Every business must incorporate tactics to stay on the market and compete with other brands. That’s why it’s important to know creative ways to increase brand awareness. By implementing effective marketing strategies, businesses can boost brand recognition among their target audience and increase sales, customer loyalty, and market share.
You should note that building brand awareness is not a one-time marketing tactic. Since it’s a competitive world, you should always empower it. Therefore, you may have to use the same methods or incorporate new strategies to empower your presence on the market.
From traditional advertising to social media marketing, there are various ways to increase brand awareness and establish a strong presence in the market.
How to Increase Brand Awareness?
Are you ready to boost your business and make your brand remembered by your audience? Here are a few ideas to increase brand awareness:
1-Focus on Social Media
Undeniably, social media platforms are great places for brands to increase brand awareness. These platforms are where most of your customers are available. Here are some methods to try.
Instagram Ads
Advertising on Instagram means paying Instagram to show your content to more people without bothering them. Instagram ads are shown between stories and posts to Instagram users, making them remember your name and product. If you create an attractive ad, they may follow your account or become your customers, too.
Giveaway Campaigns
Contests and giveaway campaigns are among the top tactics to increase brand awareness on social media. In this method, you can give your audience a gift or a discount code and allow them to test your product or service without paying, creating a more trusted personality for your brand.
Hashtag Campaigns
A hashtag campaign is a marketing strategy in which a brand creates a hashtag and asks its followers to share a post or story with that hashtag. The goal of this tactic is to bring more reach and engagement. Hashtags that go viral will increase brand awareness for your business. Therefore, consider the following tips when you want to run a hashtag campaign:
- Try to create a short and memorable hashtag. You don’t want your followers to mistype the hashtag. So, make it easy, short, and memorable.
- Use positive hashtags to encourage users to participate in your campaign by sharing positive content.
- Monitor and analyze the hashtags to see how many people have participated. If you run different hashtag campaigns, you can find out which hashtags are more engaging to your followers. So, incorporate it in other posts.
- Follow trends. You can participate in trends by sharing your own hashtags and creating a new trend on social media.
- Be creative. Don’t use a general hashtag; try to make it more fun for your followers to use it.
KOL Marketing
Some people can impact others’ opinions due to the skill or profession they have. These are KOLs, or Key Opinion Leaders, who are trusted in a specific niche. KOLs can recommend your product or brand to their followers, adding trust and credibility to your brand’s personality. Accordingly, KOL marketing can boost your brand awareness and help you make a name in your industry.
Influencer Marketing
People trust influencers and follow them to figure out what they do, including the products they use. Furthermore, influencers have many followers. Therefore, collaborating with them means introducing your brand to many people, which can increase brand awareness for your business.
If you want to grow like popular brands on Instagram, you should not underestimate influencer marketing.
Use the following methods to increase brand awareness with influencer marketing:
- Run an influencer marketing campaign by collaborating with Instagram influencers. It can be a hashtag campaign, giveaway, contest, or any other type of campaign.
- Choose a trusted figure as your brand ambassador.
- Create sponsored posts, which will be published on the influencer’s account on your behalf.
- Provide influencers with a unique discount code or an affiliate link that they can share with their followers.
- Join influencer marketing platforms to find influencers in your niche.
Pro Tip: Running an influencer marketing campaign requires your brand to find the influencer relevant to your business and suitable for your budget. How can you find someone eager to collaborate with your brand? That’s when influencer marketplaces like Ainfluencer come to save you time and money.
Ainfluencer: The Best Influencer Marketing Platform
Ainfluencer is a 100% DIY and free marketplace that connects brands and influencers with a few clicks. After joining Ainfluencer, you can create a campaign for free. Write about your goal and the type of campaign you want to run.
Afterward, you can use the ‘Find Influencer’ tool to search for influencers based on criteria such as location, language, category, gender, number of followers, and hashtags. The best part is that you can dedicate a budget so only the influencers who work with that price will be listed, making it easier to find the proper person for your brand awareness campaign.
If you want to run an influencer marketing campaign, Ainfluencer is here to help you find the best option for your business.
2- Offer a Freebie or Freemium
Who doesn’t like freebies? When you give people a free product sample, they get excited to use it. Having your product in their hands gives them the opportunity to try and see if they like it. As a result, they may return to purchase it due to their trust in your brand.
Depending on your business type, you can offer either freebies or freemium. Both are great strategies for building and increasing brand awareness.
- A freebie is a product or service given away for free without any strings attached. It is usually a one-time or limited-time offer to increase brand awareness, customer loyalty, or word-of-mouth marketing.
