When you are running a small business and want it to grow exponentially, the one thing you need to constantly work towards is creating a brand out of it. Once a company or enterprise turns into a brand, it starts seeing a growth trajectory for itself. The more the number of people who know about your brand, the higher will be its growth.
Importance of Brand Awareness
Brand awareness refers to the level of familiarity or connection customers have with a brand. Brand awareness can also be described as the first step taken by a consumer towards getting associated with a brand or investing in a product or service offered by it. The brand of a business is built by several elements including its logo, motto, goals, products and services being offered, choice of aesthetics and its story.
Creating awareness around your brand among your target consumers is important for several reasons. If you are a company selling formal shirts and you manage to make a name for yourself, your company’s name will pop up in the minds of your consumers whenever they think about buying a formal shirt.
When a company becomes a brand, consumers develop a sense of trust and confidence in it. They feel confident about the fact that the products and services offered by the company will be of a certain quality. They believe that the amount of money they spend towards acquiring their products or availing their services would be a worthwhile investment.
How Influencers Help In Making Your Brand Visible
The more the products, services, tagline, logo, and other units associated with your business are visible, the stronger will your brand become. To ensure that your company is ‘seen’ and spoken about, you have to invest a certain amount of money in marketing and advertising. In today’s times, one of the best ways to promote your brand is to collaborate with influencers.
Here are some of the ways in which influencers boost your brand visibility:
Creating Content
One of the simplest but most effective ways in which influencers boost your brand visibility is by creating original content. If you are a company manufacturing food-based products, you could collaborate with a food influencer and get them to integrate your products into the content they create. While preparing a recipe, they could introduce their followers to a product offered by your company. Apart from increasing the sales of your product, it will also boost your brand visibility.
Endorsement
In today’s times, many brands build long-term associations with influencers to benefit from their goodwill and following. Instead of collaborating with them on a given campaign, they get them to endorse their products and services regularly. This helps tremendously in creating a sense of familiarity with the brand across a large consumer base. When you collaborate with a credible influencer on a long-term basis, you can be sure about seeing effective results.
Being Sure About Awareness Goals
As a company, you should be clear about what brand awareness means to you. You must have complete clarity about the way you want your business to be projected and known. Behind every piece of advertising content and marketing material, a lot of thought goes into deciding the kind of perception that one wants to build out there. If you are sure about your brand awareness goals, there is a good possibility that the communication channels between you and your consumer to be strong.
When you want to create a brand, you should ensure that it has a USP. For instance, many brands promote themselves as being environmentally conscious. Then, there are those who work towards empowering women by hiring a large number of them in their workforce. By highlighting some of the interesting things you are doing, you can build a strong brand for yourself.
Opting for Influencers with High Reach
When you are running a brand awareness campaign, reach and engagement are two words that would be reverberating across your mind all the time. The more the number of people who know what you do, the higher the possibility of you turning into a well-recognized brand.
When companies want better reach, they tend to reach out to influencers who have a huge following. You do have the option of collaborating with mega-influencers who have more than 1 million followers. However, you should also consider the possibility of reaching out to influencers with a smaller reach.
A lot of times, companies do not feel like reaching out to micro-influencers. Such companies are not aware of the ‘micro-influencers advantage’. A micro-influencer is somebody who has anywhere between 10,000 – 100,000 followers. A micro-influencer might not have as many followers as a mega-influencer but they have a focused reach and can help you connect with your target consumers in very little time.
Putting Together Content Strategies for Maximum Reach
More exposure leads to greater awareness. If you are serious about ensuring more exposure for your brand, you should work towards creating content strategies that hit the mark. You can sit with the influencers you are collaborating with, brainstorm ideas, and come up with strategies that would help create more awareness around your brand.
Apart from creating posts, putting up stories, and planning giveaways, you can come up with some innovative ideas to make sure your brand gets a lot of eyeballs. You have to be sure about the kind of messaging you want to put across through your content. The messaging has to be informative, positive, and impactful.
Tracking the Effectiveness of a Campaign
After launching a campaign, it is very important to check how well it is doing. Unless you find out whether a campaign has worked as per your expectations or not, you will not know whether you should be replicating it or trying out something new.
To check how effective an influencer marketing campaign has been, you can use some metrics to gauge its success. Audience engagement is one of the metrics you can check to see whether the audience has been able to connect with the content generated by you. By checking the number of mentions, you can figure out how far the content has traveled.
Conclusion
A small business becomes big when it turns into a brand. Brand awareness, therefore, is key to the growth of a small business. If you want to build a distinctive identity for your brand and want to ensure that it resonates with a large number of people, you should consider collaborating with influencers, creating effective marketing strategies, and executing them to the best of your abilities.
