Table of Contents
Easy Ways to Increase Brand Awareness
For businesses without an endless fountain of income, growing brand awareness can be a challenging task. Unlike lead generation or direct sales, brand awareness isn’t as clearly quantifiable.
That may leave you feeling like you’re blindly throwing dollars at an unknown target—not fun.
If you’re looking to build a brand awareness strategy that drives results, you’ve come to the right place! Read on to learn our foolproof method for building brand awareness strategies that actually work.
Step One:Identify your target market
When building a brand awareness strategy that actually works, the first step is identifying what populations of people you’d like to build brand awareness within.
No matter your product or company, you’ve got a target demographic. When building a profile of your target customers, identifying your target demographic is a great place to start.
Is your product geared towards men or women? What income range are your customers typically in? Do they tend to be more rural, or are they city dwellers?
Once you’ve got the basics of your target demographic down, it’s time to start building some more nuanced buyer personas.
These are fictional characters who represent specific segments of your target demographic.
Your buyer persona should answer questions like: who is this person? What is their profession? What are their interests? Where do they shop? What type of media do they consume?
Let’s say you sell road bicycles. You may have a buyer persona of a woman named Michelle. Michelle is 27 years old and an avid biker. She was introduced to biking several years ago and has been hooked ever since.
Her social circle revolves around cyclist friends and cycling events. Michelle is a savvy online shopper, and does thorough research before making any big purchase for her bike.
Her most trusted sources for recommendations when looking for cycling gear are cycling blogs like Cycling Tips and Cycling Weekly Magazine, and, of course, Instagram. She’s constantly perusing #cyclechic and #cyclegear.
Step Two: Be where your target market is
Now that you know who your target market is and where they hang out, the next step in building brand awareness is to create a strategy that enables you to be where your target market is. Sound simple? It is!
Let’s take Michelle. Here are the things we know about where Michelle is:
- She spends a lot of her free time at cycling events, whether it’s a race or a cycling fundraiser that her team has put together
- She consumes tons of cycling media, including video content, blog articles, and product reviews
- She follows all her cycling idols on Instagram and looks to them for gear recommendations
Your brand awareness strategy should target all the places that Michelle hangs out. If these are the three main places she spends her time, then that’s where you want to be!
The next question to tackle for your brand awareness strategy is: how?
You could, of course, go the traditional route and place advertising in these three places.
Get some banners printed up and hang them at the next bike race. Buy a half-page spread in Cycling Weekly Magazine. Run ads on Instagram and target users interested in cycling. These strategies are safe, and they’ll drive a bit of interest.
But in today’s day and age, where we’re flooded by advertisements everywhere we look, traditional media ads are just a little dull.
A brand awareness strategy that will really grab Michelle’s attention is one that is interactive.
Ask yourself: how do I make an impact that will last? In order to do so, you’ll have to think outside the box.
For instance:
- Rather than hanging a banner at Michelle’s next race, print branded water bottles and hand them out to every race participant. Not only will Michelle be reminded of you each time she uses it, but her bike team will all see it, too!
- Rather than placing a print ad in Cycling Weekly Magazine, collaborate with their print creative team and supply all of the gear for their next photoshoot.
- Rather than advertising on Instagram, send a freebie of your latest road bike model to top cycling influencers and request that they tag your company when they post any photos with it.
Building an effective brand awareness strategy isn’t rocket science. It just takes a good understanding of your customer and a little creative thinking to get where you’d like to be!
