Building Brand Awareness
Brand Awareness is the familiarization of your company within your target audience. Brand Awareness is built by using visual or audible cues that customers immediately link to your company. Some examples of this are McDonald’s I’m lovin’ it slogan and Apple’s world famous bitten apple logo. Sometimes the cue is just a series of sounds, such as the Intel Inside chime. Brand Awareness is a powerful advertising tool because its an extremely effective way to help customers make a quick connection between a simple cue and your brand. Right now is the perfect time to focus on brand awareness, as building it up now can really jumpstart your company after COVID – 19 eases and the economy recovers.
Business in the new reality
You may have already started building brand awareness, so now is also the time to think about how to pivot it. Will you resume operations exactly as they were before? Or, now do you also offer masks, sanitizer, online shopping, delivery, or other products or services poised to become necessary in our new economic reality? Whether you are building brand awareness from scratch or adapting an in-place marketing model, think about how your cues encompass they way your business may have changed.
Decide on your cues
What brand awareness cues best suit your business? A logo? A sound? A chime? A catchy slogan? When deciding on our cues, take into account:
- Your target audience: are they on smartphones? In coffee shops? Newspaper readers?
- Uniqueness: is your cue too close to a competitor’s? Is it too unique and therefore difficult to understand?
- Marketing: how easy will it be to promote your cue? If you have relied on newspaper advertising, for example, you will need a new medium for an audio cue. If you have relied on digital advertising and want to include print media, you may be better served by a purely visual cue.
Timing is everything
We say now is the time to focus on building brand awareness because timing really is everything. Right now, most businesses have slowed down or closed their doors temporarily. While this is a frightening prospect, the upside is that it allows business owners valuable time to work on the business instead the daily long hours at the business. It takes a lot of time and energy to come up with a visual or audio cue that encompasses your entire vision, mission, products and services. You may also need to involve a business consultant or marketing expert – which can be hard to find time do when you are front and center at work.
The other part of timing happens after the brand awareness cue rollout. It takes time for the cue to gain traction, and you must have a good tracking system in place to gauge how well your cues are working within, while also reacing,your target market.
Help is on hand
There is no need to build a brand awareness strategy on your own. Great West Digital has been helping business owners reach their target market for years. We use a combination of experience and digital tools to put your message directly in front of your target audience and we track the results so that you can see what works and where your marketing dollars are best spent. Contact us today to start building brand awareness for the post-COVID-19 economy.
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