How to build brand awareness for small businesses?

Building brand awareness is a multifaceted process. Small businesses may not dream about becoming names like Apple or Google, but If they follow a well thought out plan and stay adaptive, they can grow much larger than they thought possible.

But most small businesses dismiss the idea too soon because brand awareness is hard to measure. They invest their time and money on sales campaigns and lead generation instead.

Is that wrong? No, and yes.

Answer me. What is your end goal? To become so well-known among your target market, that they make positive buying decisions with little or no forethought. Is it not?

That is what solid brand awareness is all about.

For small businesses, building brand awareness is very crucial in the initial stages, when they are promoting and marketing their companies and its offerings.

In this blog, we are going to discuss everything you need to know to establish a brand awareness among your target market that will continue to grow with your marketing efforts and become inseparable from your business.

• Customer recognition
• Trust and credibility
• Word-of-mouth referrals
• Increased sales
• Improved customer loyalty
• Enhanced brand equity

Yes, that’s what brand awareness can do for you. That out of the way, let’s focus on how to build it from scratch.

First of all, you have to understand that it is not something you can get from your marketing campaigns. It can only come from consistent efforts that aim beyond attracting paying customers.

Here are some ways to build a solid brand awareness for your small business that can stay with your audience:

If your small business is only a company that sells ‘abc’ products and ‘xyz’ services, how can it leave a lasting impression on the audience?

Your company has to be like a person to stay in the minds of your customers. A person that they cannot just forget.

The easiest way to be remembered is to be as you are with your friends.

Determine what human traits you want your audience to find in your business, and present it to your market as if you are introducing it to your new friends.

• Is the story truthful? 
• Will it evoke a friendly and cooperative attitude? 
• Is the story beneficial to all your audience? 
• Is the story fair to all concerned?

• A is the hero
• B is the hero’s goal 
• C are the obstacles 

The basic structure is A wants B despite C. If you master the use of these 3 fundamental elements, you can create a compelling brand story.

If you only connect with your friends or family when you are looking for support, how would they remember you? You will become a person with a singular intention, not relatable or likeable from any of their points of view.

Therefore, your interaction with your audience should mimic the regular interaction among friends. Remember, you already have determined some human traits for your brand, now you can use that framework to connect with people beyond your identity as a ‘service provider’.

It can be as simple as sharing content you like, asking your audience questions unrelated to your products, commenting on posts, etc.

However, getting social is not limited to the online community. You can extend your socialization to the physical world too.

Irrespective of your industry and content type, you have to make content that your audience would like to share. Why? Because, if your content is shareworthy, your audience will raise your brand awareness themselves.

But that’s easier said than done. Your content has to have shareworthy traits to get you enough shares that helps build your brand awareness.

Here are some tips to start working on it:

Ultimately, this is about creating content that is helpful to your audience and is not pushy.

People generally don’t have to move to the second page in the Google SERP to find what they are looking for. That’s awesome for the searcher, but awful for the business that wants the searcher’s attention while remaining on the second, third, or fourth pages.

SEO or search engine optimization practices will help you compete with numerous businesses aiming to rank at the top of the SERP with similar keywords. WIthout it you will never be able to reach your target audience let alone connect with them.

If this is new to you, you should consider the Search Essentials by Google to get an outline of the most important elements to rank higher. However, if you want a straightforward guide on what improvements you can do on your site, then what’s better than an SEO starter guide by Google itself?

A logo is closely connected to your brand’s core ideas and values. And with time they transcend to become identities. From the early days of developing your brand, you should aim to create a logo to use in your advertising, marketing, and organic campaigns.

If you make a great logo, it will be memorable, and instantly recognizable among thousands of other images and symbols. With this logo you can create a powerful impact on how your audience perceives your brand.

You can go through these steps to design a logo for your small business:

Step 1: Understand your brand and express its story through the logo. Expect this task to be very challenging. But continue exploring and experimenting until you find what you are looking for.

Step 2: Brainstorm words, create sketches, and create a layout on a free design platform. You can use Logo Crisp, Appy Pie’s Logo Maker, GraphicsSprings, DesignMantic, Looka, etc. to create the logo.

Step 3: Choose your logo’s color and font very carefully as they can influence what’s being said. Once you have settled on them, ensure that your logo can represent your business on a billboard and on the side of a pen.

Talking about billboards we arrive at our next point: advertisement. Although it is best for product awareness and not brand awareness, it still holds some value as it lets people know about your brand in an unobtrusive manner.