- A freemium is a product or service that has a free and a paid version. It is usually an ongoing offer that aims to convert free users into paying customers by providing additional features, benefits, or value in the paid version.
The result of both methods is the same: the brand gets free advertising when consumers use it. Customers can get a piece of the brand or product before they decide to buy it.
3- Sponsor or Host Events
Sponsoring events like festivals, fairs, concerts, and exhibitions is one of the best methods to build and increase brand awareness because you can introduce your brand and products to more people who might not even know you exist.
In addition, running events is the next step most highly popular brands take to introduce their new products. There is no doubt that Apple is known for its events about its new releases. It’s the strategy this brand follows to increase brand awareness. As you can see, even if you are as well-known as Apple, you should still try new marketing tactics to stay on the market.
How Can Events Increase Brand Awareness?
- You can show the human side of your brand, making your name friendlier to your fans.
- Events can make a memorable experience for your audience. You can provide them with the samples of your products or have professional guests who can impact their buying decisions.
- Brands can spread their messages to more people through an event. Since people are present at an event, they care more about what you say.
4- Give Your Brand a Personality
Loyal customers are usually more than happy to spread your name to their friends and family – especially if you offer them incentives. That’s why referral programs are so popular. This marketing strategy encourages existing customers to recommend your product or service to their friends, family, or contacts in return for a reward.
For example, you can give a 10% discount on the customers’ next purchase who refer you to their friends. So, you will provide each customer with a dedicated code they can give others. It’s like viral marketing; people recommend you to each other, and they reach a reward every time they do this. As you can see, with only a 10% discount, you can introduce your brand to many people and increase brand awareness.
The next step is to implement this personality into your marketing campaigns. Let’s have a brand awareness example: Redbull’s advertisements, slogan, and design evoke an energetic and adventurous lifestyle. Red Bull’s strategic association with these personalities greatly contributed to the growth of brand awareness.
5- Be Authentic
Authenticity is the most crucial factor in increasing brand awareness. There are some easy methods for being authentic:
- Tell Your Brand’s Story: People would like to know about brands and their creators. You can tell your mission, opinion, values, and visions narratively so that your audience gets engaged to your brand.
- Create User-Generated-Content: Letting your customers and followers write about your brand will make them trust you more because they know you won’t hide behind the great personality you create. You let them review your product and even share their negative ideas. Your customers’ reviews, testimonials, and comments are the free tools to increase brand awareness.
- Engage with Your Community: Listen to your customers’ feedback, reply to their comments, and respect their concerns. By following this tactic, you can get more engaged with your audience, and create more trust in your community.
6- Use Referral Programs
Loyal customers are usually more than happy to spread your name to their friends and family – especially if you offer them incentives. That’s why referral programs are so popular. This marketing strategy encourages existing customers to recommend your product or service to their friends, family, or contacts in return for a reward.
For example, You can offer a 10% discount on the next purchase for customers who refer friends. So, you will provide each customer with a unique code they can give others. It’s like word-of-mouth marketing; people recommend you to each other, and every time they reach a reward every time they do this. As you can see, with only a 10% discount, you can introduce your brand to many people and increase brand awareness.
7- Run More Ads
If your advertising budget allows, run multiple ads. Don’t stick to one type of advertising. Run online campaigns and create visually appealing posters for billboards. Therefore, top brands are everywhere. Although they know people are familiar with their name, they don’t want their competitors to take their place. For example, you can see Nike’s brand advertising everywhere you turn.
8- Create Free Content
The internet has changed everything! People search for different things, and they want creative and informational content. If you provide them with this type of content, they will likely become your customers. Therefore, content is an easy yet effective method to increase brand awareness.
It can be anything from a blog post, video, infographic, or podcast. You should also note that you can work on all types of content at once. Furthermore, it shouldn’t always be on your website or social media; you can also test guest posting or sponsored content.
What about social media? You know it’s free to share content on your account; you can also try different methods to share posts on others’ accounts to make their followers notice you. Check out these TikTok collaborations and YouTube collabs to get some ideas about increasing brand awareness on social media.
9- Publish on LinkedIn
Most companies underestimate the power of LinkedIn. Although this platform might not be where your customers are available, it is still a great free place to promote your brand, especially to your competitors. Furthermore, it is where you can link your blog posts and bring more clicks to your website. Working with LinkedIn influencers can also increase brand awareness because they are trusted people on this platform and can credit your brand by writing a review.
