Brand Awareness: what does it mean? What is the meaning of a concept so dear to the world of web marketing? This term allows you to combine two aspects.
On the one hand, you have the brand, that is to say, the brand with all its load of meanings and values. On the other hand, you know, the ability to be remembered and obtain concrete benefits from a strategic presence in the mind of the potential audience.
In the daily frenzy of writing, publishing, replying to comments, and curbing criticism, did you forget to curate your brand? Big mistake, here’s how to remedy and increase profits by working on your brand. The most precious asset, here.
The topics of the post
- What is brand awareness: definition
- Why brand awareness is worthwhile
- Measuring the brand: the Aaker pyramid
- How to increase brand awareness
- How to measure brand awareness (KPI)
- What differences with brand reputation
- Brand and marketing: are you working on it?
What is brand awareness: definition
The term brand awareness means the notoriety of the brand in a strategic sense. That is how a name is positioned in the minds of the people you want to reach and who represent your buying audience.
Through awareness, a brand manages to position itself in people’s minds and increase sales by completely bypassing the competition. Because brand awareness allows you to identify a product or service with a question. Let’s start working on the point. But first, let’s clarify a couple of essential principles to address the topic related to personal brand awareness.
Brand protection
Activities, ranging from trademark registration to legal actions, are dedicated to everything related to the protection of your brand concerning the activity of competitors.
Brand identity
That is to say, the brand image, how the brand appears in the eyes of the public. Marketing actions are aimed at defining and strengthening this theme.
Personal branding
All the activities are put into practice to make sure that the brand of the individual is improved. Making personal branding is essential to freelance.
Why brand awareness is worthwhile
Through a good marketing strategy, you can increase brand awareness and make people recognize you, your name, and your brand, as an ideal choice to satisfy certain needs. Do you know what this means?
Cancel the competition problem. People need to know your brand and make the choice to go directly to what you do. When you work only with brand awareness you are the first possibility that comes to mind to those who buy.
You position yourself in a perennial blue ocean. But to do this you have to work hard. That’s why KissAnime wants to create good brand awareness.
All this without forgetting the close relationship between brand awareness and SEO. Today, you can’t just count on the ability to rank your site on Google – you need to get people looking for you. Directly. Without going through (only) the informational keywords but exploiting the importance of the navigational ones.
Measuring the brand: the Aaker pyramid
Before starting to work to strengthen the brand, can we evaluate the work done so far? The starting point is that proposed by David Aaker.
A marketing and brand strategy expert who sees the brand as assets and liabilities that add or subtract value to a good or service. All of this is defined through the pyramid of brand awareness. In particular?
No brand knowledge
Unaware of the brand, i.e. there is no awareness of who you are and what you do. You are at zero grade of brand awareness. So you have only one chance: to improve.
Acknowledgment of your name
Someone gets to know the job, your brand. This is done through a memory recall. So with an external contribution that suggests the name.
Brand recall
Presence is now associated with a particular basket of goods and services. In isolation, without any reference or contribution from external actors.
Top of mind
The apex of the pyramid. When someone thinks or speaks the name of an article, it is automatically associated with your work. An example? Think Walkman!
How to increase brand awareness
An important job awaits you. That cannot be done in a few months, building brand awareness is a process that takes years.
Think of Apple, Coca-Cola, and Samsung: giants that have taken decades to be remembered. Do you want to try? Start from these points to strengthen the brand.
Define the brand strategy
The brand is the promise you make to the public, it’s what people expect when you start communicating. This is why the branding strategy must be defined a priori: you cannot improve brand awareness if you don’t know what and how to say.
There must be a compact brand strategy that identifies a mission, an objective to be achieved. And of the values that hide behind the name that must be accompanied by a slogan and a pictogram. Even from a tone of voice.
Create quality content
Do you want to be recognized immediately? Communicating is your starting point. This means putting the creation of something in the foreground, a content marketing job that knows how to become useful for its audience.
You can think of corporate blogging activity, or perhaps native advertising and storytelling. Everything can become a tool to increase brand awareness if there is a strategy behind it. You can’t improvise in these cases.
Brand awareness online and offline: the logo
It is important to communicate continuity between what you do online and your offline image. Everything must be treated in detail. For this reason, I recommend studying a graphic solution that recalls colors and concepts. In summary, you need to create a logo:
- Single.
- Recognizable.
- Reproducible.
- Simple.
Blog images are also a great way to reinforce the brand by reproducing the logo. Not a wizard (or a sorceress) with Photoshop? No problem: you can create simple infographics and templates with online applications like Canva.
Unify your image
You have a thousand social profiles, each with a different image, background, and name. The biography stops 10 years ago and is written in a style that no longer belongs to you.
