Brand Awareness is essential to growth today, and it’ll still be true next year and the year after. The more your target audience notices your brand, the more likely they are to buy from you. However, not all brand awareness is created equal. A lot of brands make the mistake of thinking that any attention is considered brand awareness. Most brands engage in “me too” marketing. If you want brand awareness, make your target audience aware of your differences and how your solution can solve their pain points better than the currently available solutions. And if you do that successfully, you will be incomparable to your competitors. If you build anything, whether it be a product, a software solution or a service, there is no guarantee anyone will notice. Despite how good the product or service is, business owners can’t expect leads, prospects, or customers just to show up. Differentiation is the key to getting new customers to notice your brand and your products. You have to seek your potential customer out where they hang out in order to get your message heard or seen.
There are proven ways to create brand awareness and here are a few: Personalize your customer correspondence, run ads on Social Networks, segment your buy personas, offer referral rewards to incentivize your customers to take action and find where your customers complain so you can understand and address their issues.
Brand awareness should not be the beginning of your brand narrative. When you are building brand awareness, you should not be starting a new story. Instead, you should be picking up the story where the customer is. This cannot be stressed enough. Customers want to know how you can help them solve their problems so the narrative picks up before your brand is introduced. If you’re building awareness on a new story about your brand, your customers won’t care. But, if your story connects with theirs and helps them move toward their conclusion, they will latch on and identify with your brand message.
If you are a new company and you are attempting to create brand awareness, you have to be ready to grow at scale if you are following a proven growth strategy. As an entrepreneur, I have to consider and address the buyer’s journey and my company’s value proposition in creating a solution to help small business owners find more customers.
Product value proposition:
• What’s the pain it solves or gains it creates?
• What makes the market segment/persona you’ll target?
• Define this as narrowly as you can.
After you understand the buyer’s journey and have a compelling value proposition, it’s important to decide on your market segmentation. Market segmentation identifies pieces of your audience based on broad commonalities like geography, profession, or even marital status, while personas are highly specific representations of particular individuals within segments.
So a value proposition could mean: saving time, saving money, making money or even lifestyle benefits or professional benefits. Marketing creates awareness but branding creates fans. In the next blog, we will address Customer Journey mapping. Don’t forget to checkout Virely.io that offers a new type of referral marketing and social commerce platform for small businesses to connect with the communities in which they serve. Virely will be launching in Q1 of 2022!
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