5 Key Steps to Building Better Brand Recognition

A brand is only worth something if consumers recognize it, so one of the biggest challenges in building a brand is how to achieve good recognition. If people don’t know who you are, they won’t be willing to buy your products or services. Good brand recognition happens the moment someone remembers your brand – this means that your brand is imprinted into their minds the second they see your logo, company name, or an ad. As you build brand awareness, you’re building a company’s reputation at the same time.

Although building brand awareness is not an easy task, there are some fundamental steps that are worth remembering when building your business.

1. Determine the Target Group

Any advertising campaign, regardless of its goal, must begin with an understanding of the target audience. The same applies to building good brand recognition. Just because you want more people to know about your brand doesn’t mean you can aim headlong at reaching just about everyone. This would waste both your time and resources.

Before starting an awareness building campaign, you need to determine your target audience, their demographics, interests and behaviours. You can do this by analysing your existing customers and social media followers. You can also analyse your website visitors using tools such as Google Analytics or SEMrush. Once you know who your customers are, you can focus more on the content you will offer them and the campaigns you will use to reach new customers whose persona matches your existing customer base.

2. Establish a Social Media Presence

In the digital world, it is important to have a presence on social networks. Of course, it is useful to advertise on them with the help of ads, but it is also very important to regularly publish quality and relevant content on your channel, because this increases your visibility. Your first task should be posting consistently.

In addition to regular posts, you can ensure greater visibility by:

Respond to comments under your content. The more interactions you have with your customers, the more trustworthy you will be in their eyes. If someone has a question, don’t hesitate to answer; if someone compliments you, thank them; if someone has a problem, offer to resolve it. In this way, people will trust you more because they will know that they can easily reach you and that they can count on help in case of problems.

Creating your own hashtag. Hashtags help users discover new products and brands. It is important to create a hashtag that is not too generic, as to prevent your posts getting lost in the flood of other content with the same hashtag. Create something unique and simple.

Following the development of social networks. The only thing that is constant is change. In recent times, the social network TikTok is particularly popular with the younger generation, in addition to Snapchat. Follow developments and trends and if you find that your target audience spends a lot of time on new social networks, get ahead of the competition and don’t delay your presence on new platforms as well.

3. Partner Up With Other Brands

Partnering with other brands is beneficial, both for smaller and larger companies, because it enables the acquisition of new customers and greater visibility, as through cooperation you are more exposed to your partner’s user base, and vice versa.

If you are, for instance, a florist company, you can connect with wedding dress providers and thus reach a larger target audience that will be relevant to your business. This example is, of course, simple, but the same tactics are also used by the largest companies. Examples of recent collaborations with big brands are that of Apple and Hermes, Adidas and Arizona iced tea, Nike and Sony (Playstation), Fila and Chupa Chups…

It is important that the company you associate with expresses the same or similar values ​​as yours and that their target audience is also relevant to you. You can also collaborate with a good partner by creating a joint product.

4. Offer Freebies to Your Clients

We all love free stuff. People especially like to try things out before making a final purchase decision. By offering a “taste” of your product or service, you increase your visibility and also build trust, as you show that you stand behind the quality of your products or services.

This tactic has also been used by Spotify, a streaming music service provider that offers its users a completely free version of its app and doesn’t even require you to enter your card number. The free version of the service is, of course, somewhat poorer than the paid offer, but it offers users a very good insight into the service without forcing them to make any kind of commitment or payment. With this move, Spotify increased the number of active users from 30 million in 2016 to 70 million in 2018. At the end of 2019, Spotify reached 124 million active users.

5. Offer Added Value by Writing a Blog

Not to toot our own horn, but one of the often overlooked ways to build good brand awareness is to write your own blog. The key to a good blog is the aforementioned consistency. It is worth publishing a new article at least once a week, as this will make your customers more active and engaged. Writing your own blog can be tiring, especially if you run a business at the same time, so in such cases it makes sense to hire a third party as a writer for your blog.

In addition to publishing content regularly, it must also provide added value to your customers. The topic of the content must be in harmony with the image and offer of your company. If you are a company that sells sports equipment, you can write about topics such as healthy nutrition, the positive effects of recreation, work out tips, etc.

Find out what questions and problems your target audience has and answer them with the help of a blog. With a good blog that contains the right information and keywords (it will be SEO-optimised), your site will also be more visible on search engines like Google.