10- Create Infographics
People get attracted to colorful photos. By creating infographics, you can share some interesting statistics about your brand with your followers. Here are some tips to help you create a better infographic to boost brand awareness:
- Choose an exciting and relevant topic that can bring out your value.
- Combine your data with trending subjects.
- Select an eye-catching template for your infographic and add your own style to it. For this purpose, you can use Canva.
- Publish and promote your infographic on various channels and platforms.
How to Measure Brand Awareness
After using different methods to increase brand awareness, there should be a way to figure out if you have reached your goal. By measuring brand awareness, you can regularly monitor your brand’s growth to discover its weaknesses and strengths to appear stronger than before.
Here are a few ways to measure your brand awareness and see if your strategies are working or not:
1. Direct Traffic
Your direct traffic (the number of people intentionally visiting your website) is an important metric for measuring your brand awareness. It gets more critical when you run non-clickable ads, like TV ads or billboards. This way, people may see your web address and type it directly into the address bar.
Although consumers can discover brands in many different ways – through advertisements, social media, etc, still, direct traffic shows you that they knew you existed beforehand.
2. Website Traffic
Your web traffic can tell you much about how well your brand awareness strategies perform. Check your site traffic numbers after running a campaign or ad that focuses on clicking on your URL. For this purpose, you can use tools like Google Analytics to see who is looking at your web content and how they got there.
How to Measure Web Traffic: Use Google Analytics
The best tool to measure brand awareness through your website is Google Analytics. This web analytics service gives you basic and detailed data about your audience and helps you, as a marketer, get to know them. It also enables you to measure your advertising ROI to track social networking sites.
As we mentioned before, companies spend millions on marketing campaigns. By measuring brand awareness, they will know if their strategies and campaigns were successful. They can also increase brand awareness by doing so.
3. Social Engagement
Due to the increasing popularity of social media platforms, most brand awareness campaigns are launched on social media. You can easily monitor your social media engagement by tracking likes, followers, comments, reposts, etc.
How to Measure Social Engagement: Use Ainfluencer
As mentioned, you can run an influencer marketing campaign on Ainfluencer. After it is finished, you can see a report about its views, clicks, and engagement. It will help you determine if your Instagram marketing has performed well or if you need to try another plan.
4. Google Your Brand
Performing a Google search of your brand allows you to see how your brand ranks on Google. You can also access forum discussions, social media posts, and news articles, including negative or positive views, to see what people say about your company.
5. Social Listening
As we mentioned earlier, the more people discuss your brand on social media, the more popular your brand is. That’s why keeping an eye on who’s tagging your brand, mentioning it in comments, or even using your hashtags can help you keep tabs on your brand’s popularity or brand awareness.
6- Surveys
Create a questionnaire on your website, and ask your audience to answer the questions or write their comments. By analyzing the answers, you can figure out how well they know about your brand and if your previous campaigns have increased your brand awareness or not.
How to Measure Brand Awareness with Surveys: Use Survey Monkey
It might seem challenging for brands to create a survey to achieve realistic results. Survey Monkey is one of the most useful measuring brand awareness tools that helps your business collect customers’ feedback using a free online survey tool to catch individuals’ voices and reviews.
Conclusion
Knowing how to Increase brand awareness is crucial for businesses looking to expand their customer base and increase revenue. By utilizing various marketing strategies such as social media, content marketing, and influencer partnerships, businesses can effectively reach their target audience and build a strong brand image. As more people become familiar with a brand, it can increase sales and customer loyalty.
It is important for businesses to continuously evaluate and adjust their brand awareness strategies to ensure they are reaching their desired audience and achieving their business goals.
If you want to use social media marketing, you can rely on Ainfluencer. Sign up on Ainfluencer and create a free influencer marketing campaign to raise brand awareness on social media.
FAQs
Here are the methods you can incorporate in your marketing plan to improve brand awareness:
1. Focus on social media
2. Do influencer marketing
3. Make guest appearances
4. Be authentic
5. Create infographics
6. Tell stories
7. Run advertisements
8. Host giveaways and contests
9. Use referral programs
Brand awareness is the main parameter for generating a high engagement level on Instagram or other platforms. It helps you gain credibility, and credibility will make people choose you over your competitors.
According to studies, 82% of consumers will choose a familiar brand over the others. So, the more aware you are, the more likely people will buy products or services from your company.
Pay Per Click marketing is a type of online advertising that can increase brand awareness by showing your ads to potential customers who are searching for relevant keywords or browsing related websites.However, you should note that choosing the right PPC platform, keywords, and bidding strategy can impact the success of your ads.