The Definitive Guide to Brand Awareness for Small Businesses
As a small business owner, obscurity is one of the biggest challenges you will face when it comes to growing your business.
No matter how great your product or service is, customers won't be able to buy from you if they don't know that your business exists.
You must increase your brand awareness so you can expand your reach and make your marketing campaigns a lot more effective.
According to this study from SmartInsights, marketers state that improving brand awareness is one of the most important objectives when creating a digital marketing plan.
This is not surprising when you consider that the strength of your brand on the market is a major determining factor in the overall success of your business.
In this article, we take a look at how you can increase brand awareness to help you grow your small business.
What is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness is the extent to which your target audience is familiar with the image or qualities of your brand under different conditions.
Having brand awareness means that consumers have knowledge of, and can recognize or recall your brand’s unique selling points, as well as distinguish it from other brands in the market.
Brand awareness helps you establish and develop customer loyalty and increase your market share. An increase in brand awareness will also boost your sales volumes. Two examples of brands that everyone is familiar with are McDonald’s and Nike.
These are well-known brands that have successfully branded themselves. However, in today's dynamic and ever-evolving market, small businesses have to find innovative ways to increase awareness of their brands, such as using branded links all across the internet, or A/B testing various branding tactics.
One way to create a successful brand awareness campaign is to use a brand awareness guide.
What is a Brand Awareness Guide?
A brand awareness guide is a step-by-step process designed to help you positively impact your business's marketing efforts and increase awareness of your brand.
A detailed guide will help you achieve success in your brand awareness campaign so you can get your company noticed. It includes a variety of marketing strategies and techniques that will allow you to build brand awareness and recognition among your target audience.
Small businesses in particular need to work on increasing brand awareness so they can introduce potential customers to their products or services in the right way.
Every small business needs a brand awareness guide to help them steer their branding campaigns for years to come.
Here are just a few ways that small businesses can benefit from having a brand awareness guide:
Get your small business noticed and gain momentum
Increase your brand's market share
Better inform future marketing strategies
Expand your reach for more effective marketing campaigns
Establish and develop customer loyalty
Boost your business’s sales volumes
With the right guide, even businesses with small budgets will be able to gain momentum, get their name out there, and spread the message about their products and services.
The Steps to Brand Awareness For Small Businesses
When it comes to the effective implementation of a brand awareness campaign, there are certain steps that you must take to succeed.
Below, we have listed the steps that must be followed sequentially in order to build awareness for your brand.
1. Review Current Branding Strategies
Your first step in increasing brand awareness for your small business involves reviewing your current branding strategies. You need to check the different branding strategies that you're currently using and evaluate them to determine their strengths and weaknesses.
This means everything, including:
Internal branding, such as your company's mission, brand values, and company culture.
External branding, including your business logo, website, social media platforms, emailing content marketing, infographics, online or print ads and marketing materials, etc.
Customer experience, which includes your sales process and customer support, as well as customer service policies.
Once you know what's working and what isn't doing much to help you achieve your business objectives, you can move on to the next step.
2. Understand Your Company Goals
You need to understand your company goals if you are going to create an effective plan to increase your brand awareness.
Ultimately, the goal of your brand awareness campaign is to help you meet the main objectives of your business. By understanding the goals of your company, you will be able to easily outline the objectives and aims of your branding campaign. It also makes it easier for you to measure the success of your marketing efforts.
Once you have a firm understanding of your company's goals, you can move on to the third step in building brand awareness for your small business.
3. Create a Style Guide
The third step is to create a style guide for your brand. It's important to have clear and consistent messaging across all the different platforms that you use.
This includes your business’s logo as well as the colors and fonts that you use in the content you publish on your blog, social media, packaging supplies and various other marketing spaces.
Your audience must be able to immediately associate your brand with the content, products, and services you offer. Brand consistency is important to not only avoid confusion but also to build trust with your ideal audience.
According to a recent study, the average revenue increase attributed to consistent brand messaging is 33%.
4. Determine Your Competitive Advantage
A company's competitive advantage is any factor that allows them to produce products or services in a cheaper and more efficient way than its rivals. It is the answer to the question of why a customer would buy from that company instead of its competition.
Such factors allow the company to generate higher margins compared to its competitors in the market.
In order to determine your company's competitive advantage, you should not only focus on price, but also on deliverables, which are the characteristics, behaviors, and actions that set your business apart from your competitors.
Here are some examples of deliverables that might make your business stand out beyond the actual products and services that you offer :
Quality or Reputation
Customer Service
Trust/Relationships
Innovation
Consistency
Speed of Implementation
Resource Base
Results Delivered for Customers
So, as an example, if you sell products on one of the quality e-commerce platforms and your deliverable is consistent order fulfillment, you need to highlight that as a brand differentiator among your competitors.
