Does Your Brand Make a Lasting Impression?

Brand awareness and recall don't always come easy, but they're essential to your marketing plan. Here are some of the reasons why and a few tips for helping your public image cozy up to audiences.

Cody

Textbroker Marketing and Communications

Making an impression is a key goal of branding, but it’s harder than it looks. No matter how you try to familiarize people with your brand, you may not be creating the impact you desire or effectively spreading the word about what you have to offer.

Brand awareness and recall don’t always come easy, but they’re essential to your marketing plan. Here are some of the reasons why and a few tips for helping your public image cozy up to audiences.

The Value of Better Branding

As a small business owner, SEO marketing guru or blogger, you don’t have time to make contact with each prospective consumer personally. From hiring new staff to finding marketing partners and creating content, your plate is more than full enough already.

Want to connect with consumer audiences without diverting your attention from other pressing matters? You’ll probably want to master two key concepts:

• • Brand awareness: how well customers recognize the accessibility of your products and services
  • Brand recall: how well customers can remember or recognize your brand as being associated with your products, services or industry

Good branding helps you close the gaps between your capabilities and your outreach targets so that you can connect with users and promote engagement. Tracking brand awareness and recall can potentially

• • Increase the chances that someone might patronize your business,
  • Help you understand how effective your marketing efforts are, and
  • Improve your ability to capture valuable internet traffic.

Still confused? The key takeaway to remember is that without healthy brand recognition that promotes recall and awareness, your organization will sink into obscurity. In a world where you and your co-workers can only accomplish so much, can you really afford to limit your brand’s reach?

It doesn’t matter how mind-blowing your products, services or business strategies are; you’ll never change the world with them if consumers don’t know you exist.

Enhancing Brand Awareness and Recall

Now that you know how important it is to achieve maximum brand recognition, how can you get started? After all, what works for one market or company might not suit your situation. For instance, if you simply ape someone else’s successful marketing campaign, people might see you as an unoriginal derivative, assuming that they even respond to your efforts.

The path to success doesn’t lie in some rote formula. Instead, you’ll need to create a plan that reflects your unique organizational goals and business model.

Start Tracking the Data

Having a vague desire for increased recognition isn’t enough. Unless you’re also aware of where you currently stand, you’ll lack the necessary frame of reference to pursue improvements or even gauge your marketing efforts.

KPIs, or key performance indicators, are quantifiable variables of your choosing that reflect how good of a job you’re doing. To track brand awareness, for instance, you might derive such information from a feedback survey that asks people whether they recognize your ads, products or logo. To understand the factors that go into how well people recall your brand, you could survey them after they interact with your social media presence or site content to get a handle on how they found you.

Whether you set up internal marketing dashboards or work with professional outreach strategists, you’ll find it easier to master brand building if you get used to looking at the raw data.

Run More Experiments, More Often

The secret to efficient marketing lies in being open to learning new things. Countless business leaders have hoisted themselves with their own petards by refusing to give up on pet projects that under-performed. You may be in love with a particular marketing concept or campaign, but if it can’t actually produce results, then you need to cut your ties and move on.

Scalable experimentation works wonders for brand awareness. For instance, running low-word-count campaigns on social media platforms is a good way to see what people respond to and learn what travels best.

Many marketers pay copywriters to create short Twitter campaigns around their recent product photos or ongoing industry news events. This kind of outreach costs very little, and you don’t need a whole team to publish posts or gauge feedback. Successful tests also make perfect jumping-off points for further awareness-building initiatives. You can even combine these campaigns with purposeful announcements designed to publicize your new products or draw more attention to press releases. What better way to get the most out of your investment?

Don’t be shy about using content to test new marketing strategies in controlled environments, such as with segmented consumer audiences.

Make Higher Waves With Better Content

There are many different ways to get your marketing outreach efforts airborne. In the digital arena, the vast majority of outreach techniques depend on high-quality content.

People who consume your marketing materials look beyond the most obvious branding elements to judge your message and tone. If they discover basic writing errors, sloppy thematic constructs or unattractive language, then the brand awareness that you so desperately hoped to cultivate might give way to negative mental associations.

Content should be a stepping stone to greater things, never a crutch.

Lifting Your Brand Out of the Depths

Going viral is like the fabled Holy Grail of marketing: It’s great when you can manage it, but the journey to your five minutes of fame may be long and arduous.

In the meantime, why not go for something more accessible and enduring? Building a library of great content is the easiest way to cultivate brand awareness and recall that last longer than some passing viral fad would. Whether you decide to bulk up your social media presence or your e-commerce website, it’s hard to go wrong with proactive, content-based branding.

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