Build brand awareness strategy to grow your business

Incorporating of company’s brand awareness and SEO is a meticulous process. SEO is all about keywords, phrases, and their placement, branding, on the other hand, is all about culture and loyalty. You can’t get rid of either, as it will hurt your marketing and strategic goals.

So how do you go about incorporating both successfully? Before you get started on that, understand that SEO is not a science, but a series of guidelines. So the general practice that satisfies both sides of the equation is, you focus on the keywords and phrases at the beginning and then add company branding over time. Why can’t you just use both from the start? When you start your business, people won’t know your name, but they will definitely be looking for the products and services you offer. So you want to use keywords and phrases about your products and services rather than your name. Once you have loyalty and credibility, that’s when brand awareness becomes essential. At this point, you can use branding to instill trust in your company.

If people look for your brand by searching the name of the company, optimizing it may actually be irrelevant.

A brand is a specific sign that designates a unique product or service that belongs to a specific person – natural or legal.

This term first appeared in the Middle Ages. Then workers in various shops (for the manufacture of leather products, bakery products, and so on) began to mark their products with special marks – these are prototypes of modern logos.

Mass distribution of brands fell on the 50-the

70s of the twentieth century. It was then that businessmen faced a problem when a huge number of similar goods appeared on the market every day. Manufacturers lost impressive sums due to the fact that consumers could not distinguish their product from that of competitors. It was then that massive wars began related to the branding of certain goods and services. With the advent of brands, products have acquired a huge number of additional characteristics. Now the attention of buyers was offered not only the basic characteristics of goods – composition and features, but also additional ones – who you will be if you buy this product, what place in society you will be able to occupy, what emotions you will receive after purchase, and so on.

In the modern world, there is a whole generation of people who can rightfully be called brand-dependent. That is why a detailed study of this issue and its implementation in any business is extremely important.

Why brand is important?

Brand awareness is a series of pre-planned and interconnected activities that are aimed at creating a positive image of a certain brand (in the initial stages). Also, branding can be aimed at maintaining and increasing the market position of an existing brand. The main goal of branding is to create a unique, and most importantly, a strong image of a particular brand.

Branding can include many different marketing strategies such as:

• positioning + creation of USP (unique selling proposition)
• creation of unique graphic and verbal symbols – name, slogan, logo, jingle, corporate style, and so on
• monitoring of competitors’ market
• selection of media that will broadcast the main idea of ​​brand promotion.

In the process of long and painstaking work, brand owners may face the following questions:

Brand expansion is a measure that is used during the creation of new brand products. This applies to those cases when the entrepreneur decided to distribute a certain product or service to a wider target audience. Example: initially the brand entered the market with goods only for men, but in the process of work it was decided to expand the range of goods for other categories – women and children. This is called brand expansion.

Brand stretching is a manipulation that is used to conditionally expand the assortment, but this does not happen due to the appearance of some fundamentally new products, but due to the appearance of updated old products or services. Thus, the brand does not change either the target audience or the purpose of the product, but improves the benefits for the consumer from the use or consumption of this product.

Sub – renting is a series of activities that are used during the creation of similar goods to existing ones. As a rule, they are distinguished either by special simplicity, or vice versa – by special sophistication.

The creation of a brand family is the creation of a range of products that will be united by something special (technical characteristics, innovativeness, and so on). This method is used to save money since all these products are promoted on the market either according to the same scheme or even at the same time. For example, a brand in one commercial advertises several products of the same series at once.

How To Build Brand Awareness?

In the last century, among business owners, there was an idea that creating a brand and all the consequences that follow from it were a lot of exceptionally powerful corporations, and small organizations should be content with only their own name and nothing more. However, as the practice has shown, in reality, this is not the case. Smaller firms also need to pay attention to branding.

First of all, it is necessary for the formation of a positive image and recognition in the market. Even if your company serves not a million customers a year, but at least a couple of hundred or a thousand, this does not mean that you cannot have true fans. There is a misconception that branding is only advertising on central channels, the most expensive billboards and the most influential influencers. No, in fact, branding is just a measure of product promotion, and their scale depends solely on the size of the business itself.

When developing a brand awareness strategy for a small organization, you should definitely start by looking for a unique selling proposition. Think that you have something that your competitors do not have. Then think about what things formed the basis of your business, and in general, why you started all this – this is exactly what is your mission and fundamental values. Then this data must be correctly and correctly formulated and released to the masses. Your task is to make your potential buyer know and, most importantly, remember something good about you and your company.

How To Increase Brand Awareness?

Ok, so that we need to work in this direction consciously, we figured it out. Quite a logical question: from which side should we approach this? Where to start and what tools to use?

In fact, everything is easier than it might seem from the outside. Two good old strategies work well for increasing brand awareness:

• Attracting visitors to the site;
• Delivering information about yourself to the audience outside the site.

And both of these tasks can be successfully solved by working with content marketing.

For example, we have a website for a company that specializes in providing services in a certain niche and there is a mono-brand online clothing store that presents clothes from the manufacturer.

In both cases, the room for maneuver due to purely commercial requests clearly leaves a lot to be desired. Then we look in the direction of the general information traffic, and it turns out that there is where to fully unfold!

