Every business wants to become a household name, to be the first brand customers think of when wanting to make a purchase. Building brand awareness is the first step to achieving that goal, but where exactly do you start? In this post, we’ll define brand awareness and its importance for your business. We’ll then explain ways you can increase your brand awareness and share tools that will help you along the way.

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What is Brand Awareness?

Brand awareness refers to how familiar consumers are with your brand and product. Think Budweiser. Hershey. Q-Tip. Without having to look up any of those companies, you can most likely envision their branding and each of their respective products. That’s exactly what brand awareness is. The goal of brand awareness is for consumers to identify your brand quickly and easily on a regular basis while understanding exactly what it is you do. But it goes a bit further than that because brand awareness is not simply knowledge–it’s trust. The ultimate goal of brand awareness is for consumers to know and trust that your brand is one of the best options in the market.

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Why is Brand Awareness Important?

When a specific industry or product type is referenced, you ideally want your brand to be thought of first. If your brand is the first thing customers think of when they want or need a specific product, then they are far more likely to purchase your product. Brand awareness doesn’t mean brand presence, however. Your marketing efforts and communication with consumers ultimately lead to a positive association with your brand and an increased likelihood of purchase.

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6 Steps to Increasing Brand Awareness

Let’s dive into six great ways to increase your brand awareness.

1. Use Your Website to Tell Your Story

Your website is where you get to tell your business’s story and control the narrative surrounding your brand. When researching your company, your customers will be led to your site, where they can learn about your company and your products or services and experience other branded content.

Whether you’re a large, multi-operational business or a small operation, your brand’s website is the most powerful marketing tool in your tool belt. With website platforms like Squarespace, Shopify, Wix, and more, creating a website for your business is both easy and accessible, and you can guarantee that your competitors will have one. 

Don’t forget to create strong content on a regular basis; SEO-optimized blogs can help drive traffic to your site, which naturally increases brand awareness. Local marketing can be really powerful here, especially if you have a physical storefront you want to bring customers to. Utilizing area or city-specific keywords can help your chances of being discovered by consumers looking for a business like yours in close proximity to them.

Learn more: Local Marketing: How to Use "Near Me" Marketing to Reach Your Audience

2. Create Conversations with Email Marketing

A weekly or monthly newsletter can go a long way in building rapport with your audience, all while keeping brand awareness and helping convert leads into customers. Email marketing is highly lucrative with an ROI of $36 for every $1 spent. Capture your audience by prompting new visitors to your site to sign up for your email newsletter. Your email newsletter is where you can share discounts, product promotions, new content, or simply connect with your customers. 

3. Stay On Top of Advertising

Paid advertisements can help you reach a wide audience. With digital pay-per-click advertising, you can strategically place ads on websites your target audience is most likely to visit as well as on the search engine results pages (SERPs) for specific keywords. Paid ads allow you to attract new leads for various high-intent keywords, but it also allows you to remarket visitors to your site keeping your products and brand top of mind. Traditional advertising also works well. Placing an ad in a magazine, renting a billboard, and utilizing direct mail advertising all help to increase your brand awareness.

4. Connect to Consumers with Social Media

Social media is another powerful marketing tool for building brand awareness. Social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok have created algorithms specifically for discoverability, which means you can organically grow your audience in big ways. Creating a following on social media is also a great way to connect with your customers, which establishes those positive associations with your brand.

Learn more: How to Boost Alcohol Sales Using Social Media

5. Partner with Affiliates and Influencers

Affiliate and influencer marketing are great ways to get your brand in front of an owned audience. This method typically involves partnering with a social media influencer and either offering monetary compensation up front or providing a cut of profits for a specific period of time. If that doesn’t sound worth it to you, you underestimate the power of the influencer. Even if you don’t receive a massive amount of sales from the strategy, your product and brand are still being endorsed by a trusted, influential individual. The influencer’s audience is likely to transfer the trust and positive associations they have to your brand. 

6. Don’t Neglect Product Packaging and Point-of-Sale

Product packaging does a lot of heavy lifting towards building brand awareness, especially for e-commerce brands. E-commerce brands have very few, if any, face-to-face interactions with their customers, so the product and its packaging are the most direct touchpoints they get. Invest in your product packaging by branding inside and out. 

Take low alcohol aperitif brand Haus for example. Their aperitif bottles are beautiful and minimal, intended to be used as home decor after consumption. Likewise, their subscription boxes are designed like a care package; the box includes a greeting and a newsletter filled with recipes, frequently asked questions, and insights about the company.

Product packaging is just as important for products sold in retail stores. The packaging helps the product stand out, especially when sold alongside your competitors, but don’t stop there. Signage, inserts, and even display instructions go a long way in building an experience around your brand.

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Tools to Help Build Brand Awareness

Every good marketer needs a combination of the following tools to help build brand awareness.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media management tool that helps you create social media posts, monitor replies, analyze engagement, and more. Best of all, Hootsuite lets you manage posts across multiple platforms, making social media marketing an absolute breeze.

AdEspresso

AdEspresso helps you manage paid advertisements across Google, Instagram, and Facebook, vastly simplifying the process of advertising. AdEspresso also provides you with detailed reporting and analytics, and includes plenty of resources to help improve your marketing efforts.

SEMRush

To leverage your website content and generate more leads, check out SEMRush. This robust tool allows you to monitor your organic rankings and paid campaigns, as well as track specific keywords. SEMRush can also audit your site to identify opportunities for improvement and errors that might be bringing your performance down.

MailChimp

Mailchimp is one of the most popular tools for email marketing because it is so easy to use. Mailchimp is highly customizable, provides valuable insights about your campaigns, and is free to use for up to 2,000 contacts, making it a valuable tool for small to medium-sized businesses.

Grappos

A product locator is enormously beneficial for brands who distribute to various retail locations because it helps customers find products local to them. The Grappos product locator is by far the most robust and customizable option in the market. Our product locator integrates seamlessly with all the major website platforms, including Shopify, Squarespace, and Wix.  Best of all, the Grappos team handles all the integration, data management, and updates for you, so you can concentrate on running your business.

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Perseverance is Key

Brand awareness is something you cultivate rather than achieve, so stay consistent in your efforts. Following these strategies and using these tools will help increase your brand awareness so you can start converting leads and growing your business. 

‍Request a Grappos product locator demo to see how it can help build your brand awareness →

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