Gain a Competitive Edge Through a Killer Brand Awareness Campaign

Did you know that, next to ‘ok’,  ‘coke’ is the most recognizable word in existence? It’s so popular that even the remotest parts of the world know what it means.

Coca-Cola is just one of the many brand names out there that have made it – become a class unto itself. They achieved what’s arguably the pinnacle of brand awareness – gaining generic trademark status, otherwise known as proprietary eponyms.

Yet, as massive a brand as Coca-Cola is, they never tire of dishing out millions of dollars a year to promote their products. The reason is simple – they want to always, and never fail to, be at the forefront of their consumers’ minds.

Lucky for you, there is every chance your business could reach that caliber, too. Because, believe it or not, once upon a time they also began as a small invisible company. They were just geniuses on how to craft effective brand awareness campaigns.

If you want your company to take a step in that same direction, read on because this guide is perfect for you. By the end of this post, we hope you’ll gain a much deeper and clearer understanding of everything there is to know about brand awareness.

Benefits of a Brand Awareness Campaign

Brand awareness represents how intimate a company’s relationship is with their target market and how well their customers recognize them.

There are business owners out there who like to measure their success through the numbers on their financial reports’ bottom line, and that’s perfectly reasonable. Yet, although brand awareness is a vague concept, as it’s more challenging to assign a number to its effectiveness, knowing how to design an effective campaign will provide remarkable benefits for your products’ and services’ promotion and marketing efforts.

• It Promotes Trust (and Sales)

We all know how much popular opinion can affect buying decisions. Brand awareness gives your offerings a sincere personality that provides consumers with solutions to their problems. When they become convinced your brand delivers what you promise through your campaigns, you’ll inevitably gain their trust.

A successful campaign will make your products a household name, a lifestyle, a habitual purchase every time – all the time. To have your customers rely solely on you to provide one (or many) of their necessities is a valuable milestone that provides long-term benefits.

• It Establishes Positive Association 

You’ll know your brand is making a name for itself when people constantly associate it with a general action or task.

For example, the term Bubble Wrap is actually a brand name for inflated cushioning products. But you don’t hear people saying “Your package needs some inflated cushioning”, do you? Or maybe someone asked if you’ve ever ridden a stand-up personal watercraft before and never realized that person was just referring to a Jet Ski.

Steadily building up brand awareness for your company will ultimately lead you to a point where your product or service not only becomes the ideal option but, in their minds, the only solution. 

• Builds Brand Equity

A brand’s perceived value describes brand equity. If users get a consistently positive experience from using your brand, they will naturally assign it a high value. As more consumers give excellent feedback, that increases its brand equity.

The benefits of increased brand equity are considerable. A product with positive brand equity can demand higher prices, affect society more significantly because of its higher perceived value, and its market value in stock trading exchanges will inevitably increase.

The secret to improving brand equity is efficient brand awareness. When your customers acknowledge your capacity to provide a worthwhile experience, their next purchase (and the ones after that) will become a natural reflex because you’ve gained their loyalty effectively. Their buying decision would be so instinctive they will recommend you to their family and friends. In effect, doing the marketing for you.

Those are the reasons brand awareness is crucial to the success of your business.

But powerful brand awareness shouldn’t be a one-off effort. It needs to be at the core of simultaneous marketing efforts to showcase the remarkable experience of taking advantage of your brand, and not just geared at getting paying customers.

If you’re raring to cook up a spectacular brand awareness campaign, let’s have you go through these juicy options.

1. Use Content to Tell Your Story

Having a brand name, logo, and products or services sadly isn’t enough. If you want to connect on an intimate level with your consuming public, you need to give your brand a personality. Using content to humanize your brand will allow you to bridge the gap between the needs of your target market and the solution you provide.

Offer free content through your blogs to mold your brand’s character. Make sure it resonates with your target audience by mixing it up with engaging videos, imagery, and the glowing reactions of your past and current clientele.

Guest Posting

Creating articles for other websites is an easy and subtle way to contribute quality content to other businesses and raise awareness for your brand at the same time.

There’s enough room for everyone on the worldwide web, so you don’t have to confine yourself to your website’s blog to raise awareness. If you know where to look, you’ll find there are opportunities out there you can take advantage of.

