To survive among powerful corporate organizations, small businesses need to double the efforts in order to have a memorable impression on their target audience. If to believe the Marketing Rule of 7, a prospect needs to come across the brand’s message at least 7 times to take an action. But how can you reach the right people in a hypercompetitive environment?
In this post, we will share actionable tips SMEs can use to boost their brand awareness on a budget to compete with bigger companies.
What Is Brand Awareness?
According to Business Dictionary, Brand Awareness is the extent to which a brand is recognized by potential clients with a particular product or service. To guarantee the success of your brand and win loyal customers, you need to embed your business into people’s lifestyles and habits.
Why Is It Important?
Brand Awareness is the key element in building trust with your target audience. If your prospects have encountered your brand before via advertising or product reviews, they are more likely to become repeat customers.
Techniques to Improve Your Brand Awareness.
1. Build a Consistent Brand Image.
It would be impossible to build powerful brand awareness with a brand image that constantly changes. Make sure that your brand voice and identity are consistent across all the channels to help your audience recognize your brand better.
2. Be Active on Social Media.
Doing Marketing on a budget, you might want to consider building your presence on Social Media. However, to have success, you need to go beyond faceless corporate pages and engage with your audience on a more personal level. Share appealing pictures and interesting stories to start a conversation with your prospects.
3. Work on Your Customer Support Service.
There is nothing worse for a company than a bad customer support service – a negative word of mouth can destroy your business. Today customers tend to believe reviews more than ads and product description, so you want to make sure that your customers get the best possible experience. 82% of Americans say that recommendations and reviews are the most important element in their decision-making.
4. Try Out Contests & Giveaways.
To expose your company to a wider audience you can host a contest or a giveaway. The most common way to do so is to ask your followers to comment under the contest post tagging their friends and share the post on their feed.
5. Don’t Forget About Traditional Marketing.
Traditional marketing is still one of the most effective yet affordable ways to boost brand awareness. You can test different promotional products such as a loyalty card and flyers. Or you can use banners to boost your sales. This method is especially good for local marketing efforts as you can distribute marketing materials directly in your neighborhood.
Metrics to Track Brand Awareness.
To monitor Brand Awareness, use tools such as Google Analytics. You want to keep an eye on Click Through Rates of your ads and the amount of organic traffic. Another trick is to set up Google Alerts to see when someone mentions your brand online. For Social Media, track user engagement such as reposts, likes, and the number of comments.
High engagement means better brand awareness. Try out different approaches to identify what is interesting to your target audience and leverage it. With the set of effective techniques, you will be able to launch a powerful even without a big budget.
