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In the dynamic realm of business, one of the foremost challenges companies face is expanding their brand’s reach and recognition. “How to Increase Brand Awareness?” is a question that continuously reverberates in boardrooms and marketing departments alike.

In this enlightening article, we will delve into the art and science of enhancing brand visibility. By uncovering effective strategies, innovative techniques, and case studies of successful brand awareness campaigns, we aim to equip you with the knowledge and tools needed to chart a course toward a more prominent and influential brand presence.

Whether you’re a fledgling startup or a seasoned enterprise, this guide will be your compass to navigate the journey of brand elevation.

What is Brand Awareness?

Brand Awareness is dependent on the consumer’s ability to recollect and recognize a brand and associate it with a particular product or service. It is a term used to describe how aware people are of your brand and what it has to offer.

There are three levels of brand awareness:

Recognition of your name
Familiarity with your products/services
Understanding of your brand characteristics (logo, messaging, etc.)

Understanding Brand Awareness

In the ever-evolving landscape of marketing and business, a firm grasp of brand awareness is paramount. But before diving into strategies and techniques, it’s crucial to comprehend the concept itself. So, what is brand awareness, and why is it a pivotal factor in your brand’s success?

Defining Brand Awareness:

At its core, brand awareness refers to the degree to which your target audience recognizes and remembers your brand. It’s not just about having a logo or a catchy slogan; it’s about becoming a familiar presence in the minds of consumers. When people can easily identify your brand and associate it with certain qualities or products, you’ve achieved a high level of brand awareness.

The Significance of Brand Awareness:

Brand awareness isn’t merely a vanity metric; it holds immense significance for businesses. It serves as the foundation upon which brand loyalty, customer trust, and long-term success are built. When consumers are familiar with your brand, they are more likely to choose your products or services over competitors, even if they’re presented with other options.

Psychology of Consumer Recognition:

Understanding the psychology behind brand recognition is crucial. Humans are naturally drawn to the familiar and tend to trust what they know. A strong brand presence can create a sense of comfort and reliability, making consumers more inclined to engage with your brand and make purchase decisions.

Importance of Brand Awareness

Brand awareness familiarizes the public with a product and differentiates it from competing brands. Businesses that maintain high levels of brand awareness are likely to generate more revenue because consumers are more likely to buy familiar brand names compared to unknown ones. 59% of customers prefer to buy from brands they already know about.

Brand awareness leads to trust, meaning the more recognition our brand has, the more successful your brand or business will be. It is the foundation of acquiring a customer audience and helping them understand and become comfortable with your products and services — increasing your brand equity.

Ways to Build Brand Awareness

Developing a strategic brand awareness campaign will help familiarize consumers with your brand and product offering. The main goal is to increase knowledge within the target audience but a good campaign will also communicate attributes that differentiate you from your competitors.

Here are some ways to increase brand awareness:

Give your brand a voice

Give your brand a personality and use it to identify with your target audience. Having a distinct tone and voice will help your advertisements stick in the mind of consumers. Be mindful of the words you use. A great example is a slogan, which can help make you easily recognizable or a smart combination of colors that are both memorable and eye-catching.

Take advantage of outdoor advertising

Out-of-home advertising, or OOH, is a great way to put your brand out there. Billboards are a traditional method of advertising, but there’s a reason they’ve been around for so long. They work! Billboards placed strategically in high-traffic areas will expose your brand to thousands of people each day. Unlike commercials or digital ads, they’re there 24 hours a day, exposing your brand to anyone who passes by.

There are many ways to use billboards to increase brand awareness. If enough people see your branding on billboards, the more they will be able to recognize and identify elements of your brand identity such as logo and color scheme. This is also known as brand recognition.

Billboards aren’t just giant static images anymore. We now see innovative billboard features such as QR codes that direct to landing pages. Additionally, smart and captivating messaging can garner social media hype, while smart billboards use both augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI) to change and optimize the consumer experience. There’s no doubt you can maximize brand awareness by using billboards.