The same goes for letterhead, portfolio, business card, and other accessories. I suggest that you unify the parameters of your image so that they respect the colors, the logo, the writing, and the face you have chosen to present yourself online.
For social media, I also recommend that you insert simple biographies, which focus only on the experiences related to your business. One more tip: use information that you don’t have to change every year. Here is a concrete example:
- I have been working as a web writer for 5 years.
- I have been working as a web writer since 2014.
The first option forces you to revise the figure every year, the second always remains valid. These are also details that make the difference.
Talk to your audience
Several times I have stressed the importance of simple writing, adequate to the needs of the target. Setting a tone with big words and periods as a university professor is useless. To get in touch with readers you have to take to the streets.
You can use social media to talk to readers: they are essential for these goals. And to get the most you have to merge them with the blog. A few examples:
- Share on Twitter a comment you left on your blog.
- Suggest that followers leave an opinion.
- Ask your followers or fans to recommend a topic for the next article.
- Create an article based on a tweet, and embed it at the beginning of the post.
This is a taste of the techniques for building relationships with social networks. An important role is played by private communication between you and your readers. Responding politely to an email is a good way to add value to your brand.
SEO and branded guest post
How many guest posts did you write to earn a link? Certainly okay. But I recommend that you do guest blogging mainly to strengthen your brand, to get other people to read your name. And link it to quality text.
Guest blogging is a perfect tool to make brand awareness, to increase the spread of your name in a given audience. But it is necessary:
- Choose carefully the blog that will host you.
- Write truly unique content.
- Avoid promotional texts.
- Give the blog reader what they are looking for.
- Respect the owner’s needs.
- Work well on the biography and presentation.
- Follow the comments.
The guest post is not a tool to earn a cheap link: the result you will get will be directly proportional to your commitment to the creation of the post.
A question of domination
Your brand can be enhanced with a simple domain. Even with an email address. One of the advantages of buying WordPress hosting is the possibility to activate a domain name that can be traced back to your brand.
What do you think is the easiest email to memorize? And the domain capable of inspiring professionalism? The answer is simple. Remember that it is a good practice to summarize all the information about your business in the footer of the site or blog.
Remember one last point: when you buy a domain you can evaluate whether to bring home the other extensions (the gTLD) in order to do brand protection and prevent competitors from having an easy life.
How to measure brand awareness (KPI)
The big challenge: understanding how I am behaving and moving to increase brand awareness. Am I doing good things? We need a KPI, a key performance indicator capable of measuring the work done. Is there such a solution?
Brand and navigation searches
What metrics to use to measure brand awareness? I can mention the queries on Google that have your name at the center and that seek certain answers from the site.
This KPI suggests analyzing searches that affect your brand firsthand. Here are hiding individuals who know you, who are looking for your name, and the solution you have prepared. To get this metric you can use the Search Console, the Search Analytics section, or tools like Semrush.
To measure this step it is not enough to obtain the number of navigational and branded queries, you can take a look at Google Analytics and compare it with Search Console to try to understand how visits increase thanks to these searches.
Mentions on sites and social networks
Let’s move from search engines to online discussion platforms. The possibility of improving the brand reputation through the observation of the mentions, the quotes that are made on different realities such as:
- Forum.
- Q&A sites.
- Twitter.
- Instagram.
- Blog.
- Facebook.
These quotations, of course, must be managed in such a way as to understand the content of the reference. The sentiment, that’s it. Is it a criticism or an appreciation?
The community manager’s task is to respond, buffer and intervene in the best possible way. But how is brand awareness measured? Here are some tools:
- Mention.
- Hootsuite.
- Tweetdeck.
- Talkwalker.
Semrush also has a great monitoring service for projects. With Facebook the situation is different, it is difficult to track profiles but in the last period, the internal research has improved a lot so you can rely on this resource.
Link to the website
Getting hyperlinks isn’t just a useful step for SEO. A corporate blog that manages to get a lot of inbound links also helps improve brand awareness. Because your name is mentioned, indicated as a useful source.
The KPI of brand awareness, however, must not be limited to the number of links collected but to the general quality of the action. Because the work also consists in the search for qualitatively superior connections: contextualized, located in significant areas.
You must also evaluate the absence of nofollow, a condition for having a valid link for ranking purposes but which could be useful in any case for brand awareness.
What differences with brand reputation
Strengthening the brand is the first duty of a good marketing strategy, but you must never fall into confusion: brand awareness remains on a superficial level.
It represents a parameter to measure brand awareness, how well your name can be known in a target audience, in a defined and contextualized audience.
The brand reputation, however, is the view that people have of you. You have to make sure that people not only know your name but share your value. In this delicate balance, the work of brand building becomes decisive.