BRAND AWARENESS: HOW TO BUILD AND MEASURE IT

Awareness-building is the first step in developing a successful marketing campaign. Awareness can be referred to as interest while the advertisement is mostly about desire. Building brand awareness about one’s brand is crucial to the success of any business.

Table of Contents:

• Building brand awareness for your brand
• Measuring the success of your brand awareness campaign

Building brand awareness for your brand

Brand awareness is measurable through the use of different tools. You can refer to the following video on the basics of branding:

A brand awareness campaign should consider the following things:

1. Know your audience: When you know who your audience is, you can adjust the way you release information to them. You also understand what their interests are and where they spend time on the internet.

2. What is unique about your brand: A personal touch is important, customers want to trust their brands. A unique story can make all the difference between a happy customer and an unhappy one.

3. Why would someone buy your product instead of competitors: This part takes insight into the market, the market’s needs, and the competition.

4. How do you tell them about it: This is where the marketing plan comes in. A couple of strategies are below:

• Social Media Strategy: This can be very effective if done right, but the downside to it is that it takes a lot of time and effort.
• Media Outreach: This is a good strategy if you wish to reach a wider audience. The downside to this strategy is that it can be expensive and time-consuming.
• Email Newsletters: Intended for your existing customers and cost-effective, but has the possibility of being deleted without being read. Very limited in the number of people you will reach.
• TV Commercials: Social media can amplify the effect of TV commercials, but this is very expensive and limited to the number of people who will actually see it. People are now trending away from watching TV as opposed to staying on their phones or laptops.
• Event Sponsorship, Giveaways: This is another strategy that can be effective, but it will require a lot of effort for the impact to come to fruition. The cost also adds up quickly and takes time to see results.
• Measure results, improve, and try again if necessary.

5. Brand awareness should always be tested and measured through the entire marketing process, and it’s important that all advertising executions agree with the original brand positioning and idea.

6. Promotion: These activities include events such as trade shows, contests, industry events and award programs.

7. Advertising: This includes television, radio, print, outdoor media, and direct mail advertising.

8. Personal selling: Consumer sales team presentations of your product or service.

9. Sales promotion: Includes coupons/rebates, premiums, sampling, and trade promotions such as loyalty program incentives for repeat purchases.

10. Public relations: Earned media tactics, editorial coverage, social network/online influencers, and community programs

11. Direct marketing: Interactive approaches such as email, SMS messaging and direct web contact with consumers who are interested in your product or service offering.

12. Research & development: Internal staff that’s involved in product development to ensure products are highly competitive. R&D can be an overwhelming task, here is a video on how to implement a successful research and development strategy for your business.

13. Sales training: Make sure your sales force is well trained and equipped with the knowledge to sell your product or service offering.

14. Marketing research: Oversees brand awareness efforts through insight gained from customer surveys focus groups and other forms of opinion feedback such as social media listening tools like Radian6

15. Customer service: Ensures customers have a positive experience with your brand, product, or service.

16. Public relations & Investor relations: Key to communicating the vision of the organization and building trust with investors or stakeholders in the market.

17. Market research & Segmentation analysis: Helps inform key business decisions including product development, pricing, distribution channels, and marketing strategies.

18. Identity (brand architecture): The visual identity of the brand includes logo design, product design, and communications like advertising or packaging.

19. Visual branding: Combination of identity elements that ensure all touchpoints with customers are aligned under one coherent experience.

20. Sales Management & Channel management: Sales managers manage relationships with resellers or distributors to drive sales. Channel management focuses on managing the downstream channel between your product or service offering to the end customer.

21. Research & Development: This includes in-house scientists who are responsible for inventing new products and technologies that will improve existing ones.

22. Sales & Marketing: The team of people who are responsible for selling the company’s products and services.

23. Branding & Customer experience: This team focuses on how customers will perceive your brand, i.e., “the total experience” of customer interaction with your brand, product, or service offering. It includes marketing communications touchpoints that will influence customers’ perceptions of your brand.

24. Creative: This team includes marketers and advertising professionals that develop creative ideas for marketing campaigns, product promotions, and other communications to customers and prospects. They also manage all interactions with advertising agencies (and manage the agency where applicable).

25. PR & Social media: Makes sure any earned media coverage or customer conversation through social media is monitored, engaged in, and responded to in a timely manner.

26. Digital marketing: Comprises the various activities involved with digital efforts including SEO, social media, email, paid search engine ads (PPC), affiliate/content networks, and mobile marketing.

Measuring the success of your brand awareness campaign

A brand awareness campaign does not need to be complicated. A few key points and a creative idea are sufficient for most companies.

This article covers a few key points to be taken care of while keeping track of the success of your brand awareness campaign.

1. Measure brand awareness through panel research or through secondary research, which consists of databases available for sale, such as syndicated data from Simmons Market Research Bureau (SMRB) resources.
2. Traditionally, awareness has been measured by comparing one’s brand to the competition, for example:
3. Consider social media as a tool to measure awareness through Google search analysis tools such as Google Analytics or from Facebook Insights from your page analytics on your personal profile or business page.
4. Monitor marketing campaigns with control and treatment groups.
5. Other ways to measure brand awareness are by using surveys, focus groups, or interviews. These techniques will provide specific feedback on how consumers act, both verbally and non-verbally, when they are presented with a product/brand name. They may also be able to tell you what cues they look for that trigger a certain response or association with a brand.
6. If you are using an “ad awareness” service, be sure to ask what type of marketing activities will help your message stand out from the other ads consumers are being exposed to at the same time.
7. Brand awareness is often confused with market or advertising share because both measures can monitor how much recognition a brand is getting versus the competitors.
8. Brand awareness should be monitored longitudinally (over time) and not compared to other campaigns or brands in the short term.

Although, comparing short-term results can be useful to learn how different ad campaigns are doing over time.

9. Brand awareness should be the focus of all advertisements because it is key for having a successful campaign. Awareness cannot be sold, so use advertising efforts to raise brand awareness so you can begin selling your product or service.
10. All marketing campaigns have a goal to facilitate the sale of a product. Brand awareness helps increase sales by making it easier for consumers to identify and differentiate your company from competitors.
11. When you build brand awareness it will also lead to enhanced business results such as improved market share, improved profits, and improved customer acquisition rate.

Awareness gives a brand a competitive edge because it means that consumers are aware of the company’s service and demand for a product. More importantly, it provides a pathway to targeted traffic which can eventually lead to sales.