Okay, friends, let all the baking and cooking references you can handle commence. Why? Because it’s fun. And eerily accurate as a comparison reference. Raising brand awareness in any market today, especially as a startup or new biz, is fiercely competitive, and you need all the right tools and ingredients to make it happen.
More than that, you need the right combo of ingredients if you want your brand to be noticed, let alone remembered. If you’ve ever baked something, you know it’s not just a little dash of this or a sprinkle of that. Baking is dang near a science, and if you skip even one thing… well, let’s just say, ain’t no one gonna be raving about your soufflé to the neighbors. Now, throw on your apron, and let’s get cooking!
Essential Ingredients for Raising Brand Awareness
Though there could be other ingredients to consider, below are our top picks to focus your time and attention on, at least when you’re just getting started.
Ingredient 1: Top-Tier Content
If you’re marketing your biz online, you’re no stranger to the need for content. Blog content, video content, infographics, podcasts… think of content like your brand’s bread and butter across the interwebs.
However, it can’t just be content for the sake of it; it should be content that’s useful, valuable, helpful, or just plain entertaining. You want your content to address the pain points of your audience and provide fodder for their interests. You can do it by sharing tips and tricks, how-tos related to your industry, market insights if you want to establish yourself as an authority, and a host of other things that help you connect with potential customers.
For instance, if you own a bake shop, your content might be delish recipes, tips on making that perfect soufflé, or peeks behind the scenes on how you whip up tasty magic. Just like the smell of freshly baked bread draws folks into a bakery, your content attracts your tribe and retains your customers.
Ingredient 2: Social Media
Social media aims to engage with your audience where they actually spend time. Nowadays, social media is a lot like a storefront. You need to know your audience and where to hang out so you can tailor your social strategy to meet them where they are. That might be Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or something else, but wherever it is, consistency is key.
You want to maintain awareness of your brand by being present, sharing, and posting on at least a loose schedule, interacting with your peeps, and making the most out of the platform’s tools, such as lives, reels, and stories, to ramp up engagement.
Think of it as like setting a pot of chili on a simmer. All that goodness and flavor take time to develop! According to Mike O’Grady, CEO of StellaPop, “The best brands excelled in combining digital and social media marketing efforts… content marketing strategies can work remarkably well but get a huge lift if you can follow content posts with a strong social media push.”
Ingredient 3: Influencer Collabs
Using influencer marketing to raise brand awareness is like teaming up with another pro chef or two to enhance your street cred within your industry. It can also boost your brand’s visibility exponentially.
That said, partnering with chefs who are the right fit for your brand is important. Influencers are a great ingredient in this recipe for success because they’ve already got clout baked in. Their followers trust them, and when they recommend something, it can be almost as good as word-of-mouth.
However, before collaborating on a campaign, ensure you’re partnering with an influencer who aligns well with your target market. Once you find the right fit, you can decide on the best strategy: a giveaway, a sponsored post, or a product review.
Ingredient 4: Local Community
If your business is largely e-commerce, your local community may not have as much impact on your brand’s health. However, if you’re a small business with a physical location, your local community is vital to your success. You can get involved and engage your community in a variety of ways:
- Cross-promote with other local businesses (online and offline)
- Host local workshops related to your field
- Host customer meetups
- Get involved with community fairs
- Sponsor a local event
However you choose to do it, engaging with your local community is an excellent way to increase brand awareness and build your business reputation. In addition to your online community, staying connected to the offline one means you pull in all the folks committed to supporting small businesses and shopping locally!
Ingredient 5: Happy Reviews
Social proof is big online, and one of the biggest ways to make it work for your brand is to encourage your happy clientele to leave a glowing review online. They can do it on Facebook, review sites like Yelp, or even Google Reviews.
There are so many places to leave reviews that you may want to encourage only one platform at a time for a while. You can also request happy client testimonials for your website and share them on your social media accounts.
However, when you get a review on a third-party site, responding so your customers can see you value their feedback is important. Respond to both the positive and the negative ones, and build trust with your existing clientele and future customers.
Combining Your Strategies for the Ultimate Recipe
We’ve only covered a handful of ingredients that can be used in your brand awareness campaign, but all of them can be combined or even mixed and matched to enhance their flavor and effectiveness. You can utilize social media to share your content, announce local collaborations, or host a local giveaway to encourage online reviews.
Combining complementary ingredients is a bit like creating a three-course meal. Each dish contributes to the whole experience! For instance, let’s go back to that local bakery. Perhaps you decide to host a local meetup where your customers can mingle and try your goodies. If they love the experience, they should be encouraged to leave an online review on Yelp or Google.
This offers a cohesive approach for blending strategies that work well together. The result? More engagement and more folks talking about your brand!
Don’t Forget the Taste Test, AKA Measuring and Tracking
Another key step in successfully raising awareness of your brand is tracking and measuring everything. You won’t know if what you’re doing is paying off if you don’t! You can use social media insights available on most social platforms these days and free tools like Google Analytics to gain intel on your web traffic.
You can also utilize tools like surveys and polls to get customer feedback. Then, based on the data, you can adjust and tweak. For instance, if you know those live bake sessions where you show your audience how to make the perfect brownie, get a ton of engagement… make more of them. It’s like taste testing and adjusting your seasonings for the best flavor possible.
What About That Secret Sauce?
In the realm of brand building, the secret sauce is adding a personal touch. Building a real connection with your audience and sharing your brand story, mission, and values authentically is what will make your brand memorable.
Do whatever you can to humanize your brand and show that real people are behind the persona. This will make your business relatable to your audience, build trust, and set it apart from unfeeling corporate giants that treat customers as merely numbers and dollar signs on a spreadsheet.
Brand Building Takes a Little Time to Thicken
Remember how important consistency is? Along with that is patience! It takes time and focused attention to build a brand and raise awareness. It rarely happens overnight, not even in seemingly overnight success stories.
Keep the content flowing, stick to a social media schedule you can handle, engage with your people, and always be monitoring, learning, and tweaking as you go. Let that sauce thicken, and over time, you’ll be amazed at the richness of your results!
Let’s cook up something together, it will be delicious!
