Businesses commonly assume that branding expertise is most relevant when they are embarking on something new – whether introducing a new product or range, or announcing an expansion, new storefront or service.
In reality, the most significant branding strategies can be paramount for long-standing organisations that have hit a plateau, begun to lose traction and market share, or recognised that their existing proposition no longer aligns perfectly with the expectations and habits of their key user demographics.
Flintlock Marketing is discussing the use of branding to boost awareness, recognition, and familiarity and how implementing strong, impactful brand strategies is an excellent way to ensure your company is seen, known, and trusted by the audiences you most wish to engage with.
Varied Brand Aspirations: Using the Right Branding Approach to Achieve Your Goals
The first step in any branding project is to consult closely with you, as our client, to unpick the exact targets and aims you want to achieve. Extracting clarity about your big-picture goals, even if they are some way off, is crucial since this enables us to map where you are now and what we’ll need to do to create a strategic roadmap to success.
It’s also important to illustrate the different types of brand awareness, which may depend on the size, position, and audience of your business, and how best to ensure you connect with your target audiences through mediums where they will be receptive to the brand message.
As a quick recap, we collaborate with businesses and organisations looking to:
- Extend market share
- Improve brand familiarity
- Reposition the brand as a preferred option
- Boost visibility
- Augment brand exposure
If these targets sound similar, we’ll explain what they mean, how each approach may be valuable based on your brand’s lifecycle, and some of the potential strategies we may recommend to help you hit those goalposts.
For many, a brand audit is extremely useful at this stage, where it is far more common than you might imagine to have a different idea about how your brand is perceived and performing from an external perspective.
This is where our in-depth Sparking workshops provide detailed insights, giving you an independent overview of how your stakeholders, from consumers to workforces, partners to owners, view and feel about your brand – which can dictate the right branding strategy for you.
Raising Brand Awareness and Exposure Across Your Sector or Industry
Brand exposure is often crucial at the earlier stages when a business remains in its infancy. Penetrating a competitive market and getting your name out there can be the most significant stumbling block to success.
Deliberate, targeted, and well-placed brand marketing capitalises on opportunities and channels through which your ideal consumers will see your brand, learn what it stands for, and start to develop a relationship and connection with it—which you can use as a foundation to build on and nurture.
Making your brand memorable and improving brand recall is a vital stepping stone to developing long-term brand trust and turning potential customers now into future brand advocates.
Growing Brand Awareness and Familiarity Within Target Audience Groups
The next stage is often to introduce brand familiarity campaigns, looking to provide a direct introduction to the brand, using initial brand awareness efforts to keep developing the business’s presence and position, and ensure a prospective buyer will think of it when making purchasing decisions.
Familiarity and awareness differ because the former isn’t solely about having consumers know and recognise the brand, logo, colours, or packaging but being more in tune with what the brand has to offer, what sets it apart from its competitors, and the brand’s values.
Excellent brand familiarity is often considered a gold standard because it goes beyond the basics of knowing your brand exists and extends into how audiences feel and react to your branding and marketing strategy—and how you can use those interactions to improve revenues.
Using Brand Strategy to Extend Market Share
Next, we might consider a brand awareness campaign to broaden your reach or approach new audience segments who may not have been captured by the earlier phases of your marketing or sales funnels – whether to revisit initial brand awareness strategy marketing in new geographical areas, connect with different demographics, or within existing audiences to raise brand recognition of new services or value propositions.
Measuring brand awareness is key since, if your brand is already well known, we could suggest a different strategy, whereby we make the best use of existing high brand equity and reputation as a launchpad to bring new services or products to your market or to catalyse the speed with which you can gain market share in new trading environments.
Strong brand identity, consistent communications, and exceptional customer experiences make an enormous difference. The first interaction a viewer has with your brand marketing, online presence, or new offerings can be essential to forming a positive impression.
Adjusting Your Brand Position to Meet Current Market Demand
Finally, we mentioned earlier that brand awareness campaigns are far from suitable only for younger and newly launched brands. The majority of businesses that don’t update their branding and strategies or conduct deep dive market and user research find that, over time, successful branding begins to stagnate.
This can occur for countless reasons, but it is typically because the wants, needs, priorities, pain points, and preferences of your core audience have shifted—whether in terms of the motivations that influence their habits, content marketing consumption, and buying behaviours or because the factors that contribute to active buying decisions have altered.
For instance, we’ve seen that many heritage brands with rich and compelling legacies gain significant outcomes by refreshing and updating branding, preserving and respecting the origins of the brand, while using contemporary colour palettes, language, engagement strategies and communication methods to revitalise their position and attract new audiences.
By adapting your brand strategy to your current position and making informed, clear and tactical judgements about the right type of brand awareness marketing to focus on, you can achieve faster growth, scalability, traction and audience responses – by keeping your branding sharp and your key consumer front of mind.
