When you own a business, a primary goal of yours should be to grow your company’s brand awareness, which is a term that you’ve likely heard of before now. However, not every company understands what brand awareness actually means and how to go about improving it. Brand awareness refers to customers recognizing your business and remembering it. When you have an ample amount of brand awareness, consumers will be able to identify your business just by seeing your logo or products. For instance, most people who see the “swoosh” logo will immediately know that Nike is the brand that the logo belongs to. They may even decide to buy a pair of shoes or visit the Nike website based on one interaction with the brand.

If you want your company to be a leader in the industry you belong to, it’s important to regularly take steps to increase your company’s brand awareness. Once you have improved your brand awareness efforts, you should start to notice your main audience becoming more comfortable with your products and brand, which can be invaluable in the future. If your brand awareness is high enough, your products may be the first ones consumers think of when they want to make a purchase.

In the event that your brand awareness isn’t where you want it to be, you should consider making improvements that will provide consistent growth in brand awareness. Keep in mind that brand awareness is the initial phase of the marketing funnel. By increasing your brand awareness, it should become easier for you to reach potential buyers. You can then funnel these leads through the research process before eventually pushing them towards making a purchase.

Since brand awareness is the initial aspect of the marketing funnel, increasing your brand awareness should help you with conversion rate optimization. Bringing in more leads will invariably increase the number of conversions you obtain. Before you begin to implement new brand awareness techniques, it’s important to understand that brand awareness and brand recognition are two different things.

Brand recognition occurs when consumers are able to properly identify your brand by your brand colors or logo. Brand awareness goes further than recognition because the consumer will also have a general feeling about your business and brand that’s attached to the initial recognition. You should think of brand recognition as the first step towards improved brand awareness. This guide offers a closer look at what it takes to grow your company’s brand awareness.

5 Ways on How to Create Online Brand Awareness

While there are many steps you can take to start building brand awareness online, the following are five steps that have proven to be highly effective.

1. Guest Blog

A great way to grow your company’s brand awareness is by writing guest blogs on other websites that are currently more popular than yours. While you should also run and manage your own blog, it’s still important that you take measures to get more eyes on your website and brand, which is where guest blogging comes into play.

To begin, research publications and blogs in your industry. Use Google and social media to search for blogs that may offer similar content to your own. Platforms like BuzzBlogger and MyBlogGuest can also help you find websites where you can write guest posts. Once you’ve done enough research, write down a list of websites and blogs that accept guest posts. It’s also important that the people who read your blog post will be receptive to the content and become interested in your business and brand.

Make sure that you take some time to brainstorm some ideas for blog posts. You should avoid making the mistake of writing a blog post that’s similar to one that was already on the blog a month before. Some websites will allow guest posts to be outfitted with backlinks, which will lead to your website and are recognized by Google when your web pages are being ranked. When guest blogging, be careful about the content you write. If the content is too boring, the people who read it will move on and won’t show interest in your brand. Your content should always leave an impression.

2. Create Infographics

Take time to create infographics that you can share on social media and other platforms. These graphics are essential for reaching new audiences on platforms like Facebook that aren’t automatically geared towards businesses. People who use social media only consume content that’s easy to digest, which means that you should avoid placing plain text articles on websites like Facebook.

Along with being visually engaging, infographics are more enjoyable to read, should means that they could help you improve your brand image. To better understand why infographics are more effective at reaching consumers than posts with plain text, keep in mind that visuals are processed at a rate of 60,000 times faster when compared to plain text. Nearly 95% of blog posts that contain visuals obtain more engagement than plain text.

3. Use SEO to Your Advantage

Search engine optimization is almost essential to brand awareness because there are numerous ways that SEO can improve a company’s brand awareness. It’s important to understand that high rankings make your website and brand seem more reliable and trustworthy. If your website appears towards the top of search results for relevant keywords, you’ll be able to create brand awareness, increase site visibility, bring in more traffic, and boost conversions.

However, some SEO techniques are designed to be used with long-term strategies. You may not notice results immediately. However, the right optimization can pay dividends when you’re attempting to grow brand awareness. Make sure that you always use keywords in your website and content that relate to your industry and the products you offer. When potential customers search for a product that’s similar to yours, it’s important that your website is one of the first search results they see.

4. Gather Client Testimonials

One area of focus that you shouldn’t overlook is gathering testimonials from your customers and clients. No matter how great your marketing materials are, most customers know when they’re receiving information from a brand representative, which is information that could be exaggerated. For new customers, reviews can be more important than any other marketing material if you want these customers to make a purchase.

When potential customers are able to read reviews and testimonials from past customers, they are receiving valuable opinions and experiences that they can rely on. While users can look at product features to gain a general understanding of what the product is, reading reviews is the only way to determine if these features work as intended. Make sure that you include both positive and negative feedback. If you don’t include negative feedback, potential customers may believe that the reviews aren’t legitimate.

5. Utilize Social Media

As touched upon previously, social media is more important than ever for businesses that want to reach a wide audience. Facebook alone has nearly 2.9 billion monthly active users, which means that most of your audience spends time on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. While it’s possible to pay for social media marketing, there are also some organic social media techniques that you should look into.

For instance, you should respond to all customer questions on your social media pages, which will improve brand awareness and reliability. Another great way to obtain more brand awareness through social media is by holding contests that require users to tag or share their posts in order to win a prize.

Improving Your Brand Awareness

While creating brand awareness is necessary if you want your company to garner long-term success, you shouldn’t cease your efforts once you’ve created a base amount of brand awareness. From here, it’s important to take steps to improve your brand awareness, which will help your business and brand grow to new heights.

1. Run Social Media Advertising

An effective method for improving your brand awareness is to run social media ads on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. These ads will allow you to reach individuals who might have only been interested in the products your competition offers before now. Make sure that you include relevant content, appealing visuals, and calls to action in any ads you make.

2. Implement Native Advertising

Native advertising has proven to be among the most effective methods that businesses can use to improve brand awareness. Because these ads are native to the platforms they are hosted on, they will fit right in with the surrounding content and should be appealing to individuals who see them. If you implement native ads in The Washington Post or The New York Times, these ads will be placed after the conclusion of an article, which means that they are non-intrusive.

When you create native advertising, keep in mind that these ads are fully customizable and should include relevant messaging. To understand how important native advertising is to most companies, these ads are expected to make up more than 60% of digital display ads this year.

Conclusion on Increasing Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is a critical component of the success of any business or brand. If you want to grow your audience and bring in new customers, the only way to do so is by making sure that people are aware of your brand and understand what your brand image is. Once you’ve started to implement some of the above strategies for creating and improving your brand image, it’s important that you measure the results.

The methods you use to measure results differ depending on the strategy you’re using. When you create native ads, you can measure brand awareness results by looking at site traffic, impressions, and click-through rates. Your social media efforts can be measured by looking at the analytics for each individual platform.

While you continue to monitor your efforts, you can use the measurements you obtain to improve your marketing and brand awareness campaigns. As mentioned before, increasing your brand awareness is essential if you want your business to grow and be at the forefront of the industry you operate out of.