As a small business or start-up, the importance of building your brand and cultivating brand awareness is fundamental. Developing a strong, cohesive and consistent brand will lead to lasting, long-term benefits for your business. From priming the bottom end of the marketing funnel, to lowering long-term costs of acquisition, to increasing conversion rates and stronger customer loyalty, investing in brand awareness can set your business up for success.
This guide will walk you through the steps of creating, building and sustaining brand awareness. From defining your brand identity, to creating your visual brand elements, establishing your online presence, engaging with your audience, and more, follow along for all the ins and outs of brand awareness and how it can drive your business.
Brand Awareness: Define you brand
When it comes to defining your brand, it’s important to look beyond just your name or logo and dive deep into identifying all the ins and outs of your brand. A brand identity is made up of what your brand says, what your values are, how you communicate your product, and what you want people to feel when they interact with your company. Essentially, your brand identity is the personality of your business and a promise to your customers.
Clearly articulating your brand mission and values is the first step in defining your brand. Your brand mission will be a cornerstone in every other aspect of your branding process. It will help your audience understand the purpose of your brand and what it aims to accomplish. A brand mission statement clearly communicates a brand’s purpose, objectives and how it plans to serve its audience. It is action-oriented and gives readers an idea of what your business does and what impact it wants to make on its audiences’ lives and on the world. It is common for a company’s mission statement to shift and evolve over time as the company itself grows and redefines its goals. Your brand values are the key principles that guide how your brand and company operates. These values will define how you will achieve your mission.
The next step in defining your brand is identifying your target audience. Your target audience is the group of people that are most likely to buy your product or use your service. It is the group that will most resonate with your brand mission and values. Defining your target audience should go deeper than simply identifying their demographics. You should work to understand who they are as people, and as consumers, and what they care about. Things to explore when defining your target audience can include:
- Where do they hang out on- and offline?
- How do they like to communicate?
- What is their demographic information (age range, expertise, location, job title, hobbies)
- What is their psychographic information (behaviors, attitude, lifestyle preferences, personality type, etc.)
- What pain points do your products or services solve for them?
Outlining and understanding your target audience is crucial in building your brand and setting up your marketing strategy and plan for success.
Once you’ve solidified your brand mission and values and defined your target audience, it’s time to outline your unique brand identity so that you can truly stand out in the market. Your brand identity is the visual, verbal, and emotional expression of your brand. It includes your name, logo, colors, fonts, tone of voice, tagline, and personality. Your brand identity should directly reflect your core values, mission, and vision. It should set you up as a unique player in your marketplace.
Brand Awareness: Create Compelling Visual Brand Elements
Once you’ve got your brand mission and identity established, you can use that as inspiration to develop your visual brand elements, including your logo, your typeface, design elements, color palette, etc. It is important that your brand voice and your visual identity blend together seamlessly, complementing each other in perfect harmony. A strong logo and visual identity can capture the essence of your brand and help you to make an impact in the world.
A few questions to consider prior to developing your brand visuals:
- What are the key brand traits you want to express through your visuals?
- What type of visuals communicate these traits?
- What do you want people to feel when they “see” your brand?
It’s important that your full team and all brand stakeholders are involved in this conversation and process, so that everyone is on the same page and representing your brand in the same, consistent manner.
Brand Awareness: Establish an Online Presence
Okay, so you’ve built and defined your brand identity. You’ve defined your mission, your values and your target audience. You’ve perfected your visuals and you’re ready for the next step. That’s establishing an online presence. An online presence can be defined by how easy it is to find a brand or company online. It’s important for building your brand’s reputation, increasing brand awareness, and providing visibility to your products or services when users are searching for related keywords.
Your online presence is more than just your company website. It can include email marketing, your presence on social media, producing content to share online, running online ads, mastering your SEO, developing and nurturing relationships, and more. Showing up in a consistent and interesting manner online is a critical component of building your brand awareness.
Brand Awareness: Utilize Content Marketing
So, your brand is in the wild. Now, your customers and target audience want to see valuable content from your brand; content that they can connect to. Cue, content marketing.
