Have you ever heard people refer to themselves as “Apple people,” “Nike people,” or “Tesla people”?

This is what brand awareness can do for a brand: embed itself into consumer lifestyles and purchase habits so that they don’t have to think twice before becoming a customer — time and time again.

What is brand awareness?

Brand awareness represents how familiar your target audience is with your brand and how well they recognize it. Brands with high brand awareness are generally referred to as “trending,” “buzzworthy, or simply “popular.” Establishing brand awareness is valuable when marketing and promoting your company and products, especially in the early stages of a business.

Brand awareness is very important for business success and marketing goals of an organisation. Brand awareness creates trust in your field of consumers. Brand trust is everything, once a consumer becomes loyal to your brand then they are more likely to become a repeat consumer in the future. It is the same for the large multinationals and small organisations; the proverbial face of your brand is what consumers will trust. People do business with people and consumers trust a friendly and familiar face.

Association by Brand Awareness

When you’re having a disagreement with a friend about, pretty sure you would Google it. When you’re ordering a whiskey drink at the bar, I’m sure you would say “Jameson & ginger ale”. And when you are ordering take-away you definitely say one of the following – “Deliveroo it or Just-Eat”!

Am I wrong? I’m guessing not, so why does this happen with brands being used as nouns or verbs? Google should be referred to as a search engine, Jameson as a whiskey and Deliveroo or Just-Eat as a take-away. However, it’s more fun to refer to the brand itself even if it’s not the brand we actually go ahead with for this transaction.

Now we understand brand what brand awareness does, I hope! It associates actions and products with particular brands, subconsciously encouraging us to replace common words with branded terms.

Building your Brand Equity

Brand equity is also known as a brand’s value. This is determined by the consumers experience of the brand along with the overall perception of the brand. Positive and negative perceptions of a brand add up to evaluate Brand Equity. Some brands are known to be controversial and others to be clean cut and cautious. Take Paddy Power for instants; I’m not sure they have produced an ad campaign or marketing campaign that was not controversial and didn’t offend somebody. But that’s the point of brand awareness and establishing brand equity. Paddy Power use gorilla marketing techniques and get up peoples noses but everybody loves it because we can all have a laugh every now and again.

Whether your brand is planted firmly on the train tracks or sky-diving out of a plane there are valuable results that come from positive brand equity like: higher perceived value, higher stock price, ability to expand products or services and greater social impact because of brand name value.

Once a consumer is aware of a brand, they start to recognize it without assistance, seek it out to make a purchase, begin to prefer it over other similar brands, and establish a loyalty that not only spurs on other purchases but also inspires recommendations to family and friends.

That, amigos, is why brand awareness is so important. It establishes trust with your customers, creates positive associations, and builds invaluable brand equity that allows your brand to become a household name.

Establishing Brand Awareness

There is no overnight magic formula for Brand awareness. It takes multiple simultaneous efforts to promote and convert consumers into needing your brand.

People buy from people. It’s the age-old businessman tagline that translates directly into the world of big brands. Most successfully brands have a face, traits and feelings that define them and leave a lasting impression with the consumer.

“Being social leads to greater Brand Awareness”. Social media has become the forefront of human interaction the last decade and is set to only increase in popularity with the coming generations. Over 50% of brand reputation comes from online social media accounts. The more social you are the greater your awareness brand becomes.

Being social can also have some negative effects. It’s a simple mistake some brands make but research has proven that shoving deal after product or service deal down consumer’s throats has a detrimental effect on brand awareness. Consumers want to receive free advice, offers, deals and feel like the brand cares about them. Treat your social accounts as if you were a person trying to make friends rather than customers.

We really believe in the power of storytelling and find this a great marketing tool to promote and captivate audiences. Crafting a narrative around your brand humanizes it and gives it depth. And weaving this said narrative into your marketing inherently markets your brand alongside your products or services. People like hearing stories about each other, it creates authenticity and can lead to a big increase in brand awareness.

How to increase Brand Awareness?

Every business is different but when expanding your brand awareness the common denominator is always related to “Giving”. Consumers love a brand that offers them free advice, free software, upgrades, free content that they can share easily, free merchandise when they show up to an event already sponsored by you and leave with branded apparel with your brand on it. The most interesting options out of all is to give your brand a personality. Treating your brand as a person and defining your narrative are the first steps to giving your brand a personality. The next step would be infusing this personality into your marketing efforts.

Consider Churchill Insurance – Oh Yees! (did you just picture the bobble headed dog? I did.) They are adding a face/ a personality to their brand to give it an…. animal touch! Even a tagline that goes “depend on the dog”. There’s something endearing about have a dog as a mascot and being an insurance company that handles your personal property insurance kind of softens the negative feelings people have towards insurance companies.

Quantitative Brand Awareness Measures

These numbers can help you paint the overall picture of your brand awareness. To measure quantitatively, check out these metrics:

• Direct traffic.Firstly, direct traffic is the result of people intentionally typing in your URL and visiting your website. Your direct traffic number will tell you how much your marketing is prompting people to visit your website. This is an important metric, as many consumers today discover brands through social media, advertisements, or by typing in keywords related to your brand or product. When consumers go directly to your site, it means they were aware of your brand beforehand.
• Site traffic numbers. This number just reflects overall site traffic, which will tell you how much of the general internet population is checking out your content and spending time with your brand. It won’t quite tell you where people came from, but that doesn’t matter, because they’re aware of your brand enough to check it out.
• Social engagement.Engagement can refer to followers, likes, retweets, comments, and more. It’s a reflection of how many people are aware of your brand and socialize with it, as well as how impactful your content is. For instance, sites like Sparktoro can give you a specific score for your Twitter impact.

Qualitative Brand Awareness Measures

This step is where your brand awareness “score” gets a little murky. But these tactics can still help you gauge who and how many people are aware of your brand. To measure qualitatively, try:

• Searching Google and setting up Google Alerts. Doing this gets you up to speed with how your brand is being talked about online. It will alert you to any news or mentions by third-party press. As your brand grows, its internet real estate will expand beyond your website, so keep an eye on that.
• Social listening.Social listening is monitoring social media management tools for organic mentions and engagement. Who’s tagging your brand, mentioning it in comments, or using your hashtag in their posts? These tools can help you discover that. And the more your audience is discussing your brand on social media, the more they’re aware of it.
• Running brand awareness surveys. This process involves getting direct feedback from your customers and audience and can be incredibly helpful with not only understanding who knows of your brand but also what they think of it. You can release surveys through SurveyMonkeyor TypeForm and share them on social media or directly with your customers. This guide will help you create and promote them.

These quantitative and qualitative metrics will help you understand your brand awareness among your audience and the general public. It’ll never be a perfect number, but keeping your pulse on this measure will help influence campaigns and stay connected to your audience. Regardless of how you gauge brand awareness for your company, avoid these common mistakes when measuring brand awareness.