What is brand awareness?

Brand awareness refers to how familiar people are with a company, product or service. Creating brand awareness is key to building a reputation for your business and encouraging people to buy from you. Ideally, you want to create awareness of your brand that includes qualities and separate you from your competition. 

This guide will explore what brand awareness is and how you can build yours by answering the following:

• Why is brand awareness important?
• How does brand awareness benefit my business?
• How can I build brand awareness?
• How can Countingup help small businesses build a strong brand?

Brand awareness is essential for creating a reputable business and generating more revenue (money made from sales). This is because people prefer to buy from brands they know. In fact, research shows that 71% of shoppers need to recognise a brand before making a purchase. 

In other words, brand awareness is what makes your target audience choose your business over your competitors. Let’s look at other ways creating brand awareness helps your business. 

Building brand awareness also comes with other benefits, as you’ll see below.

Since people prefer to buy from brands they know or recognise, you’ll generate more sales if more customers are aware of your business. The more brand awareness you create, the bigger your market share will become. 

Companies with bigger market shares tend to bring in more sales than their lesser-known competitors. In fact, consistent brand presentation across all platforms can increase your revenue by 23%.

The reason people prefer to buy from brands they know is that they know what to expect from that company and its products or services. Familiar brands create a sense of trust and optimism in us, which is why we’re more likely to return to ones we know and like. 

Brand awareness builds an emotional bond between a business and a consumer, encouraging people to return to that brand and spend more money.

Brand equity refers to how much a brand is worth, which goes hand in hand with the overall perception of it. Positive experiences equal positive brand equity and vice versa for negative notions. 

Positive brand equity also brings:

• Higher prices due to higher perceived value
• Greater social impact due to brand name value
• A higher stock price
• The ability to expand product or service line extensions

As you can see, building strong brand awareness is essential to creating a successful business. So how do you build it?

Strong brand awareness is about much more than attracting more paying customers, meaning you need to lay the groundwork to build a strong brand. Here’s how you can build brand awareness for your business:

You can’t stand out from competitors if your company doesn’t represent something unique and relatable. Building brand awareness is largely about giving your company a personality that customers feel they can trust and engage with. 

Giving your brand a personality means having a recognisable colour scheme, logo, tone of voice, mission statement, and so on. Settle on a version of these aspects and keep them consistent across all your platforms so customers can recognise your business instantly.

Storytelling is a powerful tactic because it gives your audience something real to latch onto.

By crafting a narrative around your business, you give it depth. Weaving your narrative into your marketing strategy will help you market your brand alongside your products or services.

Your story can be anything, as long as it’s authentic. For example, you could tell the tale of how your business had its first product idea or how you made it in this big world.  

Once you’ve given your brand a personality and story, you have to be social and tell people about it. According to research, over 50% of a brand’s reputation comes from online sociability. Being active on social media helps increase brand awareness by simply making yourself known.

Do this by posting about topics that don’t relate to your products or services and interact with your followers. Ask questions, comment on others’ posts, and share or retweet content you like. Think of your social media accounts as a way for your business to make friends, not make money. 

Another great way to build brand awareness is to partner with an influencer in your field and have them spread the word about you to their followers. People tend to trust recommendations from option leaders almost as much as from their friends and family. 

To succeed with influencer marketing, you need to be thorough in your search for an influencer partner. Make sure their followers are real people (not bots) who look up to them and engage with them often. Services like trendHERO can help you find bots and examine the comment section of a blogger’s profile to make sure it’s legit.

Word of mouth marketing is highly effective, so make sure whatever you post online is easy to share. Whether it’s blog articles, social posts, tweets, or YouTube videos, your audience is more likely to spread the word about it if it’s quick to do so. 

People will take notice of products or services that their friends and family share, and will remember the brand behind them. If you make it easy to post about your products and company, consumers will help build brand awareness for you by clicking ‘Share’.