In advertising, “awareness” refers to the level of familiarity and recognition a brand or product has with its target audience. The practice of building awareness is about ensuring potential customers know a brand exists and can easily recall it. For local businesses, awareness is crucial for success and includes establishing a strong presence, building trust, attracting customers, and fostering loyalty, ultimately leading to increased sales and business growth. When people recognize your brand, they are more likely to choose you over competitors. If your target customers aren’t aware of your business, you certainly won’t be included in their consideration set when choosing who to do business with.
Building trust through awareness helps customers feel confident in your business and your products and services.
This article is part of the Sentinel Solutions local marketing newsletter. You can sign up here to get local marketing thought pieces sent to your inbox each week.
Here are some additional benefits of building your business’ awareness with your target market:
- Competitive Advantage: In a crowded and competitive market, a recognizable brand stands out, helping you capture customer attention and driving sales.
- Effective Communication: Awareness campaigns allow you to communicate your brand’s values and message effectively, building relationships with customers and other stakeholders.
- Reduced Marketing Costs: Developing a strong and well-known brand consistently over time can work to attract customers organically, reducing the need for expensive promotionally oriented advertising campaigns.
- Customer Loyalty: A well-known brand fosters customer loyalty, leading to repeat business and positive word-of-mouth referrals.
- Partnerships and Collaborations: Brand awareness can open doors for partnerships and collaborations with other local businesses, expanding your reach and influence.
Building brand awareness is foundational to business success as it helps a company become recognizable to its target audience, and serves as the bedrock for all marketing initiatives, including social media, SEO, and display advertising.
The awareness stage of the customer journey is the initial phase where potential customers become aware of a product, service, or brand, typically recognizing a problem or need that your offering can address. Building awareness for your brand in this stage of the journey is essential to building trust and being considered among customer’s purchases.
To learn more about the awareness stage and the customer journey, click here.
To effectively build brand awareness for your local business, focus on a multi-pronged approach that includes consistent branding, engaging content, leveraging social media, targeted display advertising, SEO optimization, and consumer engagement.
- Establishing a Strong Brand Identity:
- Be consistent in your branding ensuring your logo, colors, fonts, and overall positioning and messaging are consistent across all platforms to create a recognizable and memorable brand.
- Establish your unique selling proposition and clearly articulate what makes your brand different and why customers should choose you.
- Define your tone of voice and the personality of your brand and maintain consistency in all communications.
- Content Marketing:
- Foster engagement by developing valuable and sharable content that resonates with your target audience including blog posts, videos, infographics, and social media updates.
- Share your company’s mission and values through storytelling including your origin story.
- Experiment with different content formats to keep your audience engaged, catering to their interests.
- Create content that is easily sharable encouraging organic reach and increasing your brand visibility.
- Social Media Engagement:
- Choose the right platforms. Focus on the social media channels where your target audience is most active.
- Engage fully with your followers by responding to comments and messages and engage in conversations to build relationships and foster community.
- Use social media advertising to expand your reach to users with specific demographics and interests.
- Targeted Display Advertising:
- Focus on reaching the right audience and engage them with visually engaging advertising across relevant platforms.
- Consider strategies including geographic and demographic targeting, interest and behavioral targeting, contextual targeting, and re-marketing.
- Include a strong call-to-action to encourage customers to take the next step whether it’s visiting your website, making a purchase, or signing up for something.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
- Do your research by identifying relevant keywords that your target audience uses when searching for products and services like yours.
- Ensure your website is optimized for search engines by incorporating relevant keywords into your content strategy and optimizing your site structure.
- Earn and build high-quality backlinks from reputable websites in your industry to improve your search engine ranking.
- Consumer Engagement:
- Create campaigns that encourage customers to share their experiences with your brand including positive online reviews.
- Repurpose and share user-generated content on your social media channels and website.
- Feature user-generated content in your marketing materials to build trust and credibility.
How do you measure brand awareness?
To measure brand awareness track metrics including branded search volume, social media mentions, shares, and likes; website traffic, impressions, clicks, and additionally conduct brand awareness surveys to understand how consumers perceive and interact with your brand. Google Analytics and Google Trends can be valuable tools to use.
Awareness advertising is critical to an overall marketing campaign because it establishes brand recognition, builds trust, fosters loyalty and ultimately leads to increased sales and market share. Without laying this foundation, future marketing efforts will be compromised.
To learn more about the value of awareness within your marketing strategy give us a call here at Sentinel Solutions. We’re expert at marketing and building effective campaigns to help your business grow. Visit our website (here) or give us a call at 603-352-5896 or email Advertising@SentinelDigitalSolutions.com.
We’re here to help you succeed.
Additional Resources:
- Understanding The Customer Journey Toward Business Success.
- What Is Multimedia Marketing and How Can It Help Your Local Business?
- Is Branding Important to Your Local Business?
- Where Does Storytelling Fit in Your Branding Strategy?
- Can Customer Reviews Help Your Local Business?
- What Are CTAs and Why Does Your Local Business Need Them?
