It’s not news that brand awareness is essential for businesses to thrive. But building brand awareness in today’s marketing climate is much more than simply running ads or buying a domain name. Having an active online and social media presence is important, but the online space is over saturated with ads, raising prices and lowering impact.
Creative thinking is essential in crafting successful brand awareness strategies that stand out. Below are some tips to bear in mind when creating brand awareness initiatives.
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Get To Know the Consumer
Understanding who comprises your target market and what they want is essential for raising brand awareness. Often it is the case though that an unanticipated demographic interacts with a brand because it’s being used in unexpected ways. StickerYou for example, an e-commerce store specializing in user-made customizable stickers assumed their customers would mostly comprise of young people and artists. Although this indeed became the case, the company also found that other businesses were using their customizable products to further their branding and promotional incentives. By paying close attention to who was buying our products, we were able to adjust branding awareness strategies to include this new audience.
Make an Emotional Impact
It’s not enough to highlight what a product or company does. Successful brand awareness initiatives hinge on how the brand makes consumers feel. Evoking an emotional response with branding efforts can help connect the brand with consumers in a memorable way. And the emotion doesn’t have to be the standard “happy.” Highlighting how a product or service can solve a problem for a customer can foster feelings of trust and safety. By focusing on a specific emotional response, brands become more relatable, and by proxy, more trusted.
By creating a memorable and out-of-ordinary experience brands have the opportunity to align with the position that they want to have in their customers’ minds. This can be done in various ways but the goal is to give customers the right emotions that you want them to feel when remembering about the brand. A mobile showroom can be a great option to engage with customers the way that businesses would not normally do. Whether the business industry is food, jewelry, clothing, make-up, or any other field, with a mobile showroom it is always possible to get creative and give freebies, make moments worth sharing and give long-lasting experience to customers.
Cross-Promote
Traditional and outbound marketing still prove effective in terms of brand awareness because they are successful ways to ensure products or services are seen by customers. The problem is that audiences who aren’t interested in the brand are going to ignore these efforts. Targeting specific demographics and increasing brand awareness to tap into new ones works best with cross-promotional tactics, as this helps expand brand awareness via each customer base. Having an e-commerce store cross-promote in a physical brick-and-mortar location for example can be a mutually beneficial strategy. The brick-and-mortar helps the e-commerce store by exposing the brand to an audience that might spend a lot or any time online. Conversely, an e-commerce store can promote online exclusive deals to increase the brand awareness of the brick-and-mortar.
Team Up with Influencers
Establishing relationships with influencers that operate in a niche market and focusing on a specific product or service is useful in increasing brand awareness. For example, at StickerYou, we promote the ability to customize sticker designs using our online Sticker Maker tool. This ability to customize designs appeals to street artists who want to create stickers to promote their work in their own networks, which are often niche target audiences interested in art and design. By working with street artist influencers, we are able to engage with their target audiences in a more meaningful way than if we were to try to access these audiences on our own. We often post blogs featuring the creative work of artists that have purchased from us that they can then share on their own social channels and networks. This way, both parties gain increased brand awareness and exposure in different specific market segments.
Package Makes Perfect
Putting the finishing touches on orders via branded packaging is an easy, affordable, and unique way to raise brand awareness. Having a visually pleasing and functional package advertises a brand not only when the customer receives it, but also while the package is in transit. Branded packaging can make a lasting impression that encourages repeat purchases and positive word-of-mouth references.
Raising brand awareness is an important element in growing a successful business. Knowing who the customer is, evoking an emotional response, and spreading the company message via influencers, creative promo campaigns and packaging allow brands to affordably increase brand awareness in creative ways. Look into providers of personalized boxes for shipping to create the packaging that resonates with your customers.
Author: StickerYou Founder & President, Andrew Witkin
As the founder of a global e-commerce leader in custom-printed, die-cut products, Andrew Witkin is widely recognized as a leading authority on e-commerce, customization, startups, marketing and the tech economy. Witkin has also served as VP North American Licensing for Nelvana/Corus Entertainment and Director of Marketing for MegaBrands/Mattel.
About Carson Derrow
