Why is Brand Awareness Important?
The report is carried by many statistics, with a massive 70% of all Edmonton business-to-business advertisers claiming that brand awareness is crucial to growth. It’s arguably even more critical for those Edmonton customer-focused companies, leveraging awareness to establish trust and inspire local recognition.
Below, we’ll examine the idea of brand awareness and its value to your expanding company while also determining the best strategies for building this concerning your business.
What is Brand Awareness, and Why is it so Important in Edmonton?
In layman’s terms, brand awareness is the degree to which customers are familiar with a particular business’s qualities, results, or identity.
When defining brand awareness on behalf of your company, it’s all too simple to mix this with the idea of recognition.
Researches have shown a complex but distinct separation between these two things, with brand recognition best described as a cognitive process that cannot exist without awareness.
Conversely, awareness regards a state of information about a current brand and allows consumers to recognize products, stories, and even colours synonymous with a particular business.
There’s no doubt that local brand awareness comes first and creates a state of mind through which customers associate individual elements with certain businesses or digital billboard advertising campaigns.
Brand Awareness & Local Audiences
While this demonstrates the core description of brand awareness, it does little to authenticate why it is so vital to your local Edmonton business.
From a top-down perspective, brand awareness embodies the first and most crucial step in the billboard advertising funnel, which is essential to engage efficiently and eventually get clients.
So, when initially questioning yourself, “why is brand awareness important?” you should know that building this will ensure that your business prevails at the vanguard of consumer’s minds and can drive recognition, attention, and loyalty on behalf of your brand.
Additionally, there are many reasons why brand awareness is central to economic growth, notwithstanding its comparatively misunderstood concept that is hard to measure and does not possess a fixed monetary value.
Local Brand awareness should not disguise that it serves as a crucial launchpad for all marketing strategies and campaigns. It should also have a cumulative impact in driving sales, targeting new demographics, and reducing your overall marketing spend.
In terms of the latter, it’s essential to know that It will cost you five times more to acquire new customers than retaining existing ones.
Brand Awareness Helps You Stand Out
The problem is that it’s increasingly more challenging to earn the trust and loyalty of consumers in competitive markets, especially with research implying that just 36% of shoppers say that they have faith in large brands to do what is right in any given position.
Brand awareness can play a crucial role in joining this gap, as familiarity breeds trust and creates a tangible connection between two distinct entities.
More specifically, the more customers know about a brand’s mission, narratives, and core values, the more likely they are to trust their products or services.
Therefore, the cultivation of brand awareness in Edmonton can significantly influence future buying choices, particularly with a 2016 study showing that 94% of all consumers are more likely to trust a brand when they commit to full transparency.
With this, it’s fair to assume that promoting brand awareness is an excellent way of achieving a viable and steady position in your preferred marketplace. It allows for more natural market penetration, as advertisers can immediately target a fixed and loyal customer base and achieve an outstanding marketing ROI even without a vastly superior product.
For more evidence of the importance of building brand awareness, you could find it in a study approved by ISPO News. The study revealed that 90% of all purchasing decisions are made subconsciously, whether we’re buying in-store or online.
Transparent brands that have made a synchronic identity and significant awareness are the most likely to benefit from such decisions. People are the most recognizable and capable of evoking impulsive and emotive actions from customers.
This also helps to put the relationship between brand awareness and recognition into context, as the former inspires the latter and drives unconscious buying decisions.
How Has Brand Awareness Helped Other Companies?
At this degree, you should understand the importance of building brand awareness and how this can contribute to a sustainable business model.
But are there any instances of how brand awareness has helped other businesses? The answer is yes, one particular example provided by the ‘Shoes of Prey’ makes giving a relevant case in point.
Now, you may well have heard that the Shoes of Prey brand collapsed in 2018, with many becoming connected this failure to an ultimate shortfall of funding as the company scaled at an exponential and unsustainable rate.
However, the iconic company was a tearaway startup success that allowed customers to design their shoes and scale quickly by building mass brand awareness amongst a large target audience.
The brand expressly inquired about targeting its young target demographics through YouTube, leveraging 16-year-old beauty vlogger and influencer Blair Fowler to achieve this aim.
The video content created due to this collaboration had an immediate impact, generating an impressive 750,000 views in no time at all.
It also delivered a permanent 300% increase in sales while earning national media attention from top media publications in Australia. Of course, this was also augmented by an exclusive partnership with Nordstrom in the US, which helped to popularize the brand across the globe.
Beyond this type of specific example, there are plenty of studies that indicate the efficacy of brand awareness, particularly when attempting to cultivate trust amongst consumers.
For example, a study called ‘Standing on the Shoulders of Giants’ found that firms that leveraged billboard advertising saw their brand trust rise by a whopping 26%.
Similarly, brand quality rose by 106% thanks to billboard advertising, while respondents observed a hike of 275% in customer loyalty.
