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Content Marketing

What Is Brand Awareness? 8 Benefits for Brands

Brand awareness is key in establishing your brand as the one your target audience trusts and prefers. Learn 8 benefits of prioritizing brand awareness.

Brand awareness is an important consideration that measures how well a target audience recognizes your brand. 

It is an effective way to establish customer trust, build your brand’s reputation, and grow brand equity.

Key Takeaways

  • Brand awareness measures how well your target audience knows your brand.
  • Prioritizing brand awareness lays the groundwork for establishing your brand as the one your audience prefers when it’s time to buy.
  • Though brand awareness isn’t hard data, it can be measured through customer surveys, website traffic, and social media engagement.
  • Benefits include fostering loyalty, building brand equity and retaining customers.

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What Is Brand Awareness?

Brand awareness refers to how well your target audience knows your brand. There are different degrees of brand awareness, depending on how established a brand is and how ingrained it is in the lives of an audience.

Building brand awareness lays the groundwork for making your brand the one your audience prefers when making a purchasing decision as part of the customer journey.

There are different scales for the degrees of brand awareness:

  • Pre-awareness
  • Brand recognition
  • Brand recall
  • Top of mind
  • Brand preference or loyalty
  • Advocacy

Terms Associated with Brand Awareness

While ‘brand awareness’ and ‘brand recognition’ are often used interchangeably, they have separate but related meanings. 

Each term has a definition that relates to how familiar a customer is with your brand:

Brand Recognition

According to Harvard Business School, brand awareness may be aided or unaided. 

Brand awareness that is aided means a customer needs a few hints or reminders to recognize a brand. Then, for unaided brand awareness, a customer is immediately familiar with a brand.

Brand recognition falls under the category of aided brand awareness. So, if a customer is aided by a visual, written, or verbal clue they recognize a brand.

Brand Recall

Brand recall is associated with unaided brand awareness and is when a customer names your brand, along with others, as being part of a category without being prompted or cued.

Top of Mind

In the context of brand awareness, top of mind is an excellent goal to aim for in marketing.

Top of mind describes when consumers can immediately name your brand if they are asked.

Essentially this means that your brand is the first to come to mind or the first a customer thinks of in a particular category.

So, when it comes to making a purchasing decision, if your brand is top of mind they are likely to consider and compare it first.

Brand Preference 

If a customer names your brand as the one they are inclined to choose over others in the marketplace, that is brand preference. It indicates that the consumer will actively purchase your product over another.

As brand awareness among your audience grows, so does the likelihood that they will favor your brand over others when making a purchasing decision. 

Further, customers may advocate for your brand when they are brand loyal.

How Is Brand Awareness Measured?

Brand awareness isn’t exactly hard data. Subjective measurements, such as the number of people who recognize your brand and to what degree, require some interpretation. 

However, there are many metrics a brand can use to measure how brand awareness is growing:

  • Customer surveys
  • Website traffic
  • Social engagement metrics
  • Search volume data
  • Brand tracking software
  • Referral traffic data
  • Monitor your content’s performance

By actively monitoring metrics associated with your audience’s awareness of your brand, you can gain insight into the state of your brand awareness.

8 Benefits of Brand Awareness in Content Marketing

Prioritizing brand awareness has several benefits, let’s take a closer look:

1. Puts your brand on the radar of potential customers

Making your audience aware of your brand puts you on their radar when they begin their buying journey, widening your brand’s reach — one of the reasons that content marketing attracts potential customers.

2. Allows you to share your brand’s story, values, and mission

Awareness campaigns educate an audience about a brand. This is an excellent opportunity to tell your audience who you are and share your unique value proposition and benefits. It’s also a good time to tell your audience what you stand for.

3. Expresses your brand’s personality

In addition to boosting a brand’s business, awareness campaigns can help develop its persona. When building brand awareness, the brand’s unique tone, voice, style and personality shine through.

4. Helps foster trust and loyalty

By building awareness of your brand, you grow your authority and credibility. This helps foster positive feelings about your brand, which can inspire greater trust and loyalty.

5. Promotes customer retention

When you stay true to the brand values and persona your customers have become familiar with, you are more likely to maintain relevance with your customers and maintain customer relationships. 

6. Helps build brand equity with consumers

Brand equity refers to how valuable customers perceive your brand to be. As brand awareness increases and consumers become more familiar with your brand and what it stands for, it can increase brand equity. 

7. Increases organic and word-of-mouth marketing

Establishing your brand as a trusted, familiar entity, growing your customer base, and keeping customers happy are ways to build more brand advocates. When happy customers start spreading the word about the brand they trust, it’s good for business.

8. Attracts partnerships and influencers

In addition to drawing consumers' attention, strong brand awareness makes other businesses notice you, too. When your brand is seen as reputable, authoritative and well-known, you may find influencers and other companies willing to collaborate with a mutually beneficial influencer marketing campaign.

Brand Awareness Sets the Stage for Increased Sales

Making brand awareness a priority engages your target audience and allows your brand to establish trust with new and existing customers, as well as other companies and personalities.

In addition to increasing the number of potential conversions, a brand awareness strategy lets your brand tell its story and build brand equity. 

Complement your brand awareness with Originality.ai’s tools for marketers, web publishers, and editors. Check for AI before publishing content, review grammar, and improve readability.

Then, get more insight on marketing best practices in our top guides:

Melissa Fanella

Melissa Fanella is a writer, editor, and marketing professional with over 15 years of experience in content and messaging for businesses and nonprofits. Her expertise is in crafting authentic, people-first content that is compelling and engaging for audiences and positioned for business goals.

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