Brand awareness refers to how familiar your target audience is with your brand and market offerings. By its nature, brand awareness sits at the top of the marketing funnel, making it an important consideration for all marketing teams. Afterall – you can’t sell a product to a customer that doesn’t know you exist!
As many marketers know, the importance of brand awareness can’t be understated. Making sure your target audience is familiar with your brand and what you stand for is essential for customer acquisition and long-term business growth.
Brand awareness is the reason brands such as Apple, Nike, and Google are household names - so much so that we instinctively substitute brand names with verbs associated with them (e.g. “Could you Google that?”, “Could you Photoshop this image?”). These savvy brands have prioritised brand awareness to build long-term brand equity and loyalty, which in turn drives sustainable, long-term growth.
Build top-of-mind awareness
At the start, it is important to establish the “vibe” of your brand. Are you fun? Serious? A little bit kooky?
Look at any ad from big name brands and you’ll realise that they all have a theme or that aligns with their brand positioning. Coca-Cola’s ads showcase their products among crowds of happy people, driving the association between the brand and celebration, joy, and festivity. Nike’s ads convey athleticism and victory for all levels of athlete.
Once you have established the mood of the brand, you can bring it to all your marketing campaigns and start to create a positive association in the consumer’s mind. This energy should used across diverse marketing campaigns, be it direct to consumer ads or sponsorship activations with other businesses.
Earn your audience’s trust
Successfully building brand awareness among your target audience also allows your brand to drive emotional connections and customer relationships on a subconscious level. This in turns builds your audience’s trust in your brand.
Building emotional connections and enriching your customer relationships is vital in 2022. COVID-19 has upended consumer priorities and now, more than ever, people are looking at brands for an emotive connection. Customers expect brands to prioritise the customer’s best interests and feel that the brand’s purpose is to make their life better – not just enrich investors pockets.
Hurdles to growing brand awareness
The largest hurdle to growing brand awareness is often human – many brands don’t understand or want to invest in marketing activities that don’t result in quantitative outcomes. Instead, many businesses choose to focus on measurable initiatives like paid ads, SEO, and influencer marketing.
Brand awareness, however, “establishes trust with your customers, creates positive associations, and builds invaluable brand equity that allows your brand to become a household name and consumer staple.” As brands like Google and Nike demonstrate, this level of recognition leads to measurable and quantitative outcomes in revenue, website traffic, and stock price.
Building brand awareness, growing brand equity, and developing customer loyalty are long-term and constant activities. No matter where your brand markets – it is important to find your target audience and be present for them.
Brand Awareness Examples
In 2021, The Cheesecake Shop created their own Engagement Hub on the Komo platform to celebrate the Christmas festivities. As primarily a brick-and-mortar food shop, running a digital microsite was a creative way for The Cheesecake Shop to connect and stay front of mind with their audience. This Hub was filled with fun, Christmas-themed activities that boosted The Cheesecake Shops brand from a fun cake store to a cake store that shares fun. The Hub allowed The Cheesecake Shop to measure quantitative metrics like engagement rates and shares, but also gave them a quality tool to boost their brand equity heading into 2022.
Another example was with our partner the Australian Olympic Committee. They boosted the brand awareness of the AOC and its sponsors by using their Engagement Hub to promote their sponsor family and the athletes. Brands such as Speedo were able to sponsor Hub content and stay in front of mind for many Australians. These moments highlighted not only Speedo’s commitment to their athletes racing on our TV screens, but also showed consumers that Speedo cares about its sports fans.
Further Reading: 5 Tactics to Build Brand Awareness
Go Deep: Download the eBook “2022 Guide to Audience Engagement”