Nothing prevents you from starting a blog on the site of the same online store and publishing interesting articles based on the range in the catalog. And even if the conversion, in this case, will be lower than when moving on commercial requests, but it will be possible to take the volume + regularly increase the brand coverage. Even if the purchase is not made right away, the company will definitely remain in the memory of the potential client.

The second stage is the further seeding of the created content. And it is a must, because no matter how cool the article on your blog is, if you do not tell other people about it, no one may ever know about it.

You need to distribute content in places where your target audience is concentrated, such as:

• Your official pages on social networks
• Facebook thematic groups
• Thematic threads on forums and comments on other sites
• Guest posting on popular resources in your niche
• Q&A sites, communities and blogging platforms, etc.

Also, email marketing works well in this regard. And if you’re not running it, it’s time to create subscription forms and start building a database. Starting with the first hundred subscribers, this channel can already be used to communicate with the audience.

Each of these areas of work represents an additional point of contact with the audience, in addition to search. And regular work on them allows not only to tell potential customers about yourself but also to increase loyalty from the already existing audience.

Read About: Why web analytics is important for website traffic

How To Measure Brand Awareness

1. Surveys

For surveys by email, phone or via the website, you can choose existing customers or a random selection of people familiar with your brand. The first approach will give you an understanding of how these people learned about you, the second will give you insight into the number of people who can remember your brand.

2. The website traffic

Website traffic can provide insights into brand awareness, but it’s important to look in the right places. The “Direct” channel in Google Analytics records the number of people who typed your URL into the address bar, accessed it via a browser bookmark or clicked on a link in an untracked email or an offline document. Monitoring over a longer period of time can provide an indicator when something changes in brand awareness.

In the past, it was easy as Google Analytics uses to track the number of people who used brand-relevant keywords and thus ended up on the website.

Since Google switched the search to SSL in October 2011, measuring keyword traffic has become much more difficult and the majority of keywords are hidden behind “not provided” because of data protection.

In other words, you don’t know the relationship between the people who already know your brand name and are looking for it and those who searched for other keywords to find you.

Of course, not every brand relies on a website when it comes to selling their own products. Consumer goods, for example, are a sector in which the direct sales path to the consumer plays a less important role.

The majority of Tide brand sales are likely to come from supermarkets rather than tide.com. In this case, the website data does not provide any indication of how brand awareness is driving sales.

3. Search volume data

Use Google AdWords Keyword Planner and Google Trends to find out search volume via your brand name and repeat this regularly to see if the search volume increases.

This can be a simple and useful method, but the data will be very imprecise if you have a brand name that is very generic, such as Shell or Seat.

4. Social listening

Perhaps the most powerful tactic is to look at where people are already talking – on social media or other websites.

With social listening, you can track online conversations about your brand on social media and the web. This gives you an insight into the mindset of consumers who exchange information online without being asked or influenced by others.

In this way, a problem that exists with surveys can be ignored: response bias, distorted answers that arise due to this questioning situation.

Which Two Bidding Strategies Can Boost Brand Awareness And Recognition?

1.1 Directly – Via the brand name

Especially in competitive industries, there are competitors who place advertisements on your brand or your online shop. In this case, competitors use the opportunity to address the right target group through their competitors and to lead them to their own site.

This creates the risk for you that potential customers will be lost to the competition. If no ads are shown for your own branding keywords, it is possible that competitors for your brand will appear in the first place. Even if you are ranked number 1 in organic search results through good organic rankings, competitors with paid ads may appear above your top position.

If the first search results are well filled by your own branding ad (and at a low price – see first point ) and organic search results, it is much more difficult for the competition to gain market share in this area.

1.2 Indirect – Via generic search terms

Important: When combining brand name + generic search term, it is also possible that advertisements will be shown by competitors who do not bid directly on your brand, but instead on the generic term with a corresponding bid.
Accordingly, there is not only the risk that competitors bid directly on the brands of competitors , but can also appear indirectly in the paid search results through generic search terms – even if it seems at first glance that competitors are not bidding on your brand name, you could lose your top position in the search results in this case.

Tip: In the Google Ads account, the auction data report offers an overview of the performance of your own campaigns compared to the performance of competing advertisers participating in the same auctions. If you are already placing branding ads, these values ​​can be displayed separately for active branding campaigns in order to find out whether there are competitors who are in direct competition with regard to your own branding keywords.

Long Distance: Important Strategic Advantages

Brand traffic pumping is a long-range game. In the short term, you may not notice the change, but if we talk specifically about the strategic advantages, then the possible return is definitely worth the effort.

Here are four key benefits that brand conversions provide to any business:

Increased brand awareness. The more people visit your site, the more potential customers will learn about the existence of the company and the products it offers.

More converting traffic. It is easier to sell to such an audience and many users are initially set up to make a conversion.

Low sensitivity to algorithm changes. When searching for brand queries in the search results, “vital” sites are always given the first places, and sometimes several positions.

Competitive advantage. Considering all of the above points, the growth of brand traffic can be seen as a clear bonus in the fight against competitors for the Top.

In the modern world, brand awareness is becoming an important condition for successful business development at all levels. People are more likely to trust reputable companies and even links to such a site are easier to get. So if you still haven’t started working in this direction, this is definitely worth thinking about.