Last week, we tackled the essentials of brand awareness – what it is and why it’s critical for your business. Now that you know the basics, maybe you’re thinking about how to increase your own brand awareness by creating a campaign. But planning carefully, especially for next year, and especially if your market or target audience has changed, is essential. Just launching into a new campaign without a plan is one way to waste your valuable marketing dollars and get lackluster results.
To build a great brand strategy, following these five key steps can help generate awareness for your company. And as always, most importantly is to create a custom campaign plan that works for your unique business, setting you up for success from the start.
Five Steps to Create the Right Brand Awareness Campaign for Your Business
1. Know Your Target Audience
What is the most common mistake made when business owners are looking to grow their brand awareness? Skipping this vital first step of truly knowing your target audience and their unique needs. Surely the goal of increasing brand awareness is for the greatest amount of people to know about your product or service, right?
But not so fast – the best way to create successful brand awareness campaigns starts with targeting the right people.
- Who is the ideal audience for what you are offering?
- What are your buyer personas?
- What kind of income does your target audience make, where do they live, and what do they do in their free time?
Asking these questions will help you figure out exactly who you’re trying to reach with your brand awareness campaign. When you focus on reaching the right people, your marketing message will have a greater impact because you’ll be speaking directly to their needs, desires, and pain points.
2. Find Your Target Audience
Now that you know exactly who you want to talk to, it’s time to figure out where they spend their time. This could vary widely depending on your industry, target demographics, and location.
For example, are you targeting wealthy homeowners for your custom landscaping business? Then you’re not going to get much effective brand awareness with them by spending your marketing efforts on TikTok which is full of teenagers. Facebook, Instagram (with lovely photos of your work) or Pinterest might be the better routes to go.
But if you’re looking to cultivate young customers for your leisurewear apparel brand, TikTok might be a great choice.
Don’t forget – while social media channels are an incredible resource for building brand awareness, it’s not the right route for absolutely every industry.
Does your target audience not usually tend to be heavy social media users for one reason or another (don’t discount seniors and boomers, however!)? Then you can get creative with in-person events or ads as well. Or, having the right email marketing strategy, and getting plenty of positive reviews, could also help jump start your brand awareness campaign.
3. Know What Success Looks Like
Before you start any kind of digital marketing campaign, you need to know what your end goals are before you come up with specific tactics.
Are you:
- a brand-new business trying to get your name out into the community around you?
- looking for increased national awareness of your brand that’s been a regional fixture for years?
- attempting to increase word-of-mouth recommendations from your current loyal customers to their family and friends?
There’s no wrong answer here, but deciding which goals align with your business strategy will help you narrow your focus. As a result, you can pursue the campaign that will get you the results you need.
And knowing in advance how you’re defining success means you’ll know when your campaign is on target and when it needs a tweak to work better. This might be achieved through increased social media engagement, more leads coming in, or other KPIs
4. Craft Your Campaign
This is it – time to polish those marketing messages, create your campaign collateral, and launch your campaign! Your campaign should have compelling messages written in the “voice” of your brand.
It’s worth repeating, your brand’s voice and story should sound human and authentic (yes, even if you’re B2B – the decision-makers here are still people). Keep your color palette consistent, and maybe even come up with a memorable character or slogan.
Whatever your approach, it should be in line with what your target audience enjoys and remembers.
What kind of feeling or memory do you want them to take away from your branding efforts? Leading with an emotional connection and a strong narrative helps your brand awareness campaign stick in their minds long after their initial view.
5. Track Your Results
If you’ve followed step 3 – knowing what success looks like – this step should be pretty simple.
How did your marketing efforts stack up to your initial goals?
Did one tactic succeed while another didn’t do as well as you had hoped?
Did you see what you had planned for, or were you left scratching your head a bit?
Looking at the hard data from your marketing strategies should give you good insight into how your plan for building brand awareness actually went. If something didn’t go as well as you hoped, that’s not failure – that’s just valuable information for your next brand identity campaign.
Always Update Your Brand Awareness Campaign as Needed
Today’s world is saturated with millions of brands, in every conceivable industry. If your original plan to build a strong brand was successful, that’s great – but you can’t stop there. Keep your efforts up so that consumers don’t forget about your company over time, or get distracted by the latest shiny offering on the market.
And don’t just treat your brand awareness efforts as a set-it-and-forget-it campaign. Digital marketing best practices change fast, as do the preferences of your customers and where they like to spend their time and consume information.
Keep checking those results and updating accordingly to make sure that you’re sticking with what’s actually working now, not just what’s worked in the past.
Bring on the Experts to Help with your Brand Awareness Campaign
It’s important to build the perfect brand awareness campaign for the success of your business – but it’s a tricky art to master alone.
You don’t need to forgo the incredible benefits of brand awareness. You just need to work with the right partner who will create a plan for your unique business and help you get real results you can measure.
Schedule a free business review here to find out how we help businesses grow. You can use these insights for inspiration, and let us do the marketing for you.