Tap Popular Sites that Allow Brand Mention

Search popular sites relevant to your industry, as this ensures your target market will already know them. If they allow brand mentions, offer to write a blog post for them and insert your company and what it contributes to the market.

The benefit is two-fold: you’ll be able to take advantage of those site’s market share to showcase your brand (albeit only slightly), and you’ll be able to gain credibility (and therefore, your audience’s trust) because a company they have confidence in backed you up as evidenced by the mention in their live and published articles.

Tap Popular Sites that Allow Visible Author Bios

Offer to write for popular sites that will allow publishing your name as the author, your company, and your website’s link on the post you create for them. If guest posting is an ideal option for you, selecting these types of sites to write for will increase awareness for your brand.

Sponsor Posts in Local Publications

You can also pay for posts that talk about your brand in your area’s local publications. This is arguably an easier option than writing free content if you want to use guest posting as part of your brand awareness efforts.

2. Give Out Freemiums

There are so many outstanding online products out there that companies offer for free. Most of the time, these free versions will either have less features than their premium counterparts or come with watermarks that users can only remove if they upgraded to the paid version.

Even if they never upgrade to the paid version, though, as long as the watermark of your brand is there, they’ll continue to market the product for you every time they share an output bearing your logo on social media. 

Also, you never know, the next person who signs up to get the free version may go with the paid version! Ultimately, though, allowing access to free versions of your product means you’ll be offering value and showing the power of the solution you provide to more prospective customers, creating an opportunity for them to assess what you offer in a controlled environment.

3. Give Away Freebies

When you treat your friends for lunch, they may thank you by saying the meal tasted so much better because it didn’t cost a thing to get it. Wouldn’t you agree (if you were in their shoes)?

Who doesn’t love free stuff, right? 

Another excellent way to build up brand awareness for your products and services is by giving away freebies! Get a cool version of your logo printed on binders, pens, mugs, stickers, phone and tablet cases, or laptop sleeves. Then give them away during a corporate event or at local festivals and fairs to spread the word about your amazing brand! 

Looking for creative corporate giveaway ideas? We can help you customize your laptop sleeves, iPad cases, or corporate phone cases!

4. Try Out Podcasting

Podcasting, these days, isn’t such a hardship anymore. When before this was something only professionals could get into because of the studio and high-end equipment requirements, today it doesn’t take much to produce high-quality videos. 

Similar to videos and imagery, podcasts can engage your audience through the content you create, refining your brand. But, more than that, you can create episodes to showcase your expertise in your industry and the products or services you offer.

Using these to entertain and educate your audience will reveal your technical know-how, ultimately breeding trust and credibility for you as the connoisseurs behind the product.

Produce Your Own

You can develop your brand through podcasting in two ways. One of which is producing your own episodes to capture the bulk of your market share, engage them, and establish your brand’s credibility.

It’s best to follow the Pareto rule in the content you use for this medium. Eighty percent of it should talk about topics that aren’t brand-related but are highly valuable information, tips, or advice. The remaining 20% can deliver the branded message through the guests you put in the shows you produce. Remember, people don’t watch or listen to podcasts so they can hear blatant sales pitches. People want to either look for entertainment or learn about a topic that benefits them.

Partner With Famous Podcasters

If the niche you’re in is relatively competitive, chances are you’ll have quite some difficulty breaking into the barriers put up by the dominant companies you’re competing against. 

Try taking a different route by looking for podcasters who’ve already built the audience share you want to cater to. 

For instance, you can launch a series where you interview famous profiles in the industry you belong to.

Take for example Buffer.com, a company that offers brand-building services through social media. They invited people from HubSpot and Moz (industry experts) to guest on one of their podcasts, to share about their wide knowledge of marketing topics. 

HubSpot and Moz also provided added publicity to the episode by sharing it to their social media followers, extending Buffer’s audience reach significantly.

5. Leverage Social Media

Technically, social media platforms have been around for over 40 years now. But it was not until Facebook came into the picture in 2004 that people (including business owners) took notice and realized it was an incredible way to connect to their customers.

Social media is one of the most powerful means you can use to build brand awareness for your company. So it would be a shame to neglect this side of your business as it’s the only platform that brings optimum, long-term results in such a short time.

