Brand awareness is not as ambiguous as it may seem. There are three pizza places in your neighborhood. One is much better than the other two, but you haven’t been there or heard about it. So, if you’re hungry for a slice, you’ll choose between the two restaurants you know, because you don’t know the best one. This is brand awareness at work. “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door,” is attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson. But, Waldo was wrong. It should be, “Build a better mousetrap, tell everyone in the world about it, and the world will beat a path to your door!” Just being better doesn’t bring in business. The day you start building brand awareness is the day your business figuratively opens. The day you stop is, at least figuratively, the day you close.
Building Awareness
When you start a business, you usually begin with little if any brand awareness. You’ve told family and friends about it, but that’s not going to do the job. The solution starts with a thing called the Baadar-Meinhof Phenomenon. Ever purchased a new vehicle and as soon as you started driving it, you noticed more and more people driving the same vehicle? That’s the thing. Once you see or hear about something for the first time, you start recognizing it around you. When you hear about a brand, selective attention kicks in and your brain begins unconsciously searching for that brand. We soak up positive reinforcement about brands we’ve selected and that’s called confirmation bias. Then there’s brand recognition and brand recall. Don’t worry. You don’t actually need a background in psychology to build brand awareness, we’re just pointing out that there’s science behind the strategies and tactics involved. There’s a very real, cause-and-effect relationship between building awareness and increasing business. There’s even some common sense involved. As more people become aware of your business you should see more business. If you don’t, that’s a sign that your brand perception and/or products need improving. Awareness isn’t only an issue for small businesses that have just opened their doors. When the marketplace has a large population base, a business might thrive in its own neighborhood but be overlooked everywhere else.
A Gigantic Pool of Prospects
Building brand awareness is basically telling the marketplace who you are, and what you do. Today’s businesses have an amazing brand awareness tool available to help them do just that. As of this writing there are 4.9 billion social media users in the world. Forecasts say we’ll reach 5.85 billion by 2027. That is a gigantic pool of prospects which you can target in many ways. Opportunities abound and remember, if you aren’t making use of social media, your competition is.
If you want to get your feet wet, or build on your existing social media presence, we can help. Just give us a call.