4 Steps To Creating An Effective Brand Awareness Strategy
Having strong brand awareness can help you increase the chances of people noticing, connecting to, and trusting your brand. In turn, your strong brand awareness can help you grow your business and help more people with your products and services. Within this article I break down what brand awareness is and why it matters, providing you with some tangible tips to implement to begin establishing your own unique brand awareness strategy. You will learn about my 4 step brand awareness process that will help you to walk away fully understanding how to begin improving the awareness as well as experience of your brand!
Before we go into how we can establish brand awareness, we must first make sure that we understand the difference between a business and a brand. Your business produces products or offers services. Typically, the objectives of a business are to generate profits in exchange for goods and/or services. Differently, a brand is represented by the imagery, visual aesthetics and identity that encompasses and transparently represents the business. Your brand is how people perceive your business and how they relate with you. You can have multiple businesses, products or services under one brand, but it is not common practice to have multiple brands under one business. The goal of a business is most often to make money, whereas the goal of a brand is most often to build community and spark emotional connection to the business. Therefore, brand goals and business goals are often quite different. Business goals traditionally relate to sales, customers, clients, and so on. Whereas brand goals traditionally focus on engagement, interaction, discoverability, relatability, and community.
When we are getting ready to define how we intend on creating brand awareness, I find that it is not only helpful to make sure we start off by thinking about the difference between a business and brand, but that we also consider how we can have topics that we specialize in as a business as well as topics that we are known for as a brand.
Defining what these topics are for both your business as well as your brand will further help you start off from a sound foundation as you pursue establishing brand awareness strategies. Your business topics often relate to the services and/or products you sell. Your business topics will relate to how you make money and what you offer in your business. Creating brand awareness is a process of equal parts good marketing and good communication. What you market typically relates to your business topics, because your business topics relate to what you sell in your business. Yet, what you communicate is most often your brand, which is how people develop resonance, relatability and trust in your business. Your brand is felt through the way you communicate your business visually, and chances are you have specific brand topics that help you clarify the unique ways in which you offer your business topics in the form of your products and services. Your brand topics are going to relate more to How you deliver your products and services, touching upon your unique approach and value proposition. Let me use myself as an example to clearly explain this distinction. My business topics include Business and Project Development, Marketing and Media Management, Custom Design and Branding, and Strategic Planning. These topics directly relate to what I do and the services I offer. My brand topics, however, include Sustainability, Ethics, Inclusion, Accessibility, and Disruptive Innovation. These topics relate directly to How I offer and provide my services, and what unique angles I approach my work from. Knowing both your business topics and your brand topics is going to help you to properly establish your brand awareness strategy, so before moving on to my 4 step process for establishing brand awareness, make sure you clearly define your own topics! Let’s now begin diving into my 4 step process for establishing brand awareness.
The 4 parts to establishing brand awareness:
A clear and easy to understand brand concept
A well defined brand audience
An established brand expression
A strategic brand position
Before I break down each part, let’s first address what brand awareness is and why brand awareness matters.
When we create brand awareness, people begin to distinctly recognize us based on the images, aesthetics, or style of our brands. This, in turn, helps people associate our business with our brand since the two are linked together. When we create brand awareness, this helps us stand out and people stop and notice us because they have made the connection to our brands and who we are as a business. Brand awareness will help you build trust and association with your business. I like to think of the brand as the personality behind the business, where you can build a strong relationship with a brand to the point where you will want to share with others that you know them, like them, and trust them! We can create negative brand awareness, though. Negative brand awareness happens when people associate not so wonderful things with a brand. We have seen this happen time and time again when brands go viral because of being called out for harmful behaviors or practices. The goal of any business should be to work toward building a positive brand awareness experience.
Brand awareness is built the same way we build most relationships.
It happens when we are human, real, honest, authentic, transparent, empathetic, compassionate, and open with others. I enjoy comparing building brand awareness to building any meaningful relationship I want to cultivate in my life. When you consider what you value in your most important relationships, you can apply that value into the way in which you express and share your brand as a way to form relationships with others that are of meaning to you as well as them. Brand awareness happens as a byproduct of people being able to recognize you simply by your visuals, imagery, aesthetics, brand tone or voice, or the way you present yourself.
Brand awareness is what makes someone choose to go with one business over another.