Of course, we already know that individuals who see an OOH campaign are 17% more likely to engage with the brand through their cell phones, which translates into higher levels of awareness and interaction through social channels like Instagram and Twitter.
We also know that brands can utilize OOH to build awareness and create a higher sense of trust amongst customers, creating a framework for long-term gain.
How to Build Brand Awareness on Behalf of Your Business?
Now, while the importance of brand awareness has stayed consistent and unchallenged for ages, the best method for creating this remains to shift in line with social, behavioural and technological trends.
Back in the 1960s, television was the most powerful channel through which to build brand loyalty. In 1965, around 34% of customers could remember individual commercials aired on television, but this number had dropped to just 8% by 1990.
In 2007 it had fallen to a slim 2.2%, and there are no indications of this trend being reversed in the near term.
So, what channel is the most effective for building brand awareness in 2021?
As we’ve already touched on earlier in the piece, out-of-home advertising is unquestionably the best way for creating brand awareness in the new era.
One of the main reasons for this is that you employ Billboard Advertising channels such as local billboards to cast a wide net and target many customers in strategically positioned and untapped locations.
These locations will quickly introduce your brand, products and services to mass audiences through a trusted and highly engaging medium. One that can capture customers’ attention at a time when they’re most likely to interact with brands.
Locations can be particularly effective for small local businesses that initially want to target local customers in Edmonton. They can leverage carefully chosen locations and quickly build mass awareness within a clearly defined catchment area. Targeting a large audience through OOH media can enable you to acquire large volumes of customer data.
For example, not only you can gather knowledge about how many impressions your ads generate in specific locations, but metrics such as travel surveys incorporate accelerometers, barometers and compasses to establish the modes of transport used by target audiences.
Understanding Where Your Brand Stands
Such metrics also allow you to drill down deeper into the main characteristics of target demographics, making it possible to improve the efficiency of your marketing campaigns in the future and achieve a higher return on your advertising spend.
With that said, it’s necessary to know that there are many different types of outdoor advertising media available, so before taking the plunge, it’s necessary to understand the distinct differences, benefits and best advertising practices for your business.
Take high format paper billboards, for example, which do not require brands to share space with other firms, enabling them to promote their message most concisely and imaginable. Paper Billboards can be highly effective for local businesses.
The same cannot be said for digital billboards, typically shared between brands whose adverts are displayed for around 10 seconds per minute.
Billboards are also considered to be non-intrusive adverts that blend seamlessly into their background. Mainly because billboards can be placed in strategic locations, making them easily accessible to commuters and people going about their daily business.
Digital Billboards drive far greater interaction and engagement levels among customers who prefer to curate their content, making it far more likely that Consumers will effectively absorb your brand, message, and critical features.
On a final note, you need to remember that the average customer spends more than 70% of their time out of the home. In this respect, billboard advertising is the single most effective way of building awareness across most demographics.
How to Set Up Your Campaigns
Of course, execution is also crucial when building brand awareness, so you’ll need to prepare when setting up your campaigns to ensure that they receive your core business objectives.
We’ve broken down the core planning process below to understand what you want as an entrepreneur and how best to achieve such goals.
- 1. Planning, Planning and Planning: Planning your campaign features several vital factors that form your strategy’s why, where, and who. Planning compels you to drill down into your core motivation for erecting a billboard and building brand awareness, your target locations and the demographics of each audience you intend to focus on with your messaging.
- 2. The Initial Design: Once you have a clear understanding of these elements, the next step is to focus on the initial design of your billboard and create a basic visual template. Your plans should be governed by the so-called ‘rule of three’ (which essentially divides your ad space into three equally-sized horizontal sections), within which you’ll place your imagery, branding and concise, primary messaging.
- 3. The Production: At the production stage, you’ll most likely work with a dedicated and experienced agency like Localbillboards.ca, who can help to bring your conceptions to life. During this process, you’ll select the exact dimensions of your billboard, depending on their precise location and the unique behavior of your audience.
- 4. Tracking and Measuring Your Campaign: Once your billboards and ads have been erected, the next step is to measure their efficacy and performance over time. Initially, you can use primary travel survey data to calculate OOH impressions in specific locations, with ‘Mobitec’ devices tracking an individual’s real-time location and direction of travel. 3D maps can also follow the movement around small indoor ads, creating more detailed impression data in the process.
The Last Word
As we can see, brand awareness is an essential but often misunderstood marketing element and one that is increasingly capable of driving sustained business growth, incremental sales and more cost-effective campaigns.
OOH, media and ad channels such as billboards can be particularly effective when creating brand awareness for your business. At the same time, here at Localbillboards.ca, we’re well-placed to help you conceive, design and implement effective outdoor campaigns.
We’re also adding new digital locations to augment our selection of traditional billboard placements, so there’s never been a better time to partner with us, optimize your execution and create a genuine buzz around your brand.
If you are interested in discussing a billboard advertising campaign for your business, don’t hesitate to get in touch to find out more.