Common Grammar Mistakes in Advertising

One key aspect of building brand awareness is ensuring that your advertising efforts are professional and error-free. This includes avoiding common grammar mistakes that can undermine your credibility and the effectiveness of your ads. Here are some of the most frequent grammar errors found in advertising and tips to avoid them:

Misplaced Apostrophes

One of the most common mistakes is the misuse of apostrophes. Apostrophes are used to indicate possession or contractions, but they are often incorrectly used to form plurals or omitted when needed.

Example of Incorrect Usage:

“Get your car’s washed here.”

Correct Usage:

“Get your cars washed here.”

Tip: Always double-check if the apostrophe is used to show possession (the dog’s bone) or a contraction (it’s = it is). Avoid using apostrophes to form plurals.

Incorrect Subject-Verb Agreement

Ensuring that your subjects and verbs agree in number is fundamental to clear communication. Mistakes in subject-verb agreement can make your advertisements look unprofessional.

Example of Incorrect Usage:

“The team of experts are ready to help.”

Correct Usage:

“The team of experts is ready to help.”

Tip: Identify the true subject of the sentence and make sure the verb agrees in number (singular or plural) with it.

Spelling Errors

Spelling mistakes are perhaps the most obvious and easily avoided errors in advertising. Even a single misspelled word can significantly impact the reader’s perception of your brand.

Example of Incorrect Usage:

“Professional advise available.”

Correct Usage:

“Professional advice available.”

Tip: Use spell-check tools and have multiple people review your advertisements before they are published.

Avoiding common grammar mistakes is crucial for maintaining your brand’s credibility and increasing brand awareness. By paying attention to detail and ensuring your advertisements are error-free, you can present a professional image that resonates with your audience and reinforces your brand’s message.

Ways to Measure Brand Awareness

Brand Tracking helps businesses measure awareness growth and performance against competitors. It is the ongoing measurement of how well your brand is doing.

Combining different reach/frequency data will help you better visualize how well your awareness campaign is performing, helping you make the best and most informed decision for your business.

Surveys

This basic but useful form of measurement will provide you with the metrics needed to determine the trajectory of your campaign. A survey can be conducted through email, website, or telephone. Ask existing customers how they came to know about your brand to understand how people are hearing about you. You can also gain insight into how much people can recall your brand by randomly selecting survey participants and asking them if they are familiar with your brand.

Measure Website Traffic

Website traffic provides insightful data on brand awareness. Tools like Google Analytics can track how many people visited your website. To dive deeper into the detail, the application also allows you to view where your visits are coming from. With Google Analytics, you’ll be able to track whether your visitors are coming through organic search, direct visits (the number of people who type your URL into their address bar), social media, or through referral (links from other sites that direct visitors to your site). Keeping an eye on these trends will help you monitor changes in your brand awareness campaign.

Check Organic Social Growth

2.32 million Puerto Ricans use social media each day. A great way to measure your awareness is to monitor your social media following. How many new and organic followers did you get after the launch of your campaign? Are your posts gaining more likes and shares? Look into what people are saying about your brand online. What are consumers saying about your brand or product? Social media users tend to be more unsolicited, which means they are likely to be more honest compared to other data recording methods such as surveys.

Increase Brand Awareness with bMedia Group

bMedia Group is Puerto Rico’s leading marketing agency. We can help you take advantage of marketing opportunities to help further expose your brand.

Outdoor advertising is our specialty. Through our work, we aim to highlight what you offer while providing a memorable experience for the consumer. We currently have a real estate of over 500 high-exposure billboards on the island. We are confident in our ability to get your brand the recognition it needs for optimum growth and success.

The post-COVID landscape is fraught with competition between brands. Businesses with compelling messaging and impactful marketing can identify with their audience and stand head and shoulders above their competition – so long as they know which strengths and goals to amplify, of course. Brand amplification lets you attract more customers and bring together your existing ones, and it’s the key to building long-lasting brand loyalty and customer relationships.

Brand amplification done right makes lasting first impressions on your customers and keeps people thinking about your brand long after you make that great first impression.

Sounds great, right? We think so, too.

To that end, let’s cover what brand amplification is, why it’s so important, how to amplify your brand with billboards, and how to measure your brand amplification.

