A lot of statistics and reports clearly indicate the fact that Brand Awareness is imperative and pivotal to the respective Brand Development. The importance of having good Brand Awareness increases threefold especially when your business is customer-centric like a local store or an eCommerce website.
Developing a good and relevant brand awareness will let you have good leverage over other businesses, especially your competitors. Good brand awareness will be nothing but trust and inspire loyalty among your customers/consumers thus increasing your customer base.
If you look at all the successful brands, you will clearly notice a pattern that would make it seem that they clearly hold a good amount of leverage over their competitors just because of good Brand Awareness.
What is Brand Awareness and what is its Importance?
In simplified terms, Brand Awareness is basically the idea or the extent to which the brand’s potential customers are aware and familiar with the qualities, products and any other relevant information about the particular business. One point to note in this particular context is that there is a stark difference between brand recognition and awareness.
Brand Recognition is basically defined as a ‘cognitive’ process that cannot exist without brand awareness. Both Awareness and Recognition go hand in hand with each other.
When the question arises about the importance of Brand Awareness, you need to be clear about one advantage of brand awareness that is Building brand awareness of your company will keep it at the forefront since it will be in the minds of the customers/consumers which would assist your company better in the concept of marketing funnel since it would help the customer choose the products and/or services of your brand because of the familiarity, and loyalty on the behalf of the customer base.
There are other reasons why Brand Awareness is important especially in the context of the commercial growth of your Business. Brand Awareness, especially in the initial stages of your startup would be crucial considering that it would serve as a launchpad for the various strategies and campaigns in the field of marketing and also setting up a potential customer base in terms of increasing sales.
Brand Awareness is crucial for retaining customers, yes expanding your customer base is also a good option however, we need to consider the fact here that retaining customers and at the same time finding new customers consistently is the best and the most feasible way for a company to expand.
In recent times a lot of the potential customers and consumers and pointed out the fact that most of the time they only trust the big brands, in light of these findings it becomes ever more important for Brand Awareness of your company to be built upon appropriate levels since that would be more important for earning a concrete customer base by their trust and loyalty.
How would Brand Awareness Help the Companies?
Now that we know what Brand Awareness is and what is its importance, it is now for us to understand how Brand Awareness helps companies in building an overall sustainable business model to thrive on. If we look at real-world examples and specifically the Shoes of Prey brand.
Even though it collapsed in 2018 due to funding issues, it was a huge hit among people primarily due to the Brand Awareness it built on. The company let their customers design their own shoes and this concept was an instant hit since the target audience of this particular brand was extremely big.
They hired a lot of young teenage influencers who helped build their brand awareness in that particular age slot. The brand awareness built to such an extent that the sales grew by three hundred per cent in a flash.
Similar to this example there are a lot of companies like Scanteam that clearly substantiate the fact that brand awareness is crucial and imperative, especially in the initial stages of the company when it is attempting to build its customer base via trust and loyalty.
How to Build Brand Awareness on the Company’s Behalf?
The importance of Brand Awareness has remained static throughout a lot of generations, however the same cannot be said for the methods in which one can build Brand Awareness has varied and changed from time to time taking into consideration the demographics and the technology change which occurs.
For example in the 1960s and 1970s the most effective avenue and way in which companies would build Brand Awareness was television. However, in recent times the technological avenue has advanced to a large extent like in the case of smartphones, laptops, newspapers and so much more.
Television’s popularity as an avenue for building brand awareness has been reducing at a consistent rate since the late 1980s and it is also less than a meager two per cent right now in 2022.
The conclusion here is that the ways in which a company can build their brand awareness would keep on changing periodically depending on social, technological, behavioral and other trends such as the demographics of old to young people and so on.
What is the Best Avenue to Increase Your Brand Awareness?
There are a lot of new and upcoming avenues which can be utilized by your company in order to effectively and efficiently improve your brand awareness.
However, the best currently available avenue to increase your Brand Awareness would be the Out of Home advertising which is also referred to or known as the OOH advertising method.
OOH or Out of Home advertising basically consists of channels such as utilizing billboards and placing advertisements strategically and smartly in order to entice customers’ awareness for the respective brand to be targeted.
The Out of Home advertising would have an immediate impact on your brand awareness since your services and products to be offered would be introduced to hundreds and thousands of people through an effective and extremely engaging platform.
The Out of Home advertising or OOH is particularly best for the small businesses who want to target the local consumers in the initial stage with the chance of expansion later on.
How to set up your Campaigns?
The most important and key part of having your Brand Awareness increased is the part where you effectively implement your plans. A lot of plans can look appealing and extremely good on paper however, only once they are actually out there to be implemented will you actually know if the plan is feasible or not.
There are certain steps that need to take in order to ensure that the plan has gets implemented to the fullest:
Effective Planning
Planning the campaign is the most important element of any campaign since only after your plan will you know about the various elements required in order for your company to work efficiently. Things like funding, marketing, customer service options and so on. Planning effectively will increase the efficiency in which you can project the future of your company.
Initial Design
Once you have a clear understanding of the elements of different aspects of planning such as funding, marketing and other things included the next step here is to focus on the initial setup of the company.
The Hows and Whens of the company would be determined in this particular stage of the campaign. You should use the rule of three in order to properly determine under which you decide your branding, imagery, conciseness and other elements including advertising.
Production
Under this particular phase of campaigning, this is the phase where you deploy out the product and services being provided by your respective company.
Under this particular phase, you decide things like your packaging information, the transportation aspect and other intricate details involving production and deployment.
Tracking your progress
Once you have sorted out the planning, the initial design and blueprint of the particular company and have started the production and deployment.
This is the time when you track the process of your advertisement, product and service deployment. There are a lot of tests and mechanisms which you can employ to track the progress of your company.
This is especially imperative in the initial stages of your startup since you need to make certain adjustments in case your plan is not working as per what you wanted. This phase is also important for the ones who plan on expanding your business.
Industry expert Michelle Thomas quotes that “brand awareness is an important element in building your company to the vision you have decided it for.”
Only with a proper Business Awareness plan put in place can you have consistent and sustained business growth and also develop a solid customer base with efficient yet cost-effective campaigns.
There are a lot of upcoming and evolving avenues such as Out of Home advertising, Digital Advertising, P2P Advertising and so on to make sure that your campaign is effective depending upon the business type and the initial funding of your company. Eventually, it all jots down to the vision with which you have started the company and the heights you want it to reach.
