When you are hungry and want something instantly to fill your belly, do you ask for instant noodles or Maggie? Similarly, when you fall and bruise your knee, do you ask for a plastic bandage or a BandAid? These examples show just how crucial brand awareness is in today’s world.

Business owners often focus all of their energy in offering something unique and putting it on sale. However, when it fails to get the traction, they sit disappointed. It is at that time that they realize just how important brand awareness is. Brand awareness is the whetstone of how easily customers recall your brand. It spreads a word about your business amongst the target audience and makes you a part of vital conversations.

Not only does brand awareness keep the existing customers on board by spreading the value of loyalty but also magnetizes newer ones. What are the ways to achieve it? Let’s have a quick look at the five sneaky ways to build brand awareness.

1. Social media drives and giveaways

Everyone is on social media these days, and it is the perfect platform for creating a buzz about your brand. The contests boost engagement tremendously, which increases sales. According to Tailwind, Instagram accounts which host contests grow over 70% faster than those who don’t.

Giveaways include distributing freebies amongst your followers by asking them to do either or both of these tasks –

• Liking and sharing your posts
• Tagging their friends in the comments section

On the other hand, contests involve competition for the freebies. It can either be a poll or a challenge which uses your hashtags. Now, this hashtag needs to be short enough for easy entry and unique enough to be easily identified across the various social media channels. The branded hashtags will boost brand awareness.

2. Tag your friend

Now, this is a call-to-action which is extremely easy to implement. Make your posts relatable so that people share them with their friends and also tag them in the comments section.

If you want to keep your feed fresh but don’t have the time to come up with a well-articulated post, this is the way to go. It doesn’t sound pushy and yet successfully spreads brand awareness amongst newer customers.

3. Referral programs

You can shout from the rooftops about your brand, but unless the followers tell success stories themselves, it will all go in vain. Give your best to every customer and don’t underestimate the power of word of mouth. If a customer is satisfied with your product or service, h/she will talk about it with their friends. Can you see how this will boost your sales in no time?

Yet, incentives might be required to push your customers further. Think about it – the credibility and the leads that you are likely to generate will certainly compensate for the incentives.

Have you seen the referral program of Dropbox? With every successful referral, the existing users get 500MB of free storage. This campaign enabled the company to earn a plethora of users in the initial days itself.

4. Memes

There can be nothing like memes when it comes to providing your followers with a breath of fresh air from pushy promotional campaigns. Though they aren’t an obvious choice for boosting brand awareness, they have immense potential for going viral. People often share relatable memes with their loved ones over several social media channels, and a humorous post will certainly raise the number of your followers.

Here are the things that you need to keep in mind before you post memes on your social media handle –

• Avoid controversial topics like the plague. The last thing you want is for a potential client to get offended. Keep it light-hearted and funny.
• Make sure that the memes align with your brand image and target audience. Anything off-tune will only have adverse effects.

5. Influencer marketing

Influencers are perceived as industry experts by and large and collaborating with them can be quite beneficial for your business. Go for user-centric content to gain access to their following.

There are several forms of influencer marketing campaigns –

• You can ask the influencers to review your products or services on their social media handles to boost credibility.
• You can collaborate with the influencers to host a giveaway or contest. They can offer your products as prizes to the winners.
• Guest posting is also a fantastic option for leveraging influencer marketing.

Do you remember the early days of Daniel Wellington? By building a symbiotic relationship with influencers, the brand reached new heights and became one of the fastest-growing companies in Europe. They generated a million Instagram followers in their very first year.

The bottom line

Building brand awareness isn’t a choice any more, but a necessity. Reach out to Rush Republic for the best branding solutions.