Brand awareness is how familiar people are with your brand, as well as the products or features that distinguish your company from competitors. It’s crucial for getting your brand’s name out there, growing your audience and earning loyal customers or followers. In our recent research report, The State of Digital Marketing in the Manufacturing Industry, brand awareness was cited as the most important result of digital marketing. If you’re curious to learn more, you can download our full report for more helpful insights on challenges, trends and tactics.
Follow along as we expand on leveling up your brand awareness in stages, no matter the size of your marketing department.
Level One (Starting Out)
Whether marketing is new to you, you’re looking for a refresher, or just need a place to start, the first level of brand awareness is a great spot to get going. My Level One brand awareness tactics are:
1. Determine your brand voice/personality. This step is absolutely crucial for setting your brand up for success and beating out competitors. The phrase “on brand” really picked up over the past few years when referring to personal brands, but it’s also a reflection of what your company’s brand should look like. You’ll need to start by determining what your brand’s purpose is on each channel and what kind of voice is appropriate for your audience. Not everyone can get away with a Wendy’s-style Twitter account, but you can still make sure your voice shines through in your messaging.
2. Focus on creating useful, engaging content. Another key step! Creating content that is valuable to your audience will go miles in helping you grow your followers. Whether this is blog content, social media posts or emails, your content needs to provide value and answer the age-old question of “What’s in it for me?” This requires you to know your audience and provide them with the tools or resources that can help them succeed. By doing this, you’ll also grow trust and credibility within your industry — a win-win!
3. Post different content on different channels. Ah, this one can be tricky, especially if you are working on a small marketing team. But if your LinkedIn feed looks just like your Instagram stories, which look just like your email content, there’s no need for someone to be keeping up with you on each platform. Determine the goal of using each platform and from there you can decide what to share. For instance, we’ve learned that LinkedIn is much better for informative content, sharing employee updates and corporate communications as well as culture posts. LinkedIn can act as a mixed bag. But on Facebook, we like to keep our posts very culture-focused. Find a good content mix based on what makes sense for your biz.
Level Two (Intermediate)
At this level, we are stepping a little deeper into marketing for brand awareness. At this stage, it’s important to really discover what your brand’s purpose is on each marketing channel, and whether you’re connecting with your audience. Lean on tactics from Level One, but get a little more creative within your brand’s personality and explore new methods:
1. Encourage employee participation and engagement. Get your employees involved! They can be huge advocates for your brand and are great resources. Coach them on the best ways to share content and make sure to interact with their content on social to keep them engaged. By doing this, you’re reaching a bunch of new networks and really casting your net wide.
[Read More: What is Social Advocacy?]
2. Partner with local organizations/sponsor events. Find organizations that line up with your ideal customer profile (ICP) and give you a great opportunity to expose your brand to your target audience. By sponsoring events, you’ll get brand recognition. And even better, send your sales team to events to encourage them to network with potential customers.
3. Come up with a plan to share your corporate communications. Elevate any work your company is doing with ESG to show off what your company cares about. Getting involved in the community and helping make strides in local and national issues are great ways of showing that your company is involved in the greater community and cares about society.
[Read More: 4 Ways to Implement Corporate Social Responsibility into Your Marketing Plan]
Level Three (Advanced)
At this final stage, really think about how to elevate your brand. Think about how to build communities around your brand in a way that works for you:
1. Use influencers. With the number of social media influencers out there, there truly is an influencer for every brand. If you have extra budget to work with, finding an influencer that either resonates with your business model or fits in with your customer base can provide you with a great advocate that can help you reach new audiences.
2. Share and comment on relevant social media content. Go out of your way to find content that’s relevant to your industry and share your opinion in the comments. Making your presence known on social media can help boost your brand awareness and position you as an industry thought leader. Along this same vein, make sure that your company leaders are sharing insightful content on their social channels too.
3. Social listening. Implementing social listening can be an awesome way to better understand brand awareness and know where you need to improve. With social listening, you can track brand mentions, keywords, employee content, industry content and hashtags to learn your share of voice and brand sentiment. This helps you determine how best to grow. Social listening can be implemented at any stage as it’s a great companion to more traditional forms of tracking.
Measuring Brand Awareness Success
There are many ways to measure success. On social media, I measure Brandpoint’s brand awareness by tracking engagement, or the number of clicks, likes, shares and reactions that posts get. I also follow along with our impressions, which measures the number of views a post gets. Both of these are great because they measure the number of people seeing and interacting with content. Another simple option is measuring followers on social media or the email newsletter subscribers. This signifies some sort of loyalty or interest in your brand. All of this can be accompanied by social listening, as stated above.
At Brandpoint, our strategy and content creation expertise is helpful for brands looking to grow their brand awareness. We love working with clients to help them reach their goals, and we specialize in the financial services, manufacturing and software/technology. Reach out for more information on how we can be your partner in growing brand awareness.
