Awareness is the first step in brand building, ensuring you have great brand visibility and are a known, respected expert in your field. Consumers today make buying decisions based on myriad factors, and if they’ve never heard of your business, or perceive that it lacks authenticity, they will likely look elsewhere.
Brand awareness strategies build that initial knowledge, developing a strong, unique brand identity that acts as a differentiator between you and your competitors, ensuring your messaging is engaging, resonates with your target audience, and makes you a brand your buyer demographic can instantly recognise.
In this article, the brand marketing experts at Flintlock Marketing talk about brand awareness and why your approach must focus on reputation, values and delivering on your promises to foster that all-important trust – which feeds into a faster rate of brand awareness growth and ongoing customer loyalty.
The Link Between Brand Awareness and Consumer Trust
Every brand awareness campaign must be consistent, with the same themes, brand voice and personality you want your business to be known for. That all starts with identifying the underpinning qualities and characteristics that your company stands for.
Rather than trying to achieve better brand visibility through generic high-profile marketing, businesses need to be strategic about how they promote themselves, in what ways, and to which consumer groups.
While it takes time to create brand loyalty, where a customer wouldn’t consider buying anywhere else, your brand awareness efforts can build that underlying trust by concentrating their campaigns on several areas, such as:
- The quality of the services, support or products you supply.
- Social proof, using third-party testimonials and reviews.
- Value propositions, where you provide a competitive price point, balanced against the quality you offer.
- Your recruitment, retention and staffing policies.
- Business approaches to customer experiences.
- Brand values, such as your contributions to community issues or the causes you choose to support.
The key is to aim for a positive brand reputation, where you achieve great brand recognition and a business that customers engage with, relate to and want to be a part of. For example, a brand that actively supports a charitable cause may attract better brand awareness through its campaigns, creating increased awareness alongside augmented trust.
Complexities of Generating Trust Through a Brand Awareness Strategy
There are numerous approaches to raising brand awareness, and the right ways forward depend on your business sector and target audience, the current website traffic you receive, and your presence on social media platforms.
Whichever marketing campaigns you select, your content marketing, social media posts and digital marketing activities should all centre around a uniform message. Brand trust may be tricky to quantify, but it remains a core factor in many purchasing decisions.
Brand ambassadors and influencer marketing are great examples. These approaches to building brand awareness are undoubtedly beneficial for many businesses, allowing companies to access huge followings and committed brand evangelists who trust the products their favourite influencer, celebrity or expert chooses to endorse.
However, picking the wrong public spokesperson or having a brand endorsed by well-known ambassadors whose values, position or profile are inconsistent with the interests of your target audience can backfire.
It is impossible to purchase trust or buy a reputation outright, which is where brand strategy awareness campaigns come in. Although they may include a brand partnership or other campaign ideas, it is crucial that consumers recognise any business or advocate you partner with as a like-minded representative that increases their likelihood of making a purchase.
Designing a Targeted Brand Awareness Strategy
Building awareness takes sustained effort and time to accrue valuable brand equity. International brands with immediate, worldwide brand recognition, such as Coca-Cola or Apple, spent years developing their brands, logos and product ranges.
Beginning with a well-researched, adaptable and customer-focused strategy will put you in the best position to succeed, growing brand awareness gradually and ensuring that brand recognition is sustainable – where loyal customers stick with you and new audiences continue to learn about your brand.
Within the brand marketing industry, we often highlight the customer journey, where buyers might not begin as paying customers but initially learn about the presence of a brand or a particular product.
This is what makes brand awareness important – ensuring your demographic not only knows of your brand but considers it a positive, competitive solution and one that has a preferential factor over your competitors.
Let’s work through some elements you might want to consider for your brand awareness strategy and how to ensure each marketing campaign generates trust.
Understanding Your Target Market
Every great brand awareness campaign requires in-depth research where you gain insights into who your target audience is, what their expectations are, and the pain points your product or service can resolve. The greater the scope of data you have, the better you can customise your brand awareness ads.
Setting expectations and sharing messaging through a variety of campaigns helps to build brand awareness by keeping your brand at top of mind and ensuring customers feel you are a ‘brand for them’ and can meet their objectives.
This step also impacts the trust you generate through brand awareness campaigns. Your knowledge of factors such as your audience’s average income, the social media channels they choose to use, and the values and aspirations they share will shape your content, messaging and approach.
Capturing Unique Brand Positioning
Our next phase is establishing your brand positioning, showcasing those special aspects of your business that make you different. A distinct brand voice represents the essence of your business and how your target audience will perceive the value you offer.
Brand messaging is important since most consumers will prefer to purchase products or services from brands they see as having shared values. That might mean honing in on your brand history and storytelling to demonstrate your missions and aims, creating a brand that customers connect with.
There are numerous ways to spread awareness of these non-sales-focused messages, such as:
- Word-of-mouth marketing or referral programmes where new consumers rely on the experiences of existing customers.
- Guest posting to boost brand awareness with different audiences, positioning your brand as an authority, and sharing useful, informative content.
- Creating content for your website and social channels that highlights your brand voice and values rather than focusing on just your products or price points.
- Influencer marketing and brand partnerships where carefully selected influencers or experts share your content or information about your business.
In each of these brand awareness efforts, paying attention to consistency and ensuring your marketing always ties back to your brand values will help you increase awareness in a targeted way while fostering trust and retaining authenticity.
“Every minute you spend in planning saves 10 minutes in execution; this gives you a 1,000 per cent return on energy!”
Brian Tracy, author and motivational speaker
“The longest way around is often the shortest way home.”