Brand Amplification: What It Means and Why You Need It

Let’s face it: these days, people who engage with a brand are looking for more than just industry-leading services and products. They’re looking for brands that share similar values and promote those values genuinely.

Why? Because it’s easier for a prospective customer to connect with (and trust) an organization that lives out its values authentically. Brand amplification communicates the heart of your brand by highlighting its values, stories, and core message.

Think about what makes your brand stand out from its competitors, what makes it unique, and why what it does is meaningful. These insights are the stepping stones to successfully amplifying your brand. The more insights you have into the core of your brand, the easier you can convey authentic, compelling stories to your audience.

By now you may be wondering, “Do I really need brand amplification to be competitive?” If you want to build an experience that’s consistent across your customer touch-points, then the answer is a resounding “Yes!”

A well-thought-out, articulated strategy for your brand benefits more than just your audience. The most effective brand strategies give your staff members and third-party agencies a brand hierarchy that lets them establish consistency across customer touch-points. From the typeface on your website’s landing page to the logo you use on all your products, articulated brand strategies impact all your key assets.

Above all, though, brand amplification defines the type of business you want to build. It identifies the type of people you want to employ, the values you stand behind, and, of course, the values you adamantly oppose.

Now that you know a little bit more about brand amplification and why it’s so important to have, it’s time to dig into the nitty-gritty of actually amplifying your brand: let’s dive into some ways you can amplify your brand using billboards.

How to Amplify Your Brand with Billboards

In today’s hyperconnected world, it’s true that ads on social media tend to dominate the marketing landscape. The popularity that social media ads enjoy may lead some to believe that billboards are no longer a viable form of marketing – this couldn’t be farther from the truth!

Whereas social media ads are often complex and sometimes vague and ambiguous, billboards are reliably straightforward and simple. There are plenty of ways to build a billboard campaign that’s effective and impactful, but we’ve picked a few tips that you simply can’t go without when using billboards for brand amplification.

1. Keep things simple

When designing a billboard, it can be tempting to cram as much info as possible onto your billboard. After all, you’ve got a lot to say about your brand, right? As great as it is to be passionate about your messages and values, though, too much content on one billboard can make it tough to distill your brand down into a single image.

Rather than include as much content as possible, it’s best for your billboard to concisely convey what your brand can do for its customers. What do you have that your target audience may be searching for? Is there info you think may intrigue someone to find out more about what you offer? These are the questions to keep in mind when building out your first billboards – just remember to keep everything as simple as possible.

2. Use geography to your advantage

When it comes to getting your billboards in front of more interested eyes, geography is your best friend. You’ll want to determine your target audience’s most common locations and habits so that you can get more eyes on it quickly.

If your target audience is mostly in a smaller geographical area, you may also want to consider using locally relevant billboards to get impactful results. Thinking of running a billboard campaign to target an audience in San Juan, for example? Try weaving in something unique to the city that may not resonate as well with the rest of Puerto Rico.

3. Use digital billboards for more dynamic marketing

As much as we love the simplicity and reliability that traditional billboards offer, there’s something to be said about the flexibility that digital billboards provide. Digital billboards let your marketers make things more dynamic since they can run different designs during different times of the day. Want to display one design during the early morning and another after the sun sets? Digital billboards have you covered.

Digital boards are particularly handy if you’re still tinkering with brand logos and product images. You can take a couple of risks using different designs without having to double down on a single board design that’s tied to your marketing budget.

Measuring Your Brand Amplification

Don’t forget that once you’ve taken the above tips to heart, you’ll want to start measuring how successful your brand amplification is. We recommend that you keep an eye on spikes and dips in your website traffic, the number of shares and comments you get on your social channels, and increases in customer phone calls. You can use tools like Google Analytics to monitor the bounce rates on your website’s pages and Facebook to monitor your audience engagement and tie that engagement to recent posts you’ve shared.

Successful brand amplification doesn’t happen overnight; realistically, you can expect to spend at least a couple of months settling into a rhythm and locking down a brand voice you like. Once you find your groove, however, we guarantee that you’ll begin building trust and recognition among your target audience!