Brand awareness is a technique that shows how quickly potential customers can recall or recognize the brand. It’s considered a key marketing concept and a main element of marketing. In fact, according to Lucidpress, consistent presentation of a brand increases its revenues by 33%.
It consists of unique value propositions, product features, company culture, benefits, reputation, and more. The basic aim of brand awareness is to make the public recall emotions and general impressions about the brand.
Please scroll down to know what is brand awareness, its various categories, and its implications on marketing practices.
What Is Brand Awareness In Digital Marketing?Successful Brand Awareness Examples
Let’s play a quick game.
So, when you order a drink, do you ask for cola or Coke?
Do you ask for a plastic bandage or Band-Aid when you get injured?
Or when you need a tissue, do you ask for tissues or Kleenex?
These companies are at the apex of brand awareness. In fact, they have become so popular that they have replaced the basic terms for similar products.
In simple terms, brand awareness is the extent to which brands can be recognized by potential customers and associate with the product correctly. The same is the answer for what is brand awareness in digital marketing.
The brand awareness of many small businesses has not yet reached eponym status. But even simpler forms of brand awareness can be considered a success. Simpler brand awareness could mean:
- Customers are aware of what your brand is all about.
- Social media users are coming across your ad.
- Customers are choosing the products of your brands over others.
- Search engine users are typing your business name for product search.
Keep reading to learn what is a brand awareness campaign, the types of brand awareness, and how to measure brand awareness.
Successful Brand Awareness Examples
Marketers that focus on factors that establish long-lasting awareness and brand recall implement various practices like building natural stories, awesome product positioning, packaging, and advertising. Below are some of the most successful brand awareness campaign examples.
Apple And Privacy
Privacy on iPhone | Data Auction | Apple: YouTube
When you watch the video, it is clear that your data can be breached daily to drive sales. However, in the end, you also get the message, and with Apple protection features, this will not happen. A guarantee like this goes a long way; consequently, Apple is the most reliable brand globally.
Corona: Pay With Plastic
Corona is a popular beer brand associated with summer, beach, good times, and drinking. In 2019, Corona launched a campaign to celebrate World Oceans Day called “Protect Paradise.” This campaign aimed to protect the environment.
The brand encouraged the customers to clean the local beaches and collect all the plastic. The customers could get free beer in exchange for the plastic.
After the campaign, the brand saw a positive response from the people. The Twitter campaign or the brand alone generated 14.1 million impressions and a 1% engagement rate, which is impressive.
Moonpie: Super Bowl Commercial
MoonPie is known for its distinctive and quickly recognized voice. In the year 2020, MoonPie ran a commercial for Super Bowl by releasing the news for the Twitter followers in a fun way:
MoonPie blends its voice with persuasive marketing by emphasizing the purchasing of the product. While the commercial only ran at the gas station, they were able to turn the news into a fun tweet.
Brand Recognition Vs. Brand Awareness
Brand recognition is a process that refers to the extent to which consumers can correctly identify the brand after seeing indicators like logos and color.
For instance, if you see the golden yellow arches hanging around any structure on a highway, you would instantly recognize: that’s McDonald’s! With a global presence in 119 countries, the brand, like The Undertaker, has instant recall!
On the other hand, brand awareness is a step ahead of brand recognition. The basic idea of brand awareness is to recall the business and the general feeling of the business, its products, and its services.
When a business develops brand awareness, its advertising campaigns and marketing seem meaningful to its audience. Marketing can elicit emotions and feelings in the consumer.
For example, the Made Safe Certification campaign from Mama Earth Cosmetics establishes instant trust in the consumer through an emotional feeling of safety and non-toxicity.
Importance Of Brand Awareness
You can boil down the importance of brand awareness to the possibility of generating more revenue. A study has revealed that 81% of customers like to buy products from a brand they know and trust.
More than 80% of customers have revealed that they need to know that the brand is authentic before making any purchase. For this reason and many others like trust, retention, recall, etc., brand awareness is the top priority of most companies.
Many customers try to make a rational decision by choosing a product after researching, reading reviews, collecting information, and comparing. But at last, they end up purchasing based on the acceptability and reliability of the brand.
Better brand awareness can make your targeted audience choose your brand over competitors every time.
What Is A Brand Awareness Campaign?
After understanding brand awareness in marketing, let’s understand what a brand awareness campaign is. Brand awareness is a simple process that aims to improve the brand’s recognizability to the target audience.
A company’s goal is to ensure that customers have the right impression of their brand. Companies try to associate their brand with a certain service or product by trying to promote their unique selling point. It is what makes the business stand out from the competitors.
But who notices these campaigns for brand awareness? Well, everyone sees the campaign so they can know more about your company. Whether your company wants to build a name in the marketplace or is a startup, you can benefit greatly from running such campaigns.
Reasons To Create Brand Awareness Campaign
You must try brand awareness for three major reasons:
- Better brand awareness campaigns give you the power and control over how people perceive your brand. You can use the right resource to promote your brand in a way that nurtures positive associations.
- You can build trust between your brand and the targeted audience through brand awareness campaigns. Trust in the brand and price of the product is the ultimate priority for the modern consumer.
- Better brand awareness campaigns can help you build customer loyalty. Customers loyal and happy with your products will promote them to their friends and family. This way, you can expect more customers and an increase in sales.
You must try to promote your brand in a way that can connect with the customer’s emotions. When our brand establishes an emotional connection, they are more likely to return to your brand for further purchases.
Different Types Of Brand Awareness
Below are four popular types of brand awareness that can help the customer identify your brand.
