5 simple ways to create brand awareness

Successful brand awareness is more than simply brand name recognition. It means that consumers know what you do on a more intimate level. For example, when you hear the brand name ‘AirBnB’, you probably think of more than just the name. You think about going on holiday, low cost unique accommodation, and their ads “don’t go to Paris, live there”.

Put simply, brand awareness is the level of consumer consciousness of a brand.

Creating an identifiable brand
Consistency is critical when it comes to branding; streamlining your colours, logo and fonts makes this easier, as well as making the brand more instantly identifiable. The big social media brands do this really well, the blue that Facebook use is called Social Butterfly Blue and all their branding is the same blue.

We love clever and effective branding! A great example of a company whose brand awareness is on point is Carlsberg. They are a major sponsor of the European football championships in France this year; a country where alcohol advertising has been outlawed since 1991. To get around this legislation, Carlsberg simply replaces their brand name, with the word ‘probably’ in the same font and style as the brand name.

They have such strong branding that they don’t even need to use their own name.

Paid Social Media Campaigns
Social media campaigns are great way of broadcasting the goals and targets of your brand to your followers. However, when your social media follows are lacking in numbers, what can you do to increase your reach? You can boost your strongest content!

Boosting your content on Facebook can be an effective way to reach a bigger audience, with the potential for many impressions. The data that Facebook collects allows you to target user groups with great precision. Although, this does require you to still have interesting content. Bad content won’t be interesting to your 10 followers, never mind the 100,000 people you boosted it to. Bad content will get lost in the crowd, so make sure to create content that people want to engage with.

Check out our previous blog post on engaging with students.

Fact is, we now live in a world where we have to be investing some cash on Facebook Ads to get the exposure we want.

Don’t be boring, create shareable content
As we just mentioned, an easy way to get people to share your content is to create content worth sharing. A great example of this is Go Pro video content, these clips make us want to jump off things with cameras attached to our heads. Also, they make us want to share the videos with our friends because of how cool they are. Goal accomplished.

We all have an ever decreasing attention span, science tells us that we now have a shorter attention span than a goldfish, at just 8 seconds! Creating shareable and short content is the key to growth and awareness. Just look at the facts: Photos and video get 53% more Likes and 104% more comments than a post without visuals.

Get face time with your target market
Eventbrite recommend getting out there and meeting the people that you’re trying to reach. An amazing way to do this is via freshers fairs, where hundreds of students will be in one space. Again, you must engage your audience with creative content. Dominos always score highly when they give away pizza at these events. Greggs also do really well within this sphere, offering chances to win some great prizes; engaging and potentially free pastries, win.

Freshers Fairs are not the only way to get some face to face contact with this group demographic. Depending on your product, think about whether it could be appropriate to target specific courses, and try to plan giveaways during lectures? Obviously ambush giveaways would need significant planning, and could lead you in a bit of hot water if specific precautions are not organised. Proceed with caution.

Finally, be authentic
Being authentic as a brand is important, we live in a world where there is a lot of competition. Anything you can do to set you apart is good, one major part of this is brand trust. If you promise to do something on social media and you don’t follow through, it can drastically affect your image, ruining consumer relations.

It’s really important to respond to all comments that you receive on social media, not only the positive ones. A common mistake is to ignore, or delete the negative comments, this is bad news. Not only can other followers see that the brand has ignored the complaint but it only fuels the fire for that unhappy person. Responding in a positive way goes a long, long way with everyone.

So that’s that. Be real, be interesting, be consistent and the good word about your brand will spread.