
Before searching for the right tool, ask yourself the questions listed below. They will help you choose the right media and tell your story to the people who are interested in what you can offer.
- What are the steps of my PR campaign?
- How will I control the ongoing campaign?
- What are my KPIs and how will I measure them?
#9 Cision
It’s one of the most well-known and full-featured PR instruments. Cision has a database of over 1.6 million journalists and editors. The platform helps to target, engage, analyze, and measure your PR campaigns. With this information, you can track your efforts and tell your story by connecting with the right journalists. Cision's pricing depends on the client's needs and is provided upon request.
#10 HARO
HARO, also known as Help a Reporter Out, makes it easy to connect with journalists. HARO is a free platform where you can register as an expert source. Join the email list for the topics relevant to your brand and watch for emails requesting comments and insights on those topics. Journalists will use your replies in their articles or studies, thus spreading the story you’re trying to tell and increasing your brand awareness.
If you equip yourself with the right tools, it’ll be easy to build brand awareness and reach your audience. Hopefully, some of the tools above will fit right in.
