It has become critical for businesses and companies in today’s competitive marketplace that people should be familiar with their relevant brand name. Today, we’ll discuss what is brand awareness; its importance, its benefits, and how to measure it along with examples.
What is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness is a marketing term and the main element of the marketing concept, and it outlines how easily the potential customers could recall and recognize your products and services. The main step of brand awareness is to revive old brands and promote new products and services. Ideally speaking, it comprises such traits and characteristics that differentiate a product from its competitors.
Brand Awareness versus Brand Recognition
Marketers often use the two terms interchangeably, but they have got some differences. As the name implies, brand recognition is how easily your target customers could recognize your company or brand. However, it comprises easy-to-recall the symbols, logos, corporate color scheme, and the company’s name. In other words, we can say that brand recognition is about the visual identity of your brand.
Brand awareness is a bit complex notion; and it outlines the soul of your business comprising of benefits and features of your product, reputation and culture of your company, and unique value proposition. We can say that it makes the public recall the general impressions and emotions relevant to your brand.
In short, we can say that brand awareness summarizes the emotions it generates among the target audience.
Importance of Brand Awareness
The significance of brand awareness comes down to the possibility of amplifying your revenue stream. According to an estimate by Global Banking and Finance Review, customers would like to purchase from brands that they know and are already familiar with.
Approximately 71% of the people claim that they should be familiar with the brand’s name before buying it. That’s why 89% of the marketers say that their top priority is their brand awareness.
Many people believe that they intentionally and rationally make a choice among similar products while purchasing them in the market. Before shopping, they do their research, make a comparison, read reviews, gather information, and so on. Often, they make the buying decision based on the reliability and acceptability of the brand. The BA makes your target customers select you over competitors.
Benefits of Brand Awareness
Some of the main benefits of brand awareness are as follows;
High Sales
As we have already discussed earlier that customers prefer to buy from brands that they can recognize and are familiar with. A company would win a bigger market share if more people are aware of its brand.
Businesses and companies with bigger markets earn more revenue and amplify their sales than their competitors. According to an estimate by Forbes, brand presentation on various platforms would amplify their sales and revenue by up to 23%.
Emotional Connection
BA plays a significant role in retaining customers and making them buy the company’s products repetitively. The known and well-recognized brands create feelings and optimism and trust. Customers would go back to buy from such brands that they know and heard its name before.
BA helps businesses to establish a strong emotional connection between the customers and the company. According to an estimate, approximately 65% of the customers feel that they have developed a connection with some particular brands. This type of emotional connection encourages customers to buy from their favorite brands repetitively.
Growth in Customer Loyalty
Some brands have established a unique competitive edge in the market in terms of higher sales, revenue, and developing an emotional connection with customers. According to a study by PWC, customers tend to show tolerant behavior toward the mistakes and errors of their favorite brands.
Only 17% of customers would reject the products of their favorite brands after a mistake or blunder. The tolerance level of customers is lower if brands don’t have an emotional connection with their brands. Roundabout 39% of the customers say that they won’t buy products from the company after the mistake.
Acquisition through Referrals
The BA would bring more referrals and reviews. Approximately 94% of the customers that are emotionally engaged with the brand would refer the brand’s product to their friends and relatives. The referral programs amplify the sales and influence the decision roundabout 20 to 50%.
According to an estimate, roundabout 84% of the people believe that the recommendation from their friends and family members is the most credible source of information.
How to Measure Brand Awareness
Some of the main ways how to measure your brand awareness are as follows;
Website Traffic
In order to determine your brand awareness, you should track two types of traffic. First, it’s the direct traffic that you receive after entering the URL in the search bar. When people bookmark your website and visit it directly, then it means they’re familiar with your brand name.
Secondly, the overall traffic on your website is also important. It shows the total number of people who visit and interact with your content hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly basis. When you measure traffic from various sources, it would help you to study the growth of your BA.
Backlinks
Backlinks are the links to your website from various others sources like other websites, blogs, social media platforms, and others. Your BA would keep on growing if the traffic from the backlinks is increasing.
You have to make sure that the traffic from the referrals should be of high quality. It’s because the links from untrusted sources could jeopardize the visibility of your searches. It would badly impact your company’s BA.
Social Listening
Social listening is the most effective and credible way to amplify your BA. Tools like “Mention” and “Agoraplus” would help you to track the discussion about your brand on various social media platforms. It allows you to track the total number of mentions on various platforms, and their quality. It offers you a great insight on how to improve your product or brand to be relevant to the needs and requirements of customers.
Surveys
The classical approach to conducting research surveys in order to measure BA. You can survey various types of people both potential and existing customers to know what they think about your company. “TypeForm” and “SurveyMonkey” are the great survey services providing platforms that you can use, and you should share them on social media or send them via email to invite people to participate.
You should carefully draft the survey questions that you would ask people. If you’re talking with people, then you ask exactly the type of information that you want to hear.
Google Services
Some services of Google are very effective when you plan to measure the BA. They are like Keyword Planner and Google Adwords would tell you the total volume of searches of your company. However, “Google Trends” is also a great tool, it helps you to know the top popular searches on Google in various languages across different regions. It also lets you know how many people are googling your brand.
Examples of Brand Awareness
Slack
Slack is a cloud-based messaging platform and tool, and the company has amplified its BA through hacking techniques. The company started its journey as a startup with a few thousand uses, and now it’s a fast-growing business platform. The focus of the platform was building customer relations, and it was the main reason behind its success. The company earned thousands of reviews on various platforms like TechCrunch or VentureBeat before launching it.
The company has created a “slack wall of love” in order to make the best use of word-of-mouth marketing. Here the company shares the tweets of those people that love and admire this tool.
Spotify
Spotify is an online music streaming platform and the company has amplified its BA by showing customers their annual results. The platform creates a list of most listened to songs, albums, and artists and shares the results with every user individually.
People loved the personalized statistics of their favorite songs, and they started sharing them on various social media platforms. Spotify has made the list easily sharable, and it amplified the company’s BA and overall customers reach.
Conclusion: What is Brand Awareness? Importance, Benefits, Examples
After an in-depth study of what is brand awareness; its importance, benefits, and how to measure it with examples; we have realized that BA is significant for the growth of businesses and companies. If you’re working to amplify the growth of your business, then you should keep in mind the abovementioned tips and guidelines.
Ahsan Ali Shaw is an accomplished Business Writer, Analyst, and Public Speaker. Other than that, he’s a fun loving person.
