How to Increase Your Brand Awareness in 2022

As a business or brand owner, you know how important it is to build a loyal and returning customer base – but how exactly is this done, and how can you make your brand a household name.

Brand awareness is an essential component of any marketing strategy, as it helps make your business recognizable and memorable for consumers. To increase your brand awareness, you must take a proactive approach that utilizes many different strategies.

In this article, we will discuss exactly what brand awareness is, what the benefits of it are, and how you can go about increasing your brand awareness in 2022. Keep reading to learn 8 key methods for creating a well-known brand!

What is Brand Awareness?

Brand awareness is a marketing term used to describe the visibility of a business or brand. The height of brand awareness is when a customer recognizes your business simply from a name or logo and knows exactly what products and services to expect from you.

There are several key examples of businesses with excellent brand awareness, such as:

• Coca-Cola: As one of the most well-known beverage companies worldwide, The Coca-Cola Company has maximized its brand awareness through a combination of advertisements, memorable marketing, and customer engagement. The Coca-Cola brand is so popular, in fact, that many customers use the term “coke” to describe sodas that don’t even belong to the company.
• Apple: Apple is easily one of the largest tech companies in the world, so much so that their brand is recognizable from the logo alone. Part of this company’s massive success lies in its commitment to expanding its brand awareness by creating a unified user experience and fostering brand loyalty through connected products.
• Amazon: Amazon is one of the greatest examples of building brand awareness through the use of keywords, advertisements, and sponsorships. As part of this company’s marketing and brand awareness strategy, they ensure that Amazon is a household name by promoting the wide range of products and services available at affordable prices through their platform.

The Benefits of Brand Awareness

A high level of brand awareness can be incredibly advantageous, not just for establishing your popularity as a business but also for increasing the business’s profitability.

Here are 5 key benefits to a strong brand awareness strategy:

1. Free Marketing: The more people that know and love your brand, the more free word-of-mouth marketing your receive as a result. Additionally, having branded products – such as items containing your logo or merchandise with your company name – allows you to gain extra marketing and profit from a single product.
2. Customer Loyalty: Attracting new customers is essential to any business but so is retaining existing customers to build a loyal customer base that returns again and again. When customers recognize your brand and know they will receive quality products and services from you, you establish your business as a fan favorite.
3. Marketing Efficiency: When customers are well-acquainted with your brand, your marketing efforts can go a lot further. This is largely thanks to a high level of credibility and trust that comes with creating a recognizable brand that customers feel confident in. 
4. Product Launch Success: A high level of brand awareness helps to ensure that each of your new product launches goes smoothly, as you can rely more on a returning customer base that has faith in the quality of your products and services.
5. Competitiveness: These days, most industries and markets are oversaturated with businesses and brands offering fairly similar products or services. With a strong brand awareness strategy, however, you can stand out in an overcrowded industry without having to make major changes to your business model and offerings.

Building Your Brand: The First Step to Better Brand Awareness

Before you even begin to develop your brand awareness strategy, you must ensure your existing brand has a reliable level of uniformity and memorability. Brands that constantly change their names, logos, and marketing materials can often fall flat when it comes to building brand awareness due to the lack of consistency in their approach.

Consider again how Coca-Cola and Apple use consistency to make their brands well-known. While there have been changes to their logos and marketing strategies over time, they have maintained a constant stream of iconography and messaging that matches that fall within the categorization of their brands.

With this in mind, here are 3 key elements for boosting your brand’s consistency:

• Reliable Brand Names: There are two main types of names to choose from – descriptive and branded. Descriptive names describe the types of products and services you offer, while branded names may not have anything to do with the products themselves (such as Google, Nike, etc.) but rather strive to make their name synonymous with the product.
• Memorable Video Ads: In today’s digital world, memorable video advertisements can go a long way in making your brand a household name. A great example of this are the iconic Old Spice commercials that are recognized immediately by their formatting and style before ever even saying the brand name.
• Graphics & Logos: While you may go through a variety of different graphics and logos throughout the lifetime of your business, ideally you should have one central image that informs the rest of your iconographies – such as Apple’s apple logo or Nike’s checkmark.

8 Ways to Increase Your Brand Awareness in 2022

So you have your image established, your iconography in place, and your branded materials ready to go – how do you now go about increasing that sweet, sweet brand awareness?

