THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE

Build Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is the first step in the buying process, and creates demand for your business offer. Explore what it is, why it matters, and how we build it for your brand.

Read time 3 mins

Introduction

Brand awareness is the extent to which people recognise your brand, your products and your services. Is your brand memorable? Does it immediately spring to the minds of your customers? Are you synonymous with what you sell? Do potential customers already know who you are and what you do? Until you can say a resounding yes to all of these questions, you still need to put in some groundwork to build brand awareness.

What do we cover on this page:

What is brand awareness? Knowing your brand and what you stand for
Why does it matter? Improving brand perception, building trust and driving sales
How do we build it? Knowing your customer, clarifying targets, blending resources
Blog Insight: How can technology companies engage with customers in store

Section 1

What is brand awareness?

Put simply; brand awareness is the extent to which audiences are familiar with your brand. People need to be able to recognise a brand to have sufficient trust to buy it. It’s the foundation of your sales funnel. However, brand awareness extends beyond the simple notion of customers knowing the name of your brand. It’s also about what you’re known for. This means you need to create a positive experience that reaches far beyond name recognition.

"Every customer journey begins with brand awareness"

The first step in the buying process

Every customer journey begins with brand awareness. Without awareness, the general rule is that consumers won’t consider your brand. If your customers don’t know you exist, they won’t buy from you. Simple as that. Yes, impulse buying does happen on occasion, but the majority of purchases take place with prior knowledge of the brand. And the greater your brand awareness, the less you’ll rely on customers discovering you by chance, because you’ll be finding them.

Know your brand and what you stand for

What does your company believe in, and what difference do you make in the world? Knowing your branding means understanding your brand purpose, and its reason for existing. Your brand purpose doesn’t need to be as huge as saving the planet. But it does need to be inspiring and memorable - reaching out to enthuse every person within your company, as well as out there in the consumer world.

Defining your brand and the ‘why’

The first step towards defining your brand purpose is to define your ‘why’. It goes beyond the drive to make money, and digs deeper into the purpose behind the brand. Finding your ‘why’ will drive attachment and action from both customers and employees. Your ‘why’ should align with everything you do to build the brand. It’s the starting point from which your vision, mission and values follow. Plain and simple, it’s the reason your brand exists.

Know your brand:

Purpose - why we exist
Vision - what we aim to achieve
Mission - how we plan to achieve our vision
Values - what we stand for and how we behave
Positioning - how we are different from our competitors

Identifying your brand and its USP

Why should I choose you? Why should I buy from you? Why should I pay for your services? Identifying your unique selling point will answer those questions from your customers. It forms the core personality of your brand and provides the reason why people should spend their money on you. Your USP voices the unique quality that sets your brand apart from all the other noise in the market. And it’s the deciding factor why your customers come back, time after time, to buy.

Brand salience and critical touchpoints

Building brand awareness is crucial, but your ultimate goal is brand salience. You want your brand to readily spring to mind when a customer is about to buy a product or service. Brand salience is about being top of mind at just the right time - in the buying situation. It ensures you rise above your competitors and top the shortlist in the customer’s decision process. To encourage this, you can create cues that activate the brand at critical touchpoints. The secret is to meet the customer’s needs at that very moment of purchase.

Section 2

Why brand awareness matters

It’s the foundation for all marketing activities. As the first step in the sales funnel, it’s the crucial foundation for acquiring customers. Once people begin to readily recall and recognise your brand, sales will follow. It also helps businesses focus on performance objectives and goals. With brand awareness as the aim, your strategies will expand your audience, build affinity, drive sales traffic and cultivate leads.

Improve brand perception and trust

What is brand perception? It’s your customer’s personal impression of your brand. It’s what they believe your brand represents, rather than what your brand mission statement claims. It’s about truth and trust, and as such, it’s no simple task to achieve a positive brand perception amongst today’s highly discerning audience. Building strong brand awareness will help you climb this mountain. It will help you develop personal relationships with your customers. It will win their loyalty. And it will build brand advocates to spread the good word (and do your work for you).

"Brand awareness will help you develop personal relationships with your customers"

Drive website traffic and sales

Want to drive traffic to your website? Want to generate leads and sales? Building brand awareness is the first step in the process. Make people more aware of your brand, especially relevant, high-quality audiences, and you’ll reap the rewards of generating conversions and dominating your market. Brand awareness campaigns will enable you to message across new channels, reach new audiences, and feed the sales funnel from new sources.

Blog Insight

How can technology companies engage with customers in store?

New technologies and gadgets are being released at an increasingly rapid pace. But is this pace too fast? It seems so, with research showing that consumers looking for bigger ticket items prefer the in-store experience, where they can see and try the product.

This blog explores how CPM’s Active Selling programmes can deliver a real conversation between our client's brands and their customers.

Read Now

Section 3

How we build brand awareness

You need your products to be visible to the right people, in the right locations at the right time. We will amplify your brand awareness for maximum impact. Our approach creates a high level of brand awareness to give you a competitive edge, keeping your brand top of mind for customers.

Know your customer

You need to know who your customers are, where they are, and their needs. That’s what our data-driven methodology delivers. We use big data, from unique sources. Not content with EPOS, we’ve taken that leap into advanced insight, using mobile phone tracking, visual analytics, ethnicity and demographic data. Combined data sources have never been merged and analysed like this before. The result is one single view. We get to know your customers, and how to reach them. We know their movements, their timings, and their motivations to buy.

"Get to know your customers, and how to reach them"

Clarifying targets

Once you’ve pinned down your customer profile, you need to identify the best way to engage with them. Our Liquid methodology helps us dig down into the data and create the optimum mix of interventions to win customers. We know the data is meaningless unless it translates into sales. We’ll identify the perfect strategy to boost your brand awareness and deliver real business outcomes.

Blending physical and digital resources

We’ll create the perfect blend of physical and digital resources to put your brand in front of customers. You need a flexible, agile approach, and that’s what we do best. We’ll switch our sales teams on and off. We’ll flex our digital platforms. We’ll shake up sampling, and we’ll launch experiences that turn heads.

Retail marketing: We’ll cover every touchpoint along the customer journey, from attracting customers, to enhancing customer service, delivering promotions and generating sales.

Live events and experiential solutions: Our experiences and live events are uniquely designed to resonate with your audience, connecting brands with people in a meaningful way.

Active selling and sampling: Our hand-picked, results-driven brand ambassadors are experts at selling or sampling products directly to the target consumer.

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Branding strategy in the retail sector