Spotlight On: Brand Awareness

Spotlight On: Brand Awareness

Every so often we like to put a spotlight on a marketing tactic that can drive significant results for your small business. For this spotlight, we are focusing on the importance of brand awareness—and how it can positively affect your bottom line.

Consumers know logos. They know jingles. They know slogans. They know packaging and signage the personalities of your staff. All of these are pieces of the collective puzzle retailers call “a brand.” Your brand isn’t just one thing, but interestingly enough, it’s what makes your business successful or not. It’s what drives popular (or unpopular) opinions of your establishment. It helps consumers understand your product and make them comfortable with you.

Without brand awareness, your revenue won’t reach its full potential. This is the foundation on which everything else in your restaurant, store, and hotel are built on. Our digital lifestyles make it easier than ever to learn about the latest trends, retailers, food, and stores. This is great news for small businesses—but it also makes for a very crowded playing field. As AdRoll so nicely put it, “As a business, your job is to tell the right story to the right people at the right time to boost brand awareness, long-term brand equity, and customer lifetime value (LTV).” And because today’s consumer is faced with a flood of choices on where to spend their money, developing a bad reputation is really hard to come back from.

Research Your Base

Your customer base is the group of folks who continue to do business with you. They’re loyal consumers of your product, and they hold the keys to increasing your brand awareness. It’s amazing how much second-hand marketing can come from happy customers sharing their create experiences with your business, either to friends and family or their social feeds. Take the time to research the things they care about, the trends they are following, and what they tend to engage with most when it comes to your brand. Build on these learnings to continually adapt your image, offerings, pricing, and more.

Get Out There

We’re not just talking traditional advertising here. Advertising is a great way to spread the word of your business, but to create a true personality, a good strategy is to check out the digital presence of your industry peers. Do they have blogs on their websites? See if you can be a guest writer and engage with their audiences as well.

Look to the Influencers

Love it or hate it, influencers are a key component to getting your brand recognized. A lot of your consumers have their favorite bloggers and Instagram personalities they follow on a regular basis. Even more than celebrity endorsements or regular marketing tactics, people today trust the word of influencers. In fact, we read on the Taboola blog that “Brands earned an average of $7.65 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing in 2017.” Partnering with a popular influencer in your industry or area can lead to a huge uptick in cash flow.

Brand marketing and awareness can be tricky to navigate, but luckily there are loads of resources online to help you figure out where you fit in. Be sure to check back in to ARF Financial’s blog, The Pantry, for weekly content designed to help make your business the best it can be.