Why Brand Awareness Is Important To Businesses Today?

Everybody needs an identity of their own. So do businesses. In a society where there are 100 million startups launched every year, creating brand awareness is not an easy task. Probably, all the permutation combination of successful branding formula would have already tried and tested.

Knowing the importance of brand awareness, how are you going to plan the strategy to stand out from the clutter? So, this blog is intended to guide you on creating unique brand awareness strategies and show you steps to build brand awareness. Read on.

Why Brand Awareness Is Important To Businesses Today?

What is Branding and Brand Awareness?

Branding

A marketer cannot lead a single day without using the term branding. Branding products, services, events, content, design, website, etc. the list is never-ending. Well, branding is nothing but creating a hype in the trending popular culture of existing society.

But what is the original meaning of the word? It is derived from a word used by the people of Indus Valley civilization some 4000 years ago. The word is ‘Brandr’, the word was used to mention the act of branding livestock. Of course, the art and science of branding evolved through time.

Today, it is more about creating a meaningful emotional connection with people, so that they consider the products and services that businesses offer high standards. The ultimate aim is to kill the competition and create profits.

Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is a business term referring to the intangible quality of a potential customer to identify a brand (a product or a service). How many times have we used the term Xerox instead of photocopy.

This is because of the Xerox company was able to create a brand identity among the commoners. Same goes with many brands that later become household names for products or services. But in reality, these are brand names and not product names. Jeep, Kleenex, Google, Vaseline, Legos, etc., are a few which most of can relate to.

How did these brands create awareness and identity among the people? It happens only by constant conscious efforts. The most successful businesses around the globe have all created wonderful brand strategies for their success.

Why Businesses Need To Create Brand Awareness?

Without any doubt the major reason for why businesses should create brand awareness is to make profit. Well to make profit, one need to create awareness among the public because they are the ones who will buy the product or avail the services.

A brand would strategize brand awareness programs for one or the all of below mentioned reasons:

To publicize the Unique Selling Proportion.

• To assure the credibility of the product and services.
• To build meaningful and emotional connections with the public.
• To spread the news on entry of a business into a new zone or the country.
• To make people realize the loyalty and responsibility of the brand towards the society in which it is operating.
• To move the potential prospects of a business to the next stage of the customer lifecycle.

The Customer Life Cycle

Whatsoever be the reason, businesses choose different paths to create brand awareness strategies. The most common way is to advertise the brand with the help of a traditional(billboards, newspaper, TV or Radio) or new media(internet). With the advent of the internet, the time taken to create brand awareness among the public decreased. But surprisingly word of mouth ( Word of Mouth) still influences purchase decisions even now.

The Best Brand Awareness Strategies

In different centuries people used different mediums to execute the branding strategies and to create brand awareness. Let us have a quick look at the best brand awareness strategies of the various eras. For convenience the content is categorized under 2 categories. The pre-internet era and the post-internet era.

The Pre-Internet Era

Word of mouth publicity is the first type of publicity strategy used by the mankind. Also, Archaeologists have found evidence of advertising used by the Babylonians who lived in 3000 BC. So, it is definitely not a new concept. Bronze seals of the Indus Valley Civilization, royal Chinese records carved on bones and tortoise shells, etc. are examples of how important people considered creating brand awareness throughout history.

Then came the billboards, newspaper, radio and TV era; which most of us have seen in our lifetime. Advertising: editorial ratio is almost equal in almost all the traditional media.

It would be better to mention that publicity cannot only be done with the help of advertisements. The other ways of creating brand awareness are through referral programs (word-of-mouth), running consumer engaging contests, loyalty programs, etc.

The best brand awareness strategies

The Post-Internet Era

The internet has literally redefined the life of marketers. Now there are a lot of things one can do online to reach people faster, grab their attention and convert them to a faithful client or customer.

Some of the most unique and effective ways of branding in the modern internet era are:

1) Create engaging content: Engaging content about your brand on the internet can bring in a lot of attention from people world over. Content can be used in blogs, infographics, white papers, E-books, etc.
An optimized and well written content can help with SEO( Search Engine Optimization and increase the visibility on the internet.

2) Social Media Networking: No matter what creative or intellectual strategies you formalize to create brand awareness, until and unless you get connected with the right people you won’t see the results.
Social media platforms help in right networking to a large extend. Thousands of social media platforms including the most popular ones like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. Which suits your brand depends totally on your intentions.

3) Adopt trending features: If you want to brand the way the most innovative ones does, go ahead and follow the post modern trends like using #(hashtag) or @ (at). By including a hashtag to a post, social media networks are able to index it and the phrase becomes searchable/discoverable by other users. By using @, one can mention a person and calls forth attention directly from him or her.

4) Other internet strategies: Email Marketing, PPC Marketing, SEO, SMO, Paid advertisement, etc.
Unlike in the pre-internet era; branding and creating brand awareness is slightly complicated in the modern times. Only with an expert help one can find the right solution.

You can either hire an in-house employee or the most appropriate solution would be to give the project to a virtual assistant, who would be able to help you.

If you are a startup or a growing brand, increase brand awareness by incorporating innovative solutions and strategies.

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