[October 10, 2022]
In a recent blog, we discussed how to manage your brand and enhance the overall customer experience. Having a well-focused, unique brand is important. Your brand is the overall personality of your business and the promise it makes to customers.
Once your brand has been established, fostering awareness and building up the public’s perception of that brand comes next. Brand awareness is the familiarity and recognizability of your brand with your target audience. Establishing brand awareness is crucial when marketing and promoting your company and products, especially in early stages of a business.
Kim Adler, a Senior Account Manager at AKC Marketing, knows how much work goes into promoting a relatively new brand and has some insights to help other brands raise awareness of their company and product.
“Brand awareness helps audiences understand, recall and become comfortable with your branding and products,” explained Kim. “Building up that brand awareness with your target demographic helps your brand become top-of-mind and establishes brand loyalty and longevity.
From Nothing to Something – Increasing Brand Awareness
Gaining brand awareness among the general public or even people immersed in your industry doesn’t happen overnight. These days, it doesn’t even happen from a simple advertisement or marketing campaign. Strong brand awareness is the result of multiple simultaneous efforts that extend beyond trying to get paying customers.
“One of the best things you can do is build a report with customers by sharing content, stories and information,” Kim said. “Make it easy for prospects to share your content – whether it’s blog posts, social posts, videos or entire webpages, make it easy. Simple, basic information and real-world results do a lot of legwork for you and providing interesting and tangible stories will draw the prospect in and get them to share your content even wider.”
Kim also stressed the value of word-of-mouth advertising. It establishes trust and familiarity among customers. If someone sees a friend or family member recommending a product, they’ll take notice and store that information for later.
Storytelling is another incredibly powerful marketing tactic. Whether marketing products or promoting an entire brand, storytelling provides something real for the audience to latch on to. Crafting a narrative around your brand is another way to humanize it and give it some depth. Weaving this narrative into your marketing will tie your brand directly to your products.
Boosting Brand Awareness
In our previous blog on developing a brand, we talked about Pivot Bio and the process of developing a brand voice. Developing that voice is important to help build customer confidence in both the brand and its products. Pivot Bio PROVEN® was a new product without much brand awareness. Increasing awareness was the key to increasing sales. By developing attention-grabbing advertising that established Pivot Bio as a nitrogen company and Pivot Bio PROVEN® as a better source of nitrogen for corn crops, AKC Marketing was able to meet this challenge.
“Pivot Bio set up a number of goals for the awareness campaign,” explained Kim. “These goals included increasing brand awareness from 7% to 50%, increasing product awareness from 3% to 50% and becoming known as a more productive, more predictable source of nitrogen.”
The campaign set out to communicate Pivot Bio’s company statement — “Nitrogen’s Turning Point” —and Pivot Bio PROVEN®’s brand statement — “The Nitrogen That Stays Put, Weather or Not.”
“We planned for the mediums that would support the campaigns, choosing print, radio, broadcast, digital, search and display, collegiate sponsorships and social media,” Kim said. “We also partnered with agricultural media outlets to ensure we reached the right audience, knowing if we could increase brand awareness with this demographic, it would be easier for our sales reps to sell a new product.”
At the end of 2020, AKC Marketing partnered with Farm Journal to survey 500+ corn growers in the Corn Belt. The survey results said that Pivot Bio had increased their brand awareness from 7% to 69% and Pivot Bio PROVEN® had increased awareness from 3% to 49%. Finally, Pivot Bio was able to meet their 2020 sales goals and increase sales by 300% from 2019.
Measuring Brand Awareness
In the above case study, we partnered with an industry publication to poll subscribers in order to gauge results. However, there are multiple ways to measure brand awareness, and different metrics may mean different things to different people. HubSpot explains that there are two ways companies can measure brand awareness with a fair amount of accuracy: quantitatively or qualitatively.
Quantitative brand awareness measurements can help paint the overall picture of your brand awareness. Marketers can measure direct traffic by tracking URLs, as many consumers discover brands through social media, advertisements, or by typing in keywords related to your brand or product. Social engagements are another quantitative method. Engagement can refer to followers, likes, shares, comments and more. It’s a reflection of how many people are aware of your brand and interact with it, as well as how impactful your content is. For instance, sites like Sparktoro can give you a specific score for your Twitter impact.
Qualitative brand awareness, while not as easy to measure, can still help you determine who and how many people are aware of your brand. Setting up Google Alerts and utilizing social media listening tools are two ways to keep tabs on how often people are talking about your company or product and what they are saying. A brand awareness survey, either through an email campaign or partnering with a publication or third-party company can help you understand who is aware of your brand and what they think of it.
Next Steps
When it comes to increasing brand awareness, utilizing multiple tools, platforms and methods yields the best results. Each campaign can be measured differently, and each campaign may have different goals. Whether launching a new product or trying out a new tagline, our experts are ready to work with you and create a campaign that can reach and grow an audience.
“Brand awareness, while somewhat ambiguous, is a powerful concept that can have a huge impact on your marketing efforts, consumer perception and ultimately revenue,” Kim said. “Routinely checking where you stand in the market and how people think of your company or product are great practices. Knowing where you stand and learning from previous efforts can help you when launching products and new campaigns.”
No matter your brand goals, building a plan and following up with results are necessary for every brand awareness campaign. Contact us and we’ll help you get started.