Brand Recall
Brand recall can be termed a customer’s ability to recall a brand name from the product category. For instance, when we hear the word soft drink, we instantly think of the brand Coca-Cola.
Customers can recall three brands when they hear of a product. Some can recall more, but there might be 1-2 products that they would have low interest in.
Better brand recall shows a strong link between product category and brand. Sometimes, brand recall is also called spontaneous recall.
Usually, the number of products a customer can recall depends on multiple factors. These include product usage, situational factors, awareness set size, and brand loyalty. Also, a customer who regularly uses the product category is more likely to recall the brand than someone who doesn’t use the product.
Here are some brands with excellent brand recall:
Nike (Footwear)
Taco Bell (QSR)
INOX(Multiplexes)
IKEA (furniture)
Lays(FMCG)
Pepsi(FMCG)
Loreal(Cosmetics)
Brand Recognition
Brand recognition refers to the ability of customers to differentiate a brand from others. Under brand recognition, the customer might not remember the exact brand name. However, they can instantly state the product category or product of the brand.
Brand recognition usually happens through jingles, packaging, logos, or slogans. When customers start recognizing brands, the product properly reaches the targeted customers.
Examples of Brand Recognition Include:
McDonald’s golden arches
Nike’s tickmark
No one can eat just one: Lays jingle
Funny Puns on everyday news: AMUL butter
Solve hunger pangs in 2 minutes: Maggi from Nestle
Top-Of-The-Mind Awareness
top-of-the-mind awareness is the first brand that comes to customers’ minds when searching for a product category. When this concept is applied to many consumers, it can be considered the most recalled or remembered brand name.
The brands that customers can easily remember are more likely to be considered when purchasing a product. This brand awareness type plays a huge role when customers choose among the competitors.
Most of the time, top-of-the-mind awareness is involved during impulse buying. Examples include:
Bandaid comes to mind for plastic bandages
Nestle comes to mind when craving coffee
DeBeers comes to mind when someone is buying diamonds
Fried chicken resonates with KFC all around the globe
Brand Dominance
The last brand awareness type is brand dominance. This awareness is referred to as a situation when a customer can only recall a single brand in a product category.
Under brand dominance, a brand can become a household name. It is possible because many people can recall a single brand name. When a brand becomes a household name, it’s considered successful.
Microsoft Office is an example of brand dominance. Nokia enjoyed brand dominance in the recent past but lost it. Google is on every smart handset on the earth: that’s brand dominance.
Many times, brand names also become synonyms for the actual product name. Coke and Kleenex are good examples of brand names becoming the product categories’ synonyms.
Becoming a generic product name might sound like a good idea for a brand but doing so is not easy. That’s because they must work against their competitors and think out of the box to make their brand perform daily.
How To Measure Brand Awareness
While brand awareness is a good way to make your brand popular, there is no metric to calculate it. So, how to measure brand awareness? Fortunately, you can judge by indicators. Below are three indicators that you can use.
- The volume of mentions: You need to understand how discussable your brand is on the traditional media and social networks.
- Reach: Reach is the number of people who can see your brand and its posts.
- Engagement: It refers to the process of how effectively customers connect and engage with your brand.
Here are some ways that you can follow in detail to measure your brand awareness.
Traffic To Your Website
You can understand the success of your brand awareness through two different traffic sources. The first is the direct traffic when the user visits your website by typing your URL.
This type of traffic is also generated when a visitor enters through a browser bookmark. Customers who visit your website have an idea about your brand.
The next is the overall traffic that shows the number of people daily interacting with your content. When you measure these two sources, you will get an idea of how your brand awareness is growing along with metrics like bounce rates and CTRs.
You can analyze traffic through your google suite or tools like ahrefs and SEMrush.
Backlinks
Backlinks refer to links from other resources, like social media, blogs, or websites. Customers regularly click on the backlinks, which directly increases your brand awareness.
But it would help if you ensured that the referral traffic is high-quality. Untrusted links can harm your search visibility, negatively affecting your brand.
Tools like Open Link Profiler provide detailed backlink audits.
Social Listening
Social listening is considered one of the most effective ways to calculate brand awareness. You can use dedicated tools to track every conversation related to your brand. Social media metrics like Facebook and Instagram insights can greatly hello your campaigns.
This way, you can easily evaluate the number of engagements, mentions, and quality. Social listening also helps you get valuable insights on how your brand or product can be improved to fit the customer’s needs.
Surveys
Surveys are a classic way to measure brand awareness. By taking surveys of your potential customers and current customers, you can get an idea of what they think about your company.
You can take the help of popular survey tools like SurveyMonkey and easily share the results on social media. You need to check the questions that you mention in your surveys properly.
This way, you can find out how familiar customers are with the brand. You can also ask the customers how they came to know about your brand.
Google Services
The last is the Google services that help to measure your brand awareness. You can start with Google Adwords or Keyword Planner to learn about the volume search of your brand name. Depending on the volume, you can evaluate the efforts needed to reach out and create a measurable impact.
You can also use Google Tools to search for the top queries through multiple languages and regions. This tool will help you know how people have searched for your brand.
Conclusion
59% of shoppers buy from brands they trust. Furthermore, 21% of them purchased new products from brands that they are already familiar with. Hence, you cannot deny that positive brand awareness is critical for any product or service.
Through a good brand awareness campaign, you can control and shape the way customers perceive your brand. These processes also give you the power to influence what people think when they come to know about your brand. This way, you can make sure that your customers never leave you.
Brand awareness is a prime element of any successful marketing strategy.