This guide will walk you through the basics of brand awareness and how to get started as a small brand.

What is Brand Awareness?

What brands come to mind when you think of workout equipment or sportswear?

These came up for me: GymShark, Nike, Adidas

What does this mean? That these three brands are doing well in terms of Brand Awareness. This is available for any product we use in our day to day life.

Think of any product or service you use, and brand names will start to show up.

If we go by an official definition, it would be something like this:

In theory, it makes sense, and it's pretty easy to wrap your head around.

In practice, part of the challenge is that Brand Awareness takes time, effort and constant allocation of resources to build. For small, emerging brands, this is challenging because 90% of the time, the focus is somewhere else: conversions.

And it's perfectly normal to be it this way.

On the other hand, more prominent and established companies or brands can spend millions on Brand Awareness. But, most of the time, they don't care that much about the conversions or the return on their investment, compared with smaller brands. Another consequence of these big budgets being thrown out there, except that it makes it harder to compete with such brands, is that the cost of working with influencers is high, and most of the time, too expensive for small, emerging brands.

That is why we recommend working with more engaged micro-influencers on Social Cat for a fraction of the cost.

But more on this, later on. We know what Brand Awareness is, and now we can look at how to create it.

Work with micro-influencers on Social Cat and build awareness

As discussed in previous guides, here are the benefits of working with micro-influencers on Social Cat:

For the sake of this mini-guide, we will focus on the third bullet point.

If we rewind to the definition quoted earlier, Brand Awareness means how familiar is a consumer with your product or service.

And how can they become more familiar with your product?

They hear about it constantly from ads, influencers, Social Media, or your blog - marketing channels. So hearing about your product frequently will trigger familiarity, the so-called awareness. Then, at the right time, when there is a need for your product, it will be considered, which eventually will lead to conversion.

Take some time to properly think about all this and how it can work to your benefit if done right.

Micro-influencers with a targeted and engaged audience will be some of the best ambassadors for your product. Out of the ten matches you have access to on our cheapest plan, set two aside just for creating awareness each month. If you don't have the resources, you can mix this goal with the other two goals.

Read more about Brand Awareness in the first part of this guide.

Advertising on Social Media

Social Media Advertising is another great way to build awareness for your products.

The majority of the platforms actively support brand-building through different types of campaigns like Engagement or even Awareness.

We often hear in our network that platforms like Meta are somehow favouring brands setting up Engagement and Awareness campaigns. Not necessarily that they pick them or whitelist them, but more about how the ad algorithms are built behind: ad accounts that run these types of campaigns tend to have lower CPMs and better CVRs overall.

We have seen this in our previous experiences when running different ad accounts for our clients.

Our recommendation is to start an Engagement Campaign on Instagram or (and) Facebook and run it as low as £1/day.

You can promote your Instagram or Facebook posts with this type of campaign, thus generating more likes, comments and awareness for your products.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is the process of creating and distributing relevant, helpful content - blogs, newsletters, white papers, social media posts, podcasts and more - to current and potential customers. When it's done right, content marketing conveys expertise and makes it clear that a company values the people to whom it sells.

At the first stage of the sales process, your content should focus on your audience's top concerns. Writing about their pain points, challenges, and questions gives you the best chance of engaging with them. By engaging with your audience and constantly addressing each and every concern via content, you establish a relationship with the user, which will eventually lead to conversion, and potentially even better: a long-term customer.

Content at the awareness stage should be educational, how-to advice. Save your selling for the consideration and closing phases.

The best content for this stage:

This gets us back to the same challenge for small, emerging brands: resources; as a small brand, we know how hard it is to allocate resources, so there is a tiny chance you can start creating videos, e-books or podcasts.

From our perspective, the approach here is long-term. We had great results with producing content via blog posts in the past. But, at the same time, it is fun, and it will help your brand in the long run.

Read this guide to see how to start a blog.

Notes

We mentioned this quite a few times: Brand Awareness is a long-term shot, it works like a boomerang, and it's something you want to allocate resources to; it just needs to be done cleverly and sustainably, something that can assure continuity.

Being constant with Content Marketing is the key to seeing the right results, so take a bit of time to understand how you can approach this matter properly.

Having a plan here is the right way to tackle the challenge.

Of course, we mentioned this before: the road to the conversion is an equation with quite a few variables. However, from our perspective, we need to start at the root of the problem: having an excellent product.