The 5-Step Guide to Any Retailer’s Success in Building a Brand Awareness

3 min read

by Marie Barnes

One great marketing rule states that you must sell the audience your brand before selling your products. This rule works, simply because it can’t happen another way around: consumers tend to avoid making a purchase unless they are acquainted with your brand – or, in other words, can recognize it by its logo and other symbolic attributes or even have the experience with it personally.

A brand's awareness is the first step in a buyer's journey - the early stage in a shopper's funnel. And it is only logical that it is impossible to get to the stage of purchasing, skipping the acquaintance with the brand, and still hold high expectations on marketing success. Without getting customers aware of a brand, no selling campaign will ever work to bring any revenue. That is why building awareness of a brand is the first step in building your business's success.

It is, beyond doubt, worth every retailer’s effort, but, at the same time, does not necessarily spell huge money investments or a really rough path ahead. In this guide, you will find easy and effective tips on how to get your new customers acquainted with your brand without having to pay for that too much, and in the shortest time possible!

Know your brand and establish its values

To build awareness of a brand at high-quality standards and organize its appropriate and effective positioning, retailers must first form an image of the brand. In other words, you should know what your brand means (or can mean potentially) in terms of its products’ functions, what emotions it can evoke in customers, etc.

The main thing here is to present the truth, as being honest with customers only can bring the results a retailer is aiming at, and pretending to be something you are not will get you the reverse effects only!

But aside from being best aware of your brand yourself, you should also work on the values your brand represents. Studies witness that more than half of shoppers decide on whether to buy a product or not based on how much the brand’s values align with theirs, and more than a sixth of shoppers stop being loyal to a brand in case they find that its values are not corresponding to theirs.

And it’s also worth remembering that one of the key means to get the right set of a brand’s values for a retailer is through being specific and not trying to make its mission out of everything.

Direct your marketing at your target audience

One more thing you must be beware of is that you will have to accept a loser’s role in trying to build awareness of your brand for all your potential consumers in the world at once. Only certain groups of people – your target audience – can be truly interested in your brand and your brand’s products/services -- those are the people who are able to develop the real interest in your products, form a desire to buy them, and get to the end of a shopper’s funnel by having made a purchase.

Thus, it makes sense to direct your marketing at those groups of people only, and not waste your efforts, time, and finance elsewhere.

One of the ways to strengthen your marketing is with the help of content syndication. Find out more about the benefits of content syndication with the Adsy service.

Go along your best customers and work with the channels they use

The following advice will get you the maximum results out of any of the efforts of your marketing. This is just a law – only the most loyal or the potentially most loyal to your brand customers, ready to buy the most and spend the most can get your business to the top!

The investments you make in order to get such clientele will pay off the most, so try to target them as soon as possible and never lose them from your sight.

To make it possible, retailers should focus on the channels those customers use to discover new brands – the same social networks, websites, people they follow, etc.

Work with potential advocates of your brand

According to the results of a survey by the Nielsen Global Trust in Advertising, more than 90% of shoppers prefer their friends’ and loved ones’ recommendations to any form of advertising. And if you can find influencers on social media who will recommend your brand to their followers, you could get use of this word of mouth, using their opinions as testimonials for your brand, of course, having asked for their permission before this.

Such a tactic would add both to your brand awareness and the number of customers ready to spend on your products and develop your business.

A little, however, valuable tip for you -- focus on a diverse and professional visual representation of your business. Get the chance to attract more attention and the desire to advocate brand through using visual technologies in your retailing, for example, with the help of VisualRetailing.

Visual merchandising and store planning are proven to increase the conversion rate since people commonly process visual data more effectively than any other data type.

Choose the right time for your brand promotion

Timing is everything when it comes to brand promotion. Throughout the day, people face different needs and experience a range of feelings and emotions, going through different personal and social situations, that can be easily predicted for the majority within the particular targeted groups.

Thus the retailers who count in that various time-sensitive (daily, weekly, or even seasonal) moods and needs shifts implement better retail marketing strategies.

All in all, this means that it’s a very rare case when a brand can be on people’s minds 24/7, it’s most likely that your brand can gain attention effectively only at certain times of the day, and it’s well worth finding out what those times actually are and work most intensively on gaining awareness of your brand at those specific times!

For instance, people statistically drink more coffee in the mornings, read books in the evenings after their work, so should your businesses be of these product categories, it would be best to work on their awareness at those times of the day specifically, as it will attract naturally more attention from potential customers.

And this tactic can be applied to any product of any category – you can find the most effective times to get your target audience acquainted with your brand if you just think about this more carefully!

Conclusion

Building awareness of a brand is the very first stage of a shopper’s funnel, and no retailer will ever see a long-running success if that stage is somehow omitted.

In this short 5-step guide we tried to focus your attention on the most crucial elements of building brand awareness – the brand’s voice and values, targeted marketing efforts, working with the best customers and the channels they use, using potential brand advocates, and the time factor in developing brand awareness.

Those tactics do not require any excessive spending, but can make your brand well-recognized and desirable!

About the author

Marie Barnes is a contributing writer and a reviewer for Photoretouchingservices.net. She is an enthusiastic blogger interested in writing about technology, social media, work, travel, lifestyle, and current affairs. Follow her on Medium.