In general, a Brand, what it does at best is occupy a specific position in the minds of the customer, in order to generate value for the firm or to the firm, many a times, both of them.

 

 

Brand Awareness, is generally measured by how well your customers are able to recognize your brand as compared to other brands. It can also be described as, “degree of consumer recognition of a product by its name.” (1) It has more relevance in digital marketing world.

For What Use?

So, brand awareness pertains to differentiating your brand from your competitors in order to make a specific position, with respect to how much easily the consumers are able to recognize your brand. The higher brand awareness of your firm, the higher you are putting, the barriers of entry for your competitors. Thus, a highly recognizable brand can add to profitability and profit growth of the company, giving them a position to occupy relatively higher share in the market.

How beneficial is it?

There are umpteen number of methods, tactics and strategies available at marketer’s disposal to increase brand awareness.

86% of B2B marketers have used content marketing in the year to raise brand awareness. (2)

Increasing brand awareness and engagement are the biggest objectives for mobile advertising. (3)

According to Talkwalker, The Global State of Influencer Marketing, 2019, “The main objective of influencer marketing for marketers is increasing brand visibility, with 65.8% responders agreeing on this.”

The firm may resort to any number of practices, but unless it has created a long-term sustainable strategy to generate value for its firm, from which the consumers can benefit, the campaign for brand awareness can never gain the amount of success it is supposed to.

 

Why Brand Awareness?

In Marketing Management, we read it as, “the science of choosing target markets and getting, keeping and growing customers through creating, delivering and communicating superior customer value.” (4)

As a manager with growth mindset, you want your company to grow, progress and expand. Thus, for growth, expanding customer base is important. First reason for brand awareness is thus to reach a greater number of people and subsequently convert them into consumers of your brand. Today’s time, more important aspect is to make the brand more and more visible to the public.

Well, more important aspect is to build brand equity. Brand awareness is a vital factor in building brand equity for the company. Brand equity is, “the added value endowed to products and services with customers.” (4)

Having a strong brand itself has many advantages –

·        Higher financial market returns

·        Increase in customer loyalty

·        Increase in effectiveness of digital marketing campaigns

·        Brand extension opportunities

For a successful brand awareness campaign multiple and simultaneous efforts are required in promotion of the differentiation factors and value generating factors of the company. Your brand awareness can be measured in both qualitative and quantitative metrics.

Earned Media

Direct Website Traffic

External Links

Blog Shares

Search Volume

Brand Mentions

Thus, above metrics can help you keep track of brand awareness. These metrics can have a benchmark, with which we can compare the future results.

Brand Awareness creates a recognition for your brand in the market. Recognition of brand means that your customer can differentiate between your brand and other similar brands in the market.

It does not merely to know the name or having recalled seen it before, Brand Awareness implies customer can associate the name, logo and other brand symbols in his mind.

One of the interesting theories presented by Philip Kotler is, ‘CCDVTP.’ It stands for Create, Communicate and Deliver Value to a Target market as a Profit.

Creating value means product management which can include tangible and intangible products. By communicating value, we arrive at brand management. To deliver value is called customer management which involves reaching the customers via different means.

Use of Social Media for brand Awareness

Social Media provides a good platform to promote your brand. If you are looking for opportunities in India, then it won’t be surprising to know that there are over 700 million internet users in India and on top of that, there are over 370 million people using social media, out of which 250 million are active users of social media. Now, to reach that kind of mass, you need a new marketing approach, to pursue it on the digital platform.

No only that, social media now provides an excellent platform to interact with the customers and respond to their needs. We have observed examples from past where distressed customers have been taken care of by the brands.

There are number of Digital Marketing Courses you can take to upgrade your knowledge on Brand Awareness

KPIs you can use to measure Brand Awareness

Impressions - An impression is counted each time your ad is shown on a search result page or other site on the Google Network.

Click Through rate (CTR) – CTR is the number of clicks that your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown.

Avg. Cost Per Click (Avg. CPC) - The average amount that you've been charged for a click on your ad. Average cost-per-click is calculated by dividing the total cost of your clicks by the total number of clicks.

Cost Per Thousand (CPM) - A way to bid where you pay per one thousand views (impressions) on the Google Display Network.

In the End I Would Like To Say...

Brand Awareness forms essential part of any Digital Marketing campaign and overall success of the Marketing strategy of a company. As long as people remember your brand and has positive associations with it, your company will be a success.

 

References

1. KOPP, CAROL M. Brand Awareness. Investopedia. [Online] 21 April 2019. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/brandawareness.asp.

2. Stahl, Stapehanie. success-differentiators-b2b-research. www.cnotentmarketinfinstitute.com. [Online] Content Marketing institute, 22 october 2019. https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2019/10/success-differentiators-b2b-research/.

3. Summit, Open Mobile. Open Mobile Summit 2017. www.brandquaterly.com. [Online] 30 November 2017. http://www.brandquarterly.com/event/open-mobile-summit-2017.

4. Kotler, Philip. Marketing Managemnt. s.l. : Pearson, 2018. 978-93-325-5718-5.