Below we have detailed 8 of the best methods for increasing your brand awareness in 2022:

1. Improve Your SEO

SEO – or Search Engine Optimization – is a powerful strategy for helping your business and brand to rank highly on major search engines like Google. While there are many branches of SEO, the strategy can typically be separated into two main categories: general SEO and local SEO.

General SEO deals with how well your website and online content performs in search engine queries, using both front-end and back-end techniques to optimize websites. While it can take some time to improve your search engine ranking, general SEO helps to improve your brand awareness by helping you to reach your target audience with content, metadata, and more.

Comparatively, local SEO is a specific subset of general SEO that helps your business or brand appear in highly specific, local searches. Local SEO is especially useful for brands with physical stores, helping to attract customers who are physically nearby or searching for niche businesses within a set location.

2. Submit & Publish Guest Posts

As you are just starting out with your brand awareness strategy, it can feel difficult to build credibility and visibility in the beginning. An excellent way to overcome these hurdles is through guest posting.

Guest posting is the practice of writing articles to be published on established blogs and websites, generally on very niche topics. There are many brands and websites out there that offer guest posting, as it can benefit their business as well.

By regularly writing, submitting, and publishing guest posts, you can access much larger audiences within your brand’s niche. Additionally, these posts can help establish you as an expert within your field. Some guest posts even offer payment for your work!

3. Grow Your Audience with Social Media

We live in the age of social media and we would be remiss to not encourage you to expand your use of the many social media platforms to increase your brand awareness.

A key advantage to using social media as a brand is that it allows you to connect directly with your ideal customers. Not only can this bring more business to your website but it can also increase your engagement on all platforms.

Three awesome ideas for growing your audience with social media include offering giveaways in exchange for follows and likes, creating your own unique hashtag, and crafting valuable (& branded) infographics that users can share on their own profiles.

4. Partner with Influencers & Content Creators

Influencer marketing goes hand-in-hand with social media brand awareness. Influencers and content creators are some of the most powerful people on social media, making the products they promote all the more successful in the long run.

There are all sorts of different influencer partner programs you can create – from special discount codes influencers can offer to their followers to full-on sponsorships where the influencer regularly posts about your product or service.

5. Create a Referral Program

While partnering with influencers and content creators is a great strategy, you can also offer a variety of partnership programs to your customers as well.

Referral programs are an excellent way to not only increase your word-of-mouth marketing but also foster greater customer loyalty and satisfaction. When your customers recommend your products or services to their families and loved ones, you gain a level of trust and credibility from these referrals that can be otherwise hard to achieve.

Plus, referral programs can offer crowd-pleasing rewards – such as special offers or discount codes – while still remaining a highly cost-effective brand-building strategy.

6. Craft Shareable & Relevant Content

Let’s discuss content for a moment.

Although guest posting and referral programs can go a long way in building credibility, nothing is quite as effective in this department as creating your own unique content for your email campaigns, social media, blog, and website.

This content can include everything from concise infographics and listicles to lengthy guides and ebooks. The key element that makes this content effective, however, is that it must be available to your audience totally for free. On top of this, you should always make your content shareable when possible.

Think of it this way – how many branded blogs, Facebook pages, or Instagram accounts are you familiar with simply through your friends and family sharing their posts? Creating valuable and shareable content is essential for getting the word out about your brand – and for reaching your target audience.

7. Support Your Local Community

These days, customers highly value brands and businesses that show a true commitment to bettering the communities they exist in.

As such, taking on various community initiatives is a fantastic way to not only gain greater visibility but also to show your customers that you truly care about them and their communities. Examples of effective branded community projects can include fundraisers, sponsored community events, and live shows.

A crucial component when working to support your community is to make sure your customers are involved in the process. This will help to familiarize them with your brand and ensure your community initiatives meet the wants and needs of the customers you aim to attract.

8. Offer Freebies & Sample Products

Who doesn’t love a good freebie or sample?

When you are launching a new product – or even a new brand – for the first time, offering free samples of your goods to customers can help attract an audience that may have otherwise looked the other way.

Plus, when people receive freebies from a company, they will more than likely recommend to their friends to grab a sample as well – expanding the customer pool you can reach substantially. In addition to this, freebies give customers a great first impression of your brand, as it shows them you care about their satisfaction and want them to be able to “try before they buy,” so to speak.

Final Thoughts

Increasing your brand awareness is essential for establishing your business as a household name and fan-favorite amongst customers. See how Molekeul has helped leading brands with this, reach out for more information.