PPC advertising is one of the smart solutions to consider as SEO is continually becoming more and more competitive by the day. Even if you don’t get clicks from many viewers, your brand name still makes an impression.

Organic social marketing is becoming very competitive. Therefore, more and more businesses now prefer paid social media advertising. Twitter and Facebook ads can bring considerable benefits, and they are relatively cheap.

Remarketing is an excellent strategy that works by showing ads to your target audience who have visited your site but left before converting. They will see your ads wherever they go online and solely develop an idea that your brand is much larger than previously thought.

If you want to launch a more advanced large scale campaign and truly appear everywhere, you can try launching a programmatic advertising campaign.

If you have the budget, try every platform that may work for you. Don’t leave traditional methods like car wraps too.

• Promote each other’s services and products to your audiences. 
• Sponsor events (conferences, webinars, and so on) for other businesses or co-host them. 
• Create useful content like podcasts, eBooks, infographics, and blog posts together. 
• Create new products with special packaging (if you wish) together.  
• Give other companies to distribute and sell your products. 
• Through your partner’s orders give away free samples to qualified customers.

Everybody can benefit from co-marketing, not only small businesses. Companies like Apple and Mastercard, Uber and Spotify, Red Bull and GoPro are some of the fine examples of memorable co-marketing.

However, a slogan is not only about being a catchphrase. It entails everything you have to offer and all that you stand for. It is one of the most important elements that stay with your audience even if they still haven’t become your customers.

To create your business slogan consider the following steps:

Step 1: Take a look at your mission statement, company history, value statement, vision, brand assets, target audience and their values and consider what you stand for.

Step 2: Think about what you want out of your brand slogan. What visions do you want it to communicate? What do you want it to express to the target market about the business? What product should it focus on?

Step 3: Start writing with the ideas you have generated and continue experimenting until something ‘good’ pops-up. Gather the best ones and remove the ‘too contemporary or trendy’ once to keep it timeless.

Step 4: If you still have more than one idea at your disposal, consider A/B testing them.

Great customer service is often the biggest determinant of customer loyalty. It matters less if your service or product is faulty, excellent customer service steals the game.

Quick response, helpful attitude, and quick resolution from your part will give your brand awareness a boost you cannot imagine. Good customer service is one of the top features that can make customers brand advocates who influence others about their positive experience.

By ensuring that you are offering top-class customer care service you are increasing customer satisfaction and satisfied customers are prone to bring new customers to a company which can snowball effect and increase your brand awareness further.

Overall, excellent customer service can differentiate your business from your competitors.

• Grab attention towards your business, increase brand awareness, improve its visibility in the market niche you are competing in 
• Polish your business’s image and improve its credibility 
• Create interest and positive attitude towards your company’s products and services 
• Deal with a crisis and minimize damage 

Public relations experts are there to support your product once you have released it for the marketplace. They will create interest in it by improving its visibility and communicating its benefits. This results in increased market awareness and offers you more opportunities for attracting the right prospects.

Now that you have some clear ways to build brand awareness for your small business you should learn how to measure it. Yes, you cannot measure it in the traditional sense, but there are ways to know if your efforts are effective or not.

Let’s take a look:

The overall site traffic numbers are also something that can indicate to you whether or not your efforts are fruitful. This data will tell you the total number of people who are visiting your site, spending time and checking out your content.

To check your overall site traffic on Google Analytics you can use various metrics like users, new users, source to traffic, bounce rate, goal conversion rate, session, and session duration.

How people are talking about your brand online is an indication of how good or bad your brand awareness is. Therefore, you should monitor any mention in third-party press or news articles.

Google Alerts will notify you whenever someone mentions your brand name on the internet (except social media). You should also track mentions in other search engines including AI chatbot responses.

Social listening is the act of monitoring and evaluating social media content that mentions your brand name or something related to your business. For example, who is using your hashtags in their posts, or mentioning your brand in the comments, and so on.

By practising social listening you can gauge how aware your target audience is about your brand.

What’s your primary impression after you’ve read about these ways to build your brand awareness? We hope that if you are not already practicing some of these, you start your journey today.

Today, we may rarely find customers who don’t rely on other consumer’s opinions and extensive research on their own to make a buying decision. It makes brand trust invaluable.

With consistency with these practices you can also build a trust among your target market that they will associate your brand name with the product and can make buying decisions without any second thought.