Focus on Relevant Platforms

But maintaining a host of social media accounts can take a toll on your resources as posting regularly and thinking up content campaigns to keep your target audience engaged will need a lot of planning and proper timing.

It’s vital, therefore, to focus your efforts on just two or three platforms. Choose which ones to concentrate on based on its relevance to your niche. If you belong to the home improvement niche, for instance, it would make sense to become visible on Pinterest and Instagram. But, if you’re offering software development or web-based services, then it would be natural to focus only on Twitter and LinkedIn.  

Publishing on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is an excellent platform to establish your brand’s personality. Publishing on LinkedIn fosters conversations, boosting brand awareness. It also exhibits your expertise in the products and services you offer to the industry, establishing you as a thought leader.   

Plan the content you publish on your account and track engagement results. From there, you should be able to learn what types of content get more interaction so you can adjust your content accordingly.

Make Use of Hashtags on Posts

There’s no question, hashtags are effective ways to build up brand awareness on your social media accounts. There are two ways you can make use of hashtags on social media.

Branded

Typically, companies will coin their own branded hashtags. Excellent examples are Lay’s #DoUsAFlavor, KFC’s #NationalFriedChickenDay, and #LetsDoLunch by Domino’s Pizza.

The success of using hashtag campaigns can vary depending on how popular they become and how much the public uses them. If you pull off a branded hashtag, like Hyatt’s #WorldofHyatt, then you can reap the benefits of brand awareness and marketing for your company for a long time. Hyatt, to this day, still encourages their guests to share photos of their Hyatt hotel and resort experiences using the hashtag. 

Non-Branded

You can also use popular industry-related hashtags for your campaigns like #lookgoodfeelgood, #glutenfree, #travelbug, #applevsandroid, and #fitfam.

Using non-branded hashtags is easier compared to branded ones, as they’re already popular, so the burden of getting others to use them won’t fall entirely on you. The benefits you gain from them will not, however, be as far-reaching as using them will mean the conversation will not focus solely on your brand.

They will still give your brand its much-needed visibility within the industry, though, and that’s always a plus in our book.

Organize Contests to Encourage Engagement

Another creative way of building brand awareness is creating buzz-worthy contests and giveaways to allow your audience to engage with you. 

Post a funny (and preferably brand-related) photo on Facebook, ask your followers to comment with the funniest caption they can come up with, and allow them to tag their friends. The caption that gets the most laughing emoji wins a prize.

Or, as thanks for reaching a business milestone like anniversaries, you can give away one of your best-selling products or a predetermined combination of your services. Ask followers to like and share the post, then randomly select a winner or group of winners. Announce it on your feed to sensationalize it more.

6. Influencer Marketing

Leveraging on influencers may just be what you need to amp up awareness for your brand. Look for public profiles who are reputable, hold considerable authority, and align with your company’s core values. Make sure the person you choose is already actively posting quality content on their feeds, similar to the message you want to project so you don’t risk targeting the wrong market segment.

7. Advertising

Putting up advertisements to sell your brand is an age-old marketing technique. It’s relatively within the budget and gets the job done. There are several effective ways to go about this approach.

Native 

More and more brands these days are switching to native advertising campaigns to promote their products and services. It gets more click-throughs than traditional ads you see on blogs because they don’t look like those display ads that stand out so much it becomes obvious they’re paid content.

This form of advertising campaign looks to overcome banner blindness and ad blocking as publishers can mold them to assimilate into the website’s format and placements so the ad experience becomes more seamless.

PPC

Depending on your niche, PPC advertising may be a good way to create visibility for specific search queries. Conduct proper research, target keywords with the right search intent, and you’ll be showing up at the top of Google’s search results.

Even if people don’t click on your pages when your brand name shows up, you’ll still get visibility and gain credibility in the eyes of your target audience.

Social

You may struggle with organic social marketing, especially if this is beyond your expertise or competition is stiff. These are the reasons more and more business owners are switching to paid social advertising. Putting up ads on Facebook and Twitter is relatively cheap, and even if people don’t convert right away, your brand will still get the visibility it needs and will let people recognize your brand’s relevance to their needs.

Remarketing

If people see your ads but don’t take the bite, that’s alright. Remarketing allows Google to connect you with those users again by strategically positioning your ads in front of them as they browse the internet.

