7 Strategies to Build Brand Awareness in 2021

Did you know that it takes 5 to 7 impressions for a brand to be remembered and become recognizable? Building a brand is an ongoing, evolving process that requires adaptation and hard work. 

Brand awareness is a foundation to building a brand successfully, it lays the groundwork for brand recognition and brand recall. 

So how do small businesses or enterprises ensure that their strategies are promoting brand awareness into and throughout 2021? Keep reading to find out the 7 best ideas for better brand awareness. 

Brand Awareness And Conversions 

Focusing on brand awareness can bring a myriad of advantages and benefits to your brand and business. One of these advantages is the fact that by deciding to increase brand awareness, you’re likely to see an increase in conversions and sales. 

The two are strongly tied together. 

Why is that?

Having a strong brand awareness means that people will remember your brand, and will be able to recall your products and services easier. The key to brand awareness is that potential customers will begin to relate your specific product with your brand, and remember it in their time of need. 

Brand awareness creates trust with your audience, and by doing so, eventually converts them to customers. Which is how brand awareness will increase your conversions over time. 

There are three key things that brand awareness can do your business: 

1. It can drive traffic to your website 
2. It can increase lead generation and conversions 
3. It can increase referrals and word-of-mouth marketing 

The one way to ensure that your brand awareness efforts are working for you is by using different strategies. 

1. Begin With a Plan 

Brand awareness should never be done on a whim with no strategic goals in place. This is why the first strategy you should have, is to have a strategy. 

Sounds a bit counterintuitive, doesn’t it? 

But marketing efforts should never be implemented without a solid plan as its foundation. This means you need to be able to measure brand awareness success. 

You need a plan for your brand awareness campaign. Ask yourself, what do you want to achieve with your marketing? What do you want to achieve with your brand awareness? 

Are you looking for more subscribers? Are you looking for more followers or a higher engagement rate? 

The absolute fundamental part to creating a successful brand awareness campaign is to know your audience. This is all forms part of the plan that you’ll create. So, start with your audience, what is their demographic? Where will you find them? Who are they? 

Once you’ve nailed that down, you’ll want to have measurable goals in place for the duration of your plan. How else are you going to know if you’re improving or if your strategies are working? 

2. Develop Your Brand Persona 

Some brands don’t see the importance of a cohesive brand persona across their platforms, and this is a mistake. 

You should develop a brand personality and voice that’s going to be the rule for how your brand is presented online, and offline. Part of this strategy is how you plan to make your brand relatable to your audience. 

If your brand evokes emotional reactions in people, it will be more memorable, and that’s how brand awareness and brand recall work. Work on your brand’s personality. 

How are you going to get people to relate to it on an emotional level? 

3. Content Is Key 

One strategy you should focus on is your content marketing. Through content, you can achieve many things. 

Focusing on your content marketing means that you need to have an understanding of the type of content you’ll be creating and publishing, and how this content is relevant and relatable to your audience. Content marketing is usually the heart of your brand’s digital marketing tactics. 

There’s no point in creating a brand awareness campaign if there isn’t relevant content to interest your audience. Having content that solves a problem or issue for your audience or your customers, is ultimately what will drive conversions. 

In-depth information within your content will be valuable to the performance of your brand awareness efforts. 

4. Consider Influencer Marketing 

Influencer marketing has grown exponentially over the past few years, and there’s good reasons why. 

Your strategy for influencer marketing is once again built upon the foundation of knowing your audience and knowing them well. Partnering with an influencer who is talking to your ideal target audience is how the system works. 

There are two things to consider though:

1. If you’re looking simply for increased brand awareness, then you’ll want to search for influencers who have a large following and that’s all 
2. If you’re looking to increase sales, then you’ll be looking for an influencer who is niched in your industry and can help convince their following to buy your product or service 

Did you know that 89% of marketers say that their ROI (Return on investment) is higher with influencer marketing than with other channels? 

5. Mobile Optimization 

You may read ‘Mobile Optimization’ and think wait, that’s just a tactic for digital marketing, how will it help with brand awareness?

Well, did you know that there are 3.5 billion mobile users globally? And these users spend about 2 hours per day on their mobile. 

This means one thing, if your online brand awareness is not optimized for mobile viewing, then you’ll be losing out on a large potential audience. You need to make sure that your website and all your content is suitable for viewing on any device. If your content is mobile-friendly, it makes for content consumption easily. And thus, puts your brand in front of more eyes, and increases your brand awareness. 

6. Promote Brand Loyalty 

One strategy that you absolutely have to implement is the promotion of brand loyalty. The idea behind brand loyalty is that you should be building long-term, sustainable relationships with your audience and your customers. 

One surefire way to promote brand loyalty is by creating membership scenarios for your audience and customers. This can be achieved by using the idea of exclusivity to sell the concept to your subscribers. 

What do we mean? 

Well, imagine subscribers get a monthly coupon for a small discount on your products or services, it makes them feel in a way that they belong to an ‘exclusive’ club and gives them a sense of belonging. 

Through brand loyalty, you can build communities that interact and engage with your brand continuously online, and in turn, these brand-loyal audience members will increase your brand awareness to people in their digital environment. 

7. SEO Is Still Important 

We’re all familiar with the term SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and what it can do for our websites, but what can it do for our brand awareness efforts?

Through SEO we look to achieve one thing, and that is increased traffic to our website. Through many different SEO tactics, our websites and our brands land in front of many, many more eyes. 

SEO tactics such as the use of social media marketing, keyword research, and local SEO efforts will all work together to give your brand more online presence and thereby create higher brand recognition. 

By focusing on your SEO, you’ll be killing two birds with one stone, you’ll be driving traffic to your website and promoting lead generation and you’ll be increasing brand awareness. Here are some of the SEO tactics you can include in your strategy:

• Perform an audience audit and ensure that you understand who you’re targeting and how you plan to do this 
• Through your audience audit, you’ll discover the foundation for your keyword research and this is a fundamental part to creating a successful SEO strategy 
• Focus on link-building, if your brand is present on other reputable websites of other well-known brands, you’ll drive both traffic and brand presence 
• Focus on local SEO efforts and make sure that you’re front of mind when it comes to local search engine results 

Through SEO you can place your brand in many more ‘places’ online and thereby increase your brand awareness. Ensure that your SEO efforts are measurable though, as you’re going to want to be able to measure how successful your SEO has been in contributing to your overall brand awareness efforts. 

You can use Google Analytics as a way to measure this and analyze your traffic. 

The Beauty Of Brand Awareness 

The thing about building brand awareness is that nothing is going to be an overnight success. You need to be willing to put in the groundwork and build a solid foundation for each of these brand awareness strategies. 

Measure your progress and performance periodically to ensure that you’re getting the results that you want, and to decide if your strategy needs to be adapted. 

Partnering with a reputable agency on your brand efforts can be advantageous in the long run, as they come with vast experience. Contact us if you’d like to start building brand awareness right now.