Simul’s guide to building brand awareness

Enhance your business with the ultimate guide to building brand awareness

If you’ve ever heard someone refer to searching the internet as ‘Googling’, regardless of what search engine they’re actually using, or ask for a ‘Coke’, when they want a cola, then you’ve come across a business with strong brand awareness.

Building brand awareness is harder than ever, with the online bid for attention becoming more crowded and more competitive. However, this guide will provide you with the tips and guidance needed to stand out from the rest, and build your brand awareness to its biggest potential. Maybe, you’ll even end up as the new ‘Coke’ or ‘Google’…

Brand Guidelines

First things first, it is important to layout your brand guidelines. This means you have to put rules in place as to how you want your brand to be represented to the target audience. This helps you display a consistent and concise brand image, even when multiple people within a company are managing the social media accounts and website assets.

The types of things to include in these guidelines are logo designs, colour schemes, graphic elements, fonts and type of language and tone of voice to utilize. This will allow your brand image to be consistent across all your marketing platforms and social media pages.

Importance of Social Media Branding

It is important that you understand why social media branding is essential. Social media is currently one of the biggest platforms to reach audiences.

When it comes to social media branding, a keyword to remember is consistency. You must make sure that, across all social media platforms, your branding is consistent. This allows your audience to start to associate certain things within your marketing efforts to your brand, such as colours and logos. It also means that people can see that your social media pages are associated and part of the same brand. This can help to create strong statements.

It is also vital that you are posting consistently and frequently to your social media pages, as a strong social media presence creates a sense of trust and relatability to a brand from an audience. It also means that your posts are more likely to be favoured by the social media algorithms, creating a larger audience and developing your brand awareness.

Guest Posting

One of the first strategies we’re going to look at is guest posting. Creating a blog (much like this one) is one of the best ways to increase brand awareness, and create a return audience who want to read each blog post that is published. But first, you need an audience to target.

How? That’s where guest posting comes in. If you can find a publication in your industry, figure out what their guidelines are for creating a blog post, or get in contact with them and pitch them your idea.

This will allow you access to a whole new audience who may have never found your blog otherwise. Not only this, but audiences will also see your blog as receiving an almost kind of ‘seal-of-approval’ from the publisher, who clearly consider your blog valuable enough to post.

Just ensure that the topic of your blog post is unique, and also that you’ve included your brand when it comes to credit for the post, and you’ve created an opportunity for increased viewership on your blog and increased brand awareness.

Shareable Content

Another strategy is to create shareable content for your social media. What does ‘shareable content’ entail?

This can be a number of things. As an example, it could be an infographic. This type of content is much more engaging than an article and is a better fit for the social media landscape.

This is especially helpful for algorithms like Facebook’s that value likes and shares from friends and family over posts from brands. Creating the type of content that people want to share with friends and family is key to getting your posts seen and favoured by the social media algorithm.

Referral Systems

To help grow brand awareness, another thing you should do is set up a ‘refer-a-friend’ system. Referral systems work, without a doubt. They have been around for as long as you or I can remember, and that is because 83% more likely to purchase a product when it is recommended by a loved one.

With this in mind, it is a great idea to encourage people to recommend your services to their network. This could be through a reward system for both parties (the person recommending and the friend receiving the recommendation).

No matter which way you decide to tackle this idea, getting your brand into peoples’ networks and spreading through recommendations is a vital step to building brand awareness, and this is a great way to do exactly that.

Creative Marketing Campaigns

So many marketing campaigns over the years have become a part of pop culture. From the Budweiser ‘Wazzup’ campaign to the Skittles ‘Taste The Rainbow, Feel The Rainbow’ advert, these creative marketing campaigns have created so much more brand awareness for their respective companies.

Obviously, ‘creative marketing campaign’ is a broad and subjective term, but it can be unspeakably beneficial to building brand awareness. But how do you go about understanding creative marketing campaigns?

Firstly, look at the most successful brands in your industry and see what they’re doing for their marketing campaigns. Take notes, take inspiration and brainstorm ideas. Ask your target audience, figure out what they like and what they want to see. Once you have this information, begin to formulate some outlines for what you want to put out as a marketing campaign.

Business Branding Ideas

Although we have given plenty of ways to increase brand awareness in this blog, you may still be looking for branding ideas. This is where we will help you figure out how you want to present your brand to the world.

Firstly, it is useful to choose an archetype. This isn’t to say ‘be generic’, but rather figure out a basic concept or idea that you can sum up your branding with. For example, a company like Apple presents itself as ‘the innovator’. No matter how you want to present your brand, figure out an initial idea to mould your branding around.

Another thing to do is to find a logo you can use to represent your brand. People respond to images a lot more than text, so attaching your logo to each post allows your audience to start associating an image with your brand, which will in turn raise your brand awareness.

And when trying to figure out which way to tackle your branding or what ideas you want to implement, it is always a good idea to ask your target audience. Utilise surveys, analyze competitors’ analytics if they’re available to you – figure out what it is your target audience wants to see from you and incorporate it. This can help inspire you and guide your branding in a direction that is going to be beneficial to growth.

Digital Marketing Agency

Finally, something important to note is that it always helps to have a digital marketing agency to help you create an effective marketing campaign. Ultimately, if you’re inexperienced, unconfident, or uncertain, it helps to have a team of experienced professionals help you out.

They can help you to build your brand awareness through a number of ways, including the ones that are included in this article, plus many more. Hiring a digital marketing agency is a worthwhile investment to ensure that your marketing campaign is both effective and to a professional standard.

If you are interested in hiring a digital marketing agency, Simul Digital is here to offer our services and aid with website development, creative design, search engine optimisation and lots more…

To get in contact, email us at: hello@simuldigital.co.uk, call us at 01924 450 888, or visit our website for more information.