This way, it creates the impression that your company is far larger (therefore more successful) than it is because you can (seemingly) afford such a wide reach for your ad campaigns.

8. Foster Complementary Partnerships

Complementary partnerships are sure-fire means of building up awareness.

There are companies out there that have already built a loyal customer base and sell products or services that complement the ones you have on offer. Foster a relationship with these brands and collaborate with them in crafting a campaign that will benefit you equally.

One of the most popular collaborations that has ever hit the market is McDonald’s and Hello Kitty’s partnership.  McDonald’s took exclusive rights to sell limited Hello Kitty carriers that could hold fries and drinks instead of trays, and that people could strap to their car’s headrest. Later, they also started selling small Hello Kitty collectibles with Happy Meals. 

The limitation imposed on the supply and timeframe of the availability of these items heaped so much demand and hype from their customer base, immensely increasing sales and skyrocketing awareness for their brand.

Referral Programs

Referral marketing aims for precision in targeting customers and amplifying a company’s customer base. That’s the reason it’s so effective. It’s so efficient, in fact, that marketers have already been using this technique even before any of us have ever heard of the internet.

If you ask your customers (meager as they may be at the moment) for referrals, they will automatically know how to market your products for you to their circle of family and friends. They’ll know exactly what to say about the product that will trigger positive responses from their friends because they know the people they’re selling to personally.

Take PayPal, for example. In 2000, when social media was not yet as popular, they started paying people who invited their friends to sign up and join PayPal. This spurred its growth to 7-10% per day. By the end of that campaign, PayPal gained hundreds of millions of members.

9. More Innovative Ways

Although the approaches mentioned are already a handful, and you’ve probably already decided which methods will work best for your business. But, hey, marketing is as much a systematic process as it is creative. So here’s a few more to give you some inspiration.

Sponsor Local Events

If you want to focus on your local presence and visibility within your community, sponsoring events may be an excellent option for you. Listen for upcoming activities in your area like festivals, fairs, fun runs, marathons, and even concerts. These are perfect opportunities to display your brand in front of the hundreds or thousands of people who will be in attendance.

If you’ve ever joined any of these types of events, I’m sure you’ve noticed the shirts or water bottles participants wear or lug around and the flyers and banners of the sponsoring brands strategically positioned to become part of the ambiance in the venue. 

Choose an activity that resonates with your brand’s message and character so consumers can create positive associations between the event and your brand. 

Create Mobile Billboards 

If you use company trucks or cars in your operations, have them do the extra legwork for your marketing campaigns. You can use digital mobile truck advertising to promote an event your company is sponsoring, a special pricing offer for your services, or the launch of a new branch or product line. 

• Car Wraps Advertising

You can also custom design your company (or even personal) vehicle’s body with personalized wraps that bear your company’s identity, location, and the products or services you offer. This will catch people’s attention when they see your vehicles out and about and gradually become familiar with your brand.

Ensuring Your Campaign’s Success

While you may choose one, a few, or several of the ways we talked about in this article to kick off your marketing strategies, it’s essential to know that how you implement them is just as crucial as which methods you adapt.

In any marketing campaign, knowing who your buyers are is vital, so you know exactly which segment of the market you want to speak to. Learn where they ‘live’ or how they spend their time when they’re online, and how they go about purchasing the product or service you offer.

As some methods we recommended here may require large amounts of investment, it’s also important not to lose sight of your budget when planning your brand awareness strategy. Be sure to set quantitative goals that will allow you to assess (and re-assess) its success. 

It’s also important to monitor the progress of your campaigns, track achievements, and even identify flaws within it. If you hit stumbling blocks, review your strategy, identify weak links, and work around it.

Formulate a Strategy that Works

Establishing the value that your brand puts out there for your consumers can affect your marketing efforts (and profits) significantly.

If you implement one or two of these techniques effectively, your target market will surely flock in, buying your products and taking advantage of your services over and over. Even better, they’ll be singing your praises to their family, friends, and colleagues, promoting your product for you, and amplifying your brand’s market value even more.

Want to learn more about how to create a brand that fits you?
Check it out here

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Bhushan Lele

Bhushan spent the last 15+ years building businesses and learning what really matters to customers. At Custom Logo Cases, we help brands turn everyday tech accessories into high-quality, on-brand marketing tools.