You may have heard the words ‘brand awareness’ being thrown around at one time or another and as a result, may be asking yourself, what exactly is this term ‘brand awareness’?
What is brand awareness?
Brand Awareness is the way in which a large number of consumers or clients recognise and remember your business. It centres around the idea of including and attracting everyone’s attention, stretching far and wide beyond geographical location and is a term for how aware and informed those people are about what your brand has to offer.
Brand Awareness is the first step to getting your brand noticed and the more brand awareness you have, the more people, particularly large audiences, begin to recognise and remember your logo, messaging, products and services.
How to create brand awareness
When embarking on a journey to create brand awareness, you should start by casting a wide net across a large audience of potential consumers and clients, with the intention and goal of making them all aware of your brand.
From there, you can start to funnel leads (people who are interested in your product or service) towards the research and decision-making processes. This usually involves guiding and leading them through the different stages that lead up to the final purchasing decision.
If you are a business just starting out or struggling to make an impact within your community, which in many cases businesses are, it can be tough to get your name out there.
You may ask questions like, where do I begin and where should I invest my money in order to get the most value when advertising? After all, getting your name out there should be the single most important goal that you should strive towards when starting out or struggling to make your business a household name.
A good answer, and one of many, is advertising through social media.
When you consider the rise of technology in the form of smartphones and other mobile devices, it just makes sense to choose this medium to advertise your business. Not only that, but it is significantly less costly than traditional advertising mediums.
By choosing this medium, you have the advantage of reaching a large audience for a lot less money!
Added bonus, your audience already loves browsing through social media on their devices, so you have the advantage of an already captive audience!
Social media has levelled the playing field
Social media has considerably changed the game for all businesses and levelled the playing field equally for small, medium and even large, corporates over the years.
There has been a gradual shifting away from the preferred traditional media that businesses used in the past to advertise, to a more modern medium, online media. With social media leading the charge as a notable player in the world of online advertising.
So what does this all mean? Well, this is great news for all businesses and means that you, a small, medium or large business owner, have an equal opportunity to leverage social media content for all your company’s advertising purposes.
How to create the most impact
But how do you achieve the most impact in the beginning stages through social media content? The answer, brand awareness and it starts by creating engaging shareable content.
Additionally, you should be creating content that is not too exclusive, as you want all kinds of people to resonate with your product or service at the start.
The more people that connect with what your brand has to say, the better! It’s all about creating volume in the beginning. About getting as many people interested as possible and making them aware of your brand identity quickly.
Your posts should encourage community engagement about your brand. Get people talking and get them to interact with your posts.
Possibly get your current audience to tag other people in them, friends, family, and colleagues, the more the merrier! The goal should be to start a conversation about your products or services with people who are interested in what your business has to offer.
In turn, the people who relate to your brand’s messaging will hopefully go on to share this information about your brand with others, thereby creating important word of mouth in order for your business to start seeing growth.
It is so crucial for your business to reach out to everyone and anyone in the first stage of brand awareness as you are still learning about who your audience is. So don’t limit your business’ opportunities just yet by creating niche messaging that ends up being too exclusive in the beginning stages.
After all, a large number of consumers and clients follow brands on social media purely to learn about their new product or service offerings. Audiences look forward to learning more about who you are as a brand and what you offer in terms of value.
Other reasons that people follow business pages are to be inspired and taught. So look into offering helpful content for your audience to read about. Create content that your audience will find value in and further prove that you are mindful and inclusive of your audience by using social media content to improve your brand awareness.
Contact us by either visiting our contact us page or sending an email to janine@themustardflower.co.za to find out how we can boost your brand’s awareness and grow your following today!
