When starting your business, one of the terms you should start becoming familiar with is “brand awareness“. Often business owners think that focusing on brand awareness is only necessary when their companies finally become successful. However this is a total misconception. Building your brand starts the day you take the first step towards creating your business.
There’s more to brand awareness than designing an advertising logo or getting a really savvy looking website. Often people fail at creating effective brand awareness strategies incorporating multiple features. To fully understand why people fail, it’s necessary to understand exactly what brand awareness is and why it’s important.
What is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness can be defined as “the level of consciousness of a company”. More simply put, brand awareness measures a customer’s capability to recognize a brand image as well as identify it with a certain company’s product or service.
Why is Brand Awareness Important?
Potential consumers’ decisions are motivated by the way brands advertise or represent themselves.
Since many companies are competing for the same customer loyalty, brand awareness is important to differentiate companies, products, and services. It also creates customer loyalty which in turn creates repeat purchases. This increases market share.
Effective brand awareness is the fundamental foundation that helps a business acquire a strong, supportive, and repetitive customer base. It’s essential for business owners to keep their company and product in the forefront of customers’ minds.
How Long Does it Take to Create Brand Awareness?
Creating brand awareness doesn’t happen overnight. According to experts, it can take anywhere between five and seven good impressions for a potential customer to remember a brand. Samsung was able to effectively make their brand known worldwide in a span of two years. Apple became global leaders in the smart watch scene in only five short years.
Reasons Why People Fail at Advertising Their Brand Online
Creating brand awareness isn’t as simple as putting a product out there and airing a few advertisements. One way to get it right is to at least avoid pitfalls that can prevent you from reaching your goals. There are a few common mistakes that people make trying to create effective ways of advertising their brand. Browse through them to help your campaign stay on track.
Mistake 1: Selecting the Wrong Target Audience
One of the biggest mistakes marketers make is selecting the wrong target audience to advertise to. The general opinion that your target audience is “everyone” is too vague to generate any real success.
While it may be true that different demographics might use your product, there still needs to be a selected target market. Think of Nike. Babies wear Nike shoes but the ad campaigns are not generated at that demographic or even parents in particular. Nike’s target market is still aimed at the sport demographic.
Ask yourself who your real customer is. What does your customer look like? How do they relate to your product? Now use that information when creating a campaign.
Mistake 2: Deception: What You See Isn’t What You Get
Use of cliché expressions such as “best service” might seem like a good catch phrase to attract attention, but those words have lost their spark. They have become nothing more than empty promises and your audience sees them as such.
Promises and guarantees made to customers, whether online or in ads, have to be believable. If your target audience doesn’t believe you, they’ll ignore you. This will give your competitors an advantage over you and they could possibly sway customers more successfully than you could.
Mistake 3: Not Placing Enough Emphasis on Web Design or Online Presence
Failure to create a substantial online presence in a digital world is a definite recipe for failure. Sometimes marketers don’t focus enough energy on creating an engaging website which in turn fails to generate web traffic. Your website should be an extension of your business, not a complication.
Mistake 4: No Association Between Customer and Brand
Mistakenly, some people think of branding as the look portrayed in ads and brochures. The hope is that customers will buy the product because it looks good in the ad. This unfortunately doesn’t work. Customers need to associate the brand with a benefit or else it’s just another “brand out there”.
Think of the Apple brand promoting the health features of their devices and applications. That is the benefit the customer would associate with an Apple product.
Mistake 5: Not Enough Repetition
Often, the selected advertising reaches a lot of people but is not repeated enough times to create a lasting impression with the potential customers. If a customer sees an ad only once, it won’t have any effect.
Ask yourself, would it be better to show 10 ads once over 10 days or would it be better to show the same add continuously? Repetition also creates credibility with potential customers.
Mistake 6: Focusing on Event Driven Advertising
Event driven marketing is like placing all your eggs in one basket. Planning for one particular sales event to make your brand famous won’t render much success. Customers feel no loyalty toward your business or your brand. To the customer this is just a “once off” event, and not worthy of any loyalty. It would be better to have several smaller events, giving customers the opportunity to get to know and understand your brand and your product.
Mistake 7: Not Engaging in Focus Groups
As a business owner it’s very difficult to be objective about your business and your advertising when you’re on the inside looking out. It’s important to get opinions from objective people that are in your target market. Create a comparison of what you think versus what potential customers’ feedback is.
In Conclusion
Creating brand awareness is the second most important aspect of your business. Second only to the product or service that you’re creating. Effective brand awareness creates a bond with potential customers and leads to successful customer engagement.
Marketing, if done correctly, can successfully assist you in achieving your brand awareness goals. By using a few simple guidelines you’ll be able to succeed at creating your brand and enjoy the success that it brings!
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