"We have a customer retention rate of 95% - which is twice that of our closest competitor."
5. Decide Key Messaging
Your next step is to decide on the key messaging for your brand. This is consistent messaging that you will use across all your communication channels.
Your key messaging must tell your brand's story and bring your brand to life in a compelling way. You must use appealing and memorable taglines, as well as catchy brand slogans to capture the attention of your audience.
This article from ImpactBND goes into more detail on how to create effective key messages for your brand.
Here are a few examples of really catchy taglines from some popular companies:
Nike: “Just Do It.”
De Beers: "A Diamond Is Forever"
Dollar Shave Club: "Shave Time. Shave Money."
M&M: "Melts in Your Mouth, Not in Your Hands"
MasterCard: "There are some things money can't buy. For everything else, there's MasterCard."
6. Create a Company Personality
In order to experience success in your branding campaign, your company will need to have a personality of its own.
It's important for companies to project the personality of an individual in order to succeed. In other words, be a person in your branding, not a company.
For instance, with my own brand I have a YouTube intro which includes me speaking about the topic of the video for 30-60 seconds and then I have an animated 4 second intro highlighting what my channel is about.
Many channels use the short 3-5 second animated intro and then jump into the video, but I prefer to connect with my viewers personally as a person before a video intro.
These days it's all about human-to-human communication. Business-to-customer communications are long gone. You need to ditch the corporate image for a more human face so you can give your customers the human experience they crave.
Once you've determined the type of personality your company will have, make sure that this is the personality that is portrayed across all your marketing channels. All the content you create should have a matching tone, language, and style in order to maintain brand consistency.
For instance, if you’re trying to teach online courses, you’ll want to connect your users to your personality so they know who they’re buying from. I do this myself and in doing so, I’m able to make a connection to my audience.
If your brand or business is looking to create courses as well, you may find this guide I created helpful to find the right online course platform.
7. Additional Brand Awareness Strategies
To increase brand awareness, there are tons of different things you can do. Depending on your ideal audience you may choose some of the following tactics to get the word out about your business and your brand:
Content Marketing: Leverage the power of content marketing to get your message in front of your ideal audience.
Case Studies: Use case studies to make more people aware of the solutions your brand provides.
Podcast: Start a podcast or be a guest on other small business podcasts to reach new audiences.
YouTube: Create a Youtube channel to help you expand the reach of your marketing campaigns. Side note, a high-quality YouTube channel can be an additional revenue stream for your business.
Rewards program: boost customer retention with rewarding your customers with points, perks, special discounts etc.
Sponsor Events: Sponsor programs and events to boost face-to-face interactions with prospective customers.
Strategic Partnerships: Create strategic partnerships with other small businesses that offer complementary products.
8. Measure Brand Success
The final step involves measuring the success of your branding campaign. In order to do this, you must use analytics across all the different platforms where you post content or interact with your audience.
The best way to accurately measure the impact of your marketing efforts on your brand awareness is to use tools like Buzzsumo ,ContentStudio or Mention to monitor the effectiveness of your brand-building efforts.
Here are some of the ways to measure brand success:
Track brand mentions: You can use simple searches on each platform to see the different people that interacted with your brand on various social media channels. You can also see the people who used your brand's hashtag in their posts on social media.
Use online surveys: After your brand awareness campaign has come to an end, you can run a quick survey to ask your audience whether they saw your campaign, and if so, where they saw it, what they think about it, and so on.
This will give you a better understanding of the impact your campaign had on your target audience.
Measure web traffic: Although it may be hard to track the channel where you get all your traffic, you will still be able to make an informed estimate as to the effectiveness of your awareness campaign by looking at your web traffic before and after.
Check your analytics, analyze them, and use the information to help you gauge the effectiveness of your branding campaign. You can also use tools such as chatbots to collect detailed data about your traffic source and visitors’ behaviour on your site.
Links to Site: Getting a link from another website is a vow of confidence in the eyes of search engines. Tracking the amount of other websites linking to your brand’s website is another metric to track as this can have an impact on the traffic you receive from search engines.
New Customers and Revenue: While revenue is not typically the goal of a brand awareness campaign, it’s the ultimate goal for any organization so it makes sense to track it. While running any brand awareness campaign, your team should always track new customers and revenue to see what impact the campaign has on the bottom line.
Summary
As you have seen from the information in this article, it's vital to work on your brand awareness, particularly in the early stages of your business. If you pair these best practices with an analytical approach to achieving product excellence, it’s likely that you’ll be able to create a very loyal following who love what you offer.
Use the steps outlined above to help you craft a brand awareness plan that will get your small business noticed and help you grow.