Due to what we associate and connect with a brand, these things influence our consumer behaviors. Think for a moment about a favorite product of yours that you consistently buy. Now ask yourself why you buy that specific product over others similar to it. Chances are, it’s because of something that is core to the brand. Maybe it’s their unique ingredients. Maybe it's the amazing social and/or environmental responsibility activities that the business practices. Maybe it’s because of what the business stands for or believes in. Maybe it’s because their packaging was attractive and you relate to the visual style. There are many reasons why we choose to go with one product or service over the next, but it almost always comes down to the way in which the brand awareness has been approached that helped you make that decision. Before moving on, take a moment to think about what it is about what you offer that would make someone choose to go with you over others in your industry. Now think about whether or not you are clearly and consistently communicating that to your audience. If the answer is no, then establishing brand awareness is definitely something for you to focus on! Now let’s go into the 4 parts of brand awareness, breaking each down and describing them.
Part 1: A clear and easy to understand brand concept
One of the reasons we discussed the difference between a business and a brand in the beginning of this article was because it will help you more clearly define your brand concept. When we understand what our business topics are as well as what our brand topics are…paired with also understanding the difference between a business and a brand…we can begin to more soundly understand what our brand concept is. A brand concept consists of the ideas behind your branding. This may come as a surprise, but every aspect of your brand should have some sort of purpose and be well thought out! From your color palette and typography, to your photography and brand messaging…every aspect of your brand helps you not only more directly define your brand concept but it will also support you in more effectively establishing brand awareness. Your brand concept also should include your brand strategy and style guide, two things that I absolutely love helping folks to develop. By establishing your brand concept, you will have not just your visual style determined but your message, brand tone and voice, and brand topics. This is the core of your brand and needs to be developed first when venturing into creating brand awareness because it directs your approaches to marketing and more.
Part 2: A well defined brand audience
In order to create brand awareness, we need to fully grasp who it is we want to make aware of our brand! Your brand audience relates to your target market or niche. These are the folks to which you are offering your services and products for. The thing to consider when defining your brand audience is whether or not you may have a segmented audience of multiple niches or whether you have just one type of person you are speaking to and serving. To determine your brand audience, you want to get detailed information about the demographics you are targeting, the psychographics, and the behaviors of those you are targeting. Many people hesitate to ‘niche down’ because they do not want to limit themselves or others' access to their work. I understand this hesitation and have had it myself. What you need to understand about defining your brand audience is that, if done correctly, it will not create a sense of exclusion or limits for anyone! Rather, your defined brand audience will simply help you to establish stronger marketing and communication strategies that will support you in creating more effective brand awareness.
Part 3: An established brand expression
Brand expression is what most people associate branding with. In a nutshell, it’s your visual aesthetic style guide. Your brand expression will define how your brand shares itself visually. Some things that need defined so to establish your brand expression include your business and/or brand name, your logos, your social media style and visual presence, your internet marketing style and visual appeal, your packaging design, your copy and messaging, your web design and messaging, your symbols, textures, and other various visual elements. Your brand expression is how people connect to your brand first and foremost, so it needs to be extremely thought out and well integrated to reflect your brand concept.
Part 4: A strategic brand position
Lastly, you want to clarify your strategy brand positioning. I look at brand positioning in two ways. The first way is determining Where you are positioning your brand, ensuring that the position is in alignment with where your brand audience is so that they can easily discover and become aware of you. Where you position your brand directly relates to the type of business you are operating as well as the goals of your brand. For example, some folks may want to put all of their efforts in positioning their brand on social media because their business objectives are to increase profits by bringing in new clients or customers from their social media audience. This can be effective for businesses that already have a strong internet presence or are completely focused on social media marketing. Another example could be for businesses that want to position their brand on Facebook because they are a local, brick and mortar business that runs in person events and wants to utilize Facebook for paid as well as organic advertising to their local events. This would work well for a brand that emphasizes community and has a budget that is friendly to paid advertising and social media assistance. The second way to look at brand positioning relates to the unique position you take within the industry you occupy. When you look at your brand position from this angle, you want to consider how your brand will stand out from others in your industry that do or offer similar things. Your brand position should incorporate your brand positioning statement; a statement that describes your unique value propositions and what people can expect to receive or experience from your brand that they haven’t seen elsewhere. To establish a strategic brand position, I recommend incorporating both of these perspectives on brand positioning, for it will help you to determine where you want to position your brand and how you want to position your brand in a signature way!
As we conclude this discussion on establishing brand awareness, you now have my 4 step process that you can take away and begin developing for your own brand. What I recommend doing is sitting down and brainstorming each of the four parts, getting clear on your unique and authentic approach to each. Make sure you have directly defined each aspect of the 4 step brand awareness process, and then conclude by deciding where you are going to position your brand as you begin to express it with the intention of building awareness! Once you have established your approach to creating brand awareness, the next step is to begin cultivating meaningful marketing strategies to support you in communicating your brand!
Need support in implementing a brand awareness strategy or moving into marketing your brand in an effective as well as impactful way?
Reach out and let’s put our heads together to see what we can come up with!
Until next time …
Natalie Brite