Content marketing is the process of publishing written and visual material online with the purpose of attracting more leads to your business. These can include blog posts, pages, ebooks, infographics, videos, and more. By honing in on effective content marketing, you can inspire and delight your target audience, resulting in increased conversions, improved brand awareness, boosted revenue, establishing yourself as an industry leader, and more.
Types of content marketing include:
- Online content (webpages, blogs, etc.)
- Social media content
- Short-form video
- Podcasts
- Ebooks
- Webinars
Brand Awareness: Engage with Your Audience
Engaging with your audience is essential in building brand awareness, trust and loyalty. It will let your audience know that they can trust you as a brand and as a product, and that you’ve got their best interests at heart. Regular customer engagement will show your audience that you are truly invested in them and their needs and in providing a product or service that will address those needs.
Responding to customer queries and feedback in a timely and professional manner is key to building trust. Creating a customer loyalty program can foster brand loyalty and encourage repeat customers. And, encouraging user-generated content and testimonials is a fantastic way of expanding your audience base and attracting like-minded consumers.
Brand Awareness: Leverage Public Relations and Partnerships
One final aspect of building brand awareness is through leveraging public relations and partnerships. Seeking media coverage through press releases and media pitches when your company has a new product or services to announce, an exciting event coming up, or team member news to share is a great way of getting your brand seen quickly and by a wide audience. It can also increase the credibility of your company.
Collaborating with complementary brands for cross-promotion is another great way of increasing your brand awareness and reaching a wider audience. Each company combines forces to promote the others’ products and services for a mutually beneficial relationship. You can do this on social media, in advertisements, co-hosting a webinar or podcast, creating joint promotional newsletters, and more.
Sponsoring events or participating in industry conferences is another excellent way of leveraging public relations and partnerships to build brand awareness. It can help foster your philanthropic side as a business and brand and also set you up as an innovator and thought-leader within your industry.
Brand Awareness: Measure and Analyze
Measuring and analyzing your brand awareness and brand reputation is an important and necessary part of the process. Collecting and standardizing brand awareness measurement metrics allows you to see progress over time and understand how well your efforts are working.
Here are a few key measurements to be aware of when it comes to brand awareness:
- Direct traffic to your website: 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.
- Site traffic numbers: This number 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.
- 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.
Running brand awareness surveys can be incredibly helpful with not only understanding who knows of your brand but also what they think of it. There are a variety of online survey tools that you can use, either sharing with your audience directly or via social media. Additionally, monitoring online reviews and customer feedback for brand sentiment can provide great insight into how your brand is thought of and experienced among your consumers.
Adapt and Evolve
Measuring and analyzing your brand awareness and brand reputation is an important and necessary part of the process. Collecting and standardizing brand awareness measurement metrics allows you to see progress over time and understand how well your efforts are working.
Here are a few key measurements to be aware of when it comes to brand awareness:
- Direct traffic to your website: 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.
- Site traffic numbers: This number 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.
- 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.
Running brand awareness surveys can be incredibly helpful with not only understanding who knows of your brand but also what they think of it. There are a variety of online survey tools that you can use, either sharing with your audience directly or via social media. Additionally, monitoring online reviews and customer feedback for brand sentiment can provide great insight into how your brand is thought of and experienced among your consumers.
Conclusion
To wrap up, brand awareness for small businesses and start-ups is fundamental to building a solid, lasting brand. In the early stages of developing your brand and your business, it is essential to make brand awareness and visibility a top priority. A strong identity and presence can help put any brand at the top of consumers’ minds. Adopting a strategic approach, such as the one outlined here, to building brand awareness can have lasting benefits on your brand and your business. It will set your brand up for long-term success and will create trust and loyalty among your target audience.
If you are an entrepreneur or small business owner looking to build or increase your brand awareness, you’ve come to the right place. Capital CFO+ offers full Branding + Marketing services to help you create a holistic and covetable brand. We can help you define and develop your brand story, and then share it with the world.
For more information or to get started on building your brand awareness, contact us today.
About Capital CFO+
Capital CFO+ LLC is based in Saratoga Springs, New York, providing bookkeeping, accounting, and CFO services. Capital CFO+ helps small firms access the economies of scale, efficiency, and expertise that large companies enjoy. Visit Pearl, our branch manager, at capitalcfollc.com or LinkedIn for more information.
