When you’re thirsty do you order a carbonated soft drink or ask for a “Coke”? If you need to write something down, do you grab a repositionable note or a “Post-It”? Sometimes a brand is so popular it becomes an actual trademark name for the product itself – and here lies the holy grail of effective brand awareness.
Unlike Pay Per Clicks and social shares, brand awareness is often difficult to quantify, but this doesn’t mean it’s not an extremely valuable component that helps push potential leads further down the marketing funnel. Brand awareness has the power to establish connections with new customers, build your brand equity with current customers, increase consumer loyalty, boost sales and most importantly, keep your brand top of mind.
At Wordsmith, we believe building brand awareness should be at the core of every content marketing strategy decision, from a product launch press release to your most recent tweet. So, how do you overcome the 3 most common brand awareness hurdles? Read on to find out.
1. Getting the word out
40 years ago, traditional brand building methods were pretty linear in their approach. Nowadays, with over 1.7 billion websites on the worldwide web, it’s harder than ever to break through the content-rich noise. But don’t let that deter you. There are many ways your brand can distribute content effectively to position yourself in front of an audience that’s ready to listen.
Apart from using the right content channels to increase brand awareness, another sure-fire way of getting the word out is byharnessing the power of micro influencers. Before you start thinking this approach is for big brand names alone, think again. When utilised correctly, it can be employed by brands of all sizes as a cost-effective strategy for building a mutually beneficial partnership.
Non-profit organisation, The World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF), did just that when trying to spread the word for their international campaign, “Earth Hour”. Reaching out to over 250 micro influencers, ambassadors and environmental activists across the globe, WWF helped to make “Earth Hour” the world’s largest grassroots movement for the environment to date, with 188 countries turning off their lights for one hour to symbolise their dedication to combating the effects of climate change.
Last year, WWF called on all social media users to donate their social power and spread the word with resounding success. Over the course of just 3 months, the campaign gathered 3.5billion impressions for #EarthHour and #connect2earth hashtags, resulting in over 17,900 landmarks and monuments switching off their lights, making this not only a great example of brand awareness in action, but also shows the sheer power of social.
2. When you aren’t reaching the right audience
If you feel like your content is underperforming and not getting the traction it deserves, it may be a sign that your brand positioning and messaging aren’t hitting home with the right audience. Evaluating engagement through metrics and analysis of big data can give you unique insight into the needs of your desired customer base. It can even breathe new life into your brand, giving your company opportunities for growth and allowing you to tap into new audiences.
The American multinational fast-food giant formerly known as “Dunkin’ Donuts” surprised audiences around the globe last September when they dropped the word “Donuts” from their iconic brand name. Proclaiming they were already on a “first name basis” with their customers, this rebrand strategically kept the company relevant for increasingly health conscious millennials and coming-of-age Gen Z audiences.
Michelle Edelman, Chief Strategy Officer of Peter Mayer and mastermind behind the famous tagline, “America runs on Dunkin’” was quick to comment,“In the early 2000s, the cultural zeitgeist moved strongly anti-carb, anti-sugar, and consumers started to learn about healthful eating and lifestyle at unprecedented rates.”The rebrand gave Dunkin’ the opportunity to diversify its menu, and effectively reset perceptions to show that there’s a lot more to Dunkin’ than donuts.
After unveiling the name change with its tongue-in-cheek campaign, Dunkin’ rolled out its new look, revamping over 12,800 restaurants, changing its visual identity, rebranding its packaging, and more. After extensive market research and big data analysis on its core New England fan base, Dunkin’s next generation stores have a brighter feel, with nostalgic, bakery-like touches. Its new menu now appeals to younger customers by offering an array of multigrain power sandwiches and energy cold brews that include shots of freshly made espresso for young professionals on the go.
Garnering an estimated 3 billion impressions, Dunkin’s rebranding campaign and its collection of storytelling adverts has introduced a new runway for the brand, creating not only a new value proposition for a new generation of customers, but also encouraging them to refresh their overall customer experience too.
3. When your content ranks low on Google
Companies should not see brand awareness and SEO as two separate entities, but instead integrate the two to increase organic website traffic and brand awareness.
Marketers who want to organically boost their content and brand awareness on search engine results without resorting to pricey Pay-Per-Click marketing (PPC), could try using Schema structured data – a specific vocabulary of tags you can add to your webpages HTML code. Adding Schema improves the way Google bots read and assess your content by enhancing the metadata about the content itself – thereby enhancing your search rankings and ultimately helping to spread the word about your brand.
But it doesn’t stop there. Another reason why your content could be ranking low on Google is because you’re not reacting to and evaluating your content performance metrics. With more brands building sophisticated content marketing programs, new performance benchmarks have started coming out of the woodwork, like finish rate, returning visitor rate and engagement rate.
Thanks to AI, behavioural targeting and heat mapping software, we’ve never had such greater insight into how our customers are interacting with our content. For example, metrics like social shares are more than oftenoverlooked – but what if a brand used social performance metrics as a proxy for understanding audience preferences, tracking social sentiment in the name of brand awareness? Enter Snickers.
One of our favourite examples of how to merge big data and storytelling in an effort to promote brand awareness, is Snickers’ iconic Australian campaign – the “Hungerithm Algorithm". Playing on its tagline, “You’re not you when you’re hungry”, Snickers effectively monitored the mood of the internet, fluctuating the prices of candy bars sold nationally across 7-11s stores in accordance to how “hangry” netizens where. The hangrier they were, the cheaper Snickers bars became.
With the help of Clemenger BBDO Melbourne, Snickers developed a 3,000-word lexicon that was able to track social sentiment by analysing up to 14,000 posts across Facebook, Twitter and YouTube allowing them to change their prices up to 140 times a day, over a 5-week period.
Picking up on specific Aussie colloquialisms and sarcasm, this campaign helped skyrocket Snickers’ brand awareness, resulting in 1,740% increase of new Facebook users, over 300 million media impressions and a whopping 67% increase in sales. When asked to comment, Mars Inc.’s Chief Marketing Officer Jane Wakely, agreed that “Hungerithm hit the exact digital sweet spot — the point at which media, content and commerce collide.”
The bad news is moving the needle on brand awareness doesn’t happen overnight. But by reaching out to the right micro influencers in your community, rethinking your brand’s value proposition and keeping your finger on the pulse when it comes to evaluating your performance metrics, you too can push your brand into the spotlight – and into customers’ shopping carts.