Why Brand Awareness is Vital for Growing Businesses
Trying to grow a business without brand awareness is like trying to drive a car with your eyes shut. You need to see what’s in front of you to be able to take action.
Too many brands put the majority of their marketing budget into lead generation, without realising that they’re making their job far too hard as they’ve completely overlooked brand awareness.
If you are looking for business growth, then start with brand awareness, and you’ll increase your chances of success.
Why do I need brand awareness?
Let’s start with the most obvious statement: if people don’t know you exist, how are they ever going to buy from you. The first part of brand awareness is simply letting people know you’re there. Then alongside that, you also have to tell them who you are, what you do, and very importantly, what you can do for them.
We buy things because they fulfil a need or fix a problem, so your brand awareness needs to make it very clear from the outset why you’re there to help your customers.
If you’re familiar with the marketing funnel, you’ll know that brand awareness sits at the top of it because it’s hard to move on to buy something if you don’t know it exists. It’s just logical.
This makes brand awareness the broadest part of the funnel. You need to reach as many people as possible, who could be your potential customers, to optimise your chance of success.
While it’s impossible to know exact figures, it is accepted in marketing that only a fraction of people who are made aware of you will move on to the next stage to find out more.
So let’s say, for argument’s sake, that only 10% of all the people who are made aware of you (who are relevant potential customers) move on to find out more. That means you need to ensure you have a bigger pool of people knowing about you if you want to increase your pool of leads. It’s simple maths: 10% of 100 is 10, but 10% of 1000 is 100.
Remember it’s a long game
Brand awareness isn’t as easy as just telling people you exist, however. Unfortunately, we live in a media heavy world. Everyone is trying to grab everyone’s attention. That means it’s far more difficult to get noticed.
On average, we need to see something seven times before it starts to sink in. We don’t tend to notice new things straight away. That means you have to be in front of your potential customers’ eyes for seven times before they begin to be aware of you. That’s seven times before they even reach the top of the funnel.
There isn’t really a way to circumnavigate this. Go in with a hard sell and you’ll put your customers off. You need to warm your customers up with marketing messages that will pique their interest and encourage them to want to find out more. This takes time. But when you get it right, that’s when you will start to see results.
Consistent and persistent works best
We know it’s hard to grab attention, and we know it takes a while for people to stop and take notice, so we need to factor that in to ensure we give ourselves the best chance of success.
How to do that:
- Create a really strong message that resonates with your target audience, making them want to find out more
- Be very consistent across all your marketing, ensuring that all your channels share that message. Remember: the more times people see something, the quicker they’ll listen. So use more channels to drive that message out there
- Make it really easy for people to find out more – when you do get that magic moment and someone is ready to take a look further, don’t then rely on them remembering to do that when they get home, or after they’ve finished that thing they’re doing. Quick links, QR codes, your channels working together and enticing call to actions will all help to move things along. Never rely on hoping for the best
Multi-Touchpoint Advertising
At Eye 4 Media, we set up our packages to literally do all that. We work with our clients to create stand out messages that will get noticed, we then fuse online and offline channels together to give you great consistency and persistency, and we make sure results are a priority within your campaign, meaning that we are always thinking about your call to actions and how to get them to work.
This is brand awareness at its best, driving your potential customers to find out more about you, and leading to those desired enquiries.
If you haven’t tried multi-touchpoint advertising like this, then you could be missing out.
Get in touch today to find out more.
