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When you are a small business owner, you will encounter several challenging situations while growing your business. If your audience is not aware of your brand’s existence, there is no way you can scale up your business. If you want to generate optimum brand awareness, you must create effective marketing campaigns. In this article, we will look at the different ways in which you can improve the brand awareness of your small business.
What Does Brand Awareness Mean?
Brand awareness signifies the extent to which your target customers are aware of your brand’s existence in multiple conditions. When the brand awareness of your business is high, it means that the target audience recognises the USPs of your brand that set your part from your competitors.
Brand awareness can help you in establishing and developing customer loyalty. It also increases your share in the market and provides a significant boost to your sales volumes.
Steps to generate brand awareness
1. Review your branding strategies
The first step is to review all the existing branding strategies and list their weaknesses and strengths. This would include,
- External branding like your website, logo, content marketing, social media platforms, etc
- Internal brandings like your brand values, mission, and culture
- Customer experience, which is your customer support and sales process
You need to know what is working for your company and what is not making any significant difference for your company’s success. This way, you can get a clear picture of what changes need to be made and what processes need to be further amplified to drive the success of your small business.
2. Go over your business goals
When you properly understand your company’s goals, you can easily layout all the aims and objectives of your branding campaign. This would also make it convenient for you to measure how successful your branding efforts are. Only once you have a clear understanding of your company’s goals can you proceed to the next step to boost your company’s brand awareness.
3. Make a style guide
You need to ensure that your company’s message needs to be consistent and clear across all the platforms. This would include your business logo and the fonts and colours that you use while publishing on social media, blogs, and several other spaces that you use for marketing. The consistency of your brand is essential to avoid confusion among your target audience and make it easier for them to trust your brand. This becomes a lot easier when you make a style guide.
4. Determine what sets you apart from your competitors
You need to outline all the factors that make your products and services way more attractive to your audience when compared to your rivals. You need to determine your business’s competitive advantage to make your ideal customers buy or use your service instead of your competitor. Some deliverables that would set your business apart from your rivals include,
- Customer service
- Reputation
- Quality
- Innovation
- Relationships/Trust
- Implementation speed
- Consistency
- Customer-driven results
- Resource base
5. Decide a tagline
Another important step is to decide on a tagline or key messaging for your business. This message needs to be consistently used by you across all the platforms. The tagline you choose for your brand needs to be compelling and should bring out the key attributes of your brand. Some of the popular taglines used by well-known brands include,
- Just do it – Nike
- Melts in your mouth, not in your hands – M&M
- A diamond is forever – De Beers
- There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s MasterCard – MasterCard
- Shave time, shave money – Dollar Shave Club
6. Generate your business personality
Your business needs to have a personality of its own if you wish to achieve success in your branding campaign. When you are strategising a branding campaign, think of your company as a person and proceed further. This way, you would be able to project an individual’s personality and achieve the desired success.
This is important because nowadays, it is all about communication from human to human and not business to human. You need to bring out the human face of your company and portray that among your target audience to give them a human experience and, in turn, improve your business sales.
Additional Strategies to Improve Brand Awareness
You can do many different things to improve brand awareness. Spending on your target audience, you can choose from the below options to improve brand awareness.
- Case studies: Here, focus on the solutions provided by your brand in the form of case studies.
- Content marketing: Get your message across in the right way to the right audience through content marketing.
- YouTube: Expand your marketing campaign’s reach by creating your very own YouTube channel. You can take the help of editing tools to create incredible video content in minimum time. You can explore over 2000 templates, edit visuals, text, effects, and create videos for YouTube from scratch.
- Podcast: Reach new audiences by starting a podcast or being a part of another business’s podcast.
- Sponsor events: Sponsor different events and programs to improve physical interaction with customers.
- Rewards program: Reward your customers with perks, points, special discounts, and similar incentives to boost the retention rate of customers.
- Strategic partnerships: Find other small businesses that give out complementary products and services and create a strategic partnership with them.
As you can see from the above points, it is vital to gain better brand awareness for your small business. The above steps work well when you employ them in the initial stages of starting your business. When you successfully follow the above steps and achieve product excellence, you would create a loyal customer following who loves the products and services you offer.