What is brand awareness?
Brand awareness is how familiar other people are with your brand and how well they recognise it. And that is really what I’m all about creating for you – brand awareness.
How do you create brand awareness for your business?
Start with clarity.
This is about getting really clear on
- who you work with,
- why you work with those people
- why you do what you do
- what it is that you do
- what really matters to you
- how you deliver that
- how you can communicate that message
Get as clear as you can, really focus on what you do, why it matters and who you do it for so that you can talk to those people with understanding and intention.
The clearer you can be, the easier the rest of this will be, because everything else will just follow, will flow from that clarity that you have created for yourself in your business.
Show up intentionally.
Once you have clarified what your brand is all about, what you stand for, what matters, who matters, why you work with those people, what it is that you deliver, how that actually benefits them – you can start to show up with more intention and that intention come from the clarity. It just arrives because you’ve worked on gaining clarity in the places that matter so that when you show up you are showing up knowing who you’re talking to. You’re showing up knowing why you want to talk about what you do – you’re showing up knowing why what you do matters, to the people that you want to work with.
It’s about peeling back all those layers and getting so certain of what it is that you’re all about because then communicating it becomes so much easier and being intentional when you show up is easier too. When you are intentional, that means that you are thinking about your brand and you’re thinking about how you can create awareness of your brand.
You have all these different touch points in your business. You might write an Instagram post or make something like a blog post or you might make video or you might set up a page on your website, or you might hand someone a business card or give someone a leaflet or multiple different things that happen in your business every day.
And each of those is your opportunity to show up intentionally with that clarity that helps give you that intention.
When you’re showing up intentionally, you’re showing up with purpose. You’re showing up thinking about who you want to talk to and what you want to talk about. You have a goal in mind.
One way to know if this is working is to go networking and see if people you’ve never met know what you do. I was networking this morning and a lady sat down opposite me – she said, “I know you, you are a brand person and you, you’re all about creating awareness so that you are consistent with what you are putting out there”. She’d picked that up, probably from Instagram. She knows what it is that I do. Even though I hadn’t said a word other than “hello”. So that was brilliant because that shows that what I’m putting out there is being intentional and my brand – the brand awareness I am building is working and I hope the same for you.
If you are showing up with intention, purpose and clarity behind you so that you’ve got that there to support you and push you forward it makes it a lot easier to create content because you know more of the kind of thing that you need be creating – more of the kind of thing that will serve the people that you help. When you’re showing up, you will be able to use that clarity to help you create some visuals which you can then use in a consistent way.
Consistent visuals
To show up intentionally to your ideal client talking about what you do and why it matters it helps to be consistent with your visuals. This means using the same colour palette, the same fonts, photographs that people recognise of you and of what you do with your products – whatever it is that you sell – so that when you are putting your content out there and showing up in whatever way you show up, you bring these visual assets along with you that people start to recognise.
This is called Mere Exposure, which is where you are showing up over and over and over consistently, and you become familiar to the people who keep seeing you. So when you go on Instagram or Facebook and you see posts by people with the same colours and fonts you recognise them and know whos posts they are. Wether you stop and look or not, that imagery has reached you and you have recognised it – you’re being exposed to it which over time, makes you more aware of the business even if you don’t engage with what you’re seeing each time. If you can do this too you will be building familiarity.
This means that people know you better, they know who you are, and they are familiar with you, which is great, because the more familiar they are with you, the more they’re going to know, like and trust you, which is really helpful further down the line. They’re ready for whatever it is that you have to offer them.
Use your network
Once you have clarity, intention and consistency of visuals and message the next thing you can do to help build your brand awareness is to work with other people. There’s loads of ways you can do this.
- It can be as simple asking someone to share something that you’ve created or to tag somebody in that people can get to see it because it’s really valuable information
- You can tag others. If you’ve been to an event and you’ve got a photograph you can tag the people who were at the event in that photograph so that you’re not only supporting those people and bringing them to your audience, but they can then share your image and bring you to their audience
- Collaborations with others.
- Guest interviews. You can interview somebody and they are going to share that interview with their audience. So you’re in front of their audience and they’re in front of yours.
- Partnering up with others
- Referrals where other people talk about you to other people which benefits you and them because they’re going to recommended this amazing service that someone can tap into.
If you’ve got clarity and intention and you’ve got some other people that you can work with, that’s going to help build your audience.
It’s a two way process. It’s working together. Collaboration is so good for that and it’s really fun. So you can help really build that brand awareness by getting in front of other people who will then go and follow you where you’re showing up intentionally and be exposed to you and get to know you. Exposure creates awareness. That’s going to help building and building up with that brand awareness so that they know who you are, which is wonderful because then when they’re ready for the thing that you have, they know where to go.