Brand awareness is critical in helping your business or brand connect with customers. But what is brand awareness, and more importantly, how can you increase it?
In this blog, we explore what brand awareness is and why in the digital world, content is the more effective way to build yourbrand’s profile and increase business profit.
What is brand awareness?
Think about the world’s most popular brands. We’re talking about Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Nike, etc. If asked, you could describe what these brands stand for and why they differ from the competition.
Even if you could describe the brand attributes, you could identify the logos and explain what the business does.
Simplistically, this is what brand awareness is. Brand awareness can be defined as the knowledge customers have about your product or service. But it’s more than knowing about a product or service; it’s about understanding how these attributes set a brand apart.
Brand awareness defines the DNA of your business – and investing in it works.
The companies we’ve mentioned above spend millions on marketing and advertising to build brand awareness.
A prime example of someone needing branding was a Bristol based company who had recently launched a new high street venture. They employed the services of a local Bristol Copywriter who spent time with them to understand their company and their brand, and then went about creating a wealth of PR and other content material the company could use across so many online marketing avenues. Content helps with brand awareness, as does it help with everything else you want to achieve as well.
But what can you do if you don’t have unlimited budgets and a global reach to build brand awareness? Invest in content.
Why content is king
In the digital world, content is king. Creating great quality content enables you to compete fairly and squarely with businesses of all sizes.
At the most basic level, high-quality content is an important ranking factor for search engines. Create enough high-quality content over a consistent period, and you’ll find that your website ranking improves.
OK, so you’ll need deep pockets (and a LOT) of content to compete with Coca-Cola. But let’s consider you’re operating in a niche. By investing in content, you can rapidly revitalise your search engine performance.
But that’s just the start…
Great content enables you to create connections with your customers. For example, you can create blogs, articles, and other forms of long-form copy (such as whitepapers) to answer customer questions.
Let’s say you’re running a cleaning business in a local area. You can create content that answers customer questions (how to replace a tap) but use location-specific search terms to build relevance and increase visibility.
Sounds great. But how does this help brand awareness?
If you’re building a commercial brand, you’ll need to spend big on advertising to engage customers.
But when building a small business, visibility is critical. Ensuring a high ranking in search engines, for example, sends out a great signal that your brand is established and trustworthy.
When they can trust your brand, they’ll buy from you. That principle works from the smallest purchases (a can of drink) to the largest (a house).
Say you worked in a leading pharmaceutical sector based company. The first thing you need to do is find a specialist in what you do, so for example a Healthcare Content Agency. They know your industry, but they then get to know your company, and they bring the two together to create amazing related content that you can use to build your brand. For some sectors, you really should find content writers that know your niche, as you often need to sound far more authoritative than maybe other general content.
Building brand awareness is critical to the success of any business of any size. And it’s content that’s at the core of that.
How to use content to build brand awareness
Content can help you engage with your clients and customers. The (not so) secret to building brand awareness through content is by having a process. Here’s how works…
- Understand what your customers are searching for – use Google tools (Keyword Planner) to identify the search terms your customers are using and the questions they want answers to.
- Create a content plan – Use the insights above to develop a clear content plan.
- Vary content – Not every blog has to be 750 words. Create short-form content (500 words), long-form content (2000+ words), create FAQs, build case studies, and get testimonials.
- Share online – Publish blogs and content on your website and increase reach through sharing on social media.
- Review & update – You can build on successful posts, adding new content (such as answers to FAQs) when relevant.
Before we finish, you’ll obviously have concerns about the cost of all this. OK, so it’s not cheap – but you should never cut corners when creating copy and content. While AI content producers and low-cost content mills may appear a good idea, they won’t help you to build genuine human connections. Doing so could actually harm brand awareness and damage your business.
Our advice? Work with a professional copywriting agency that can do this for you. It could be the best investment you ever make.