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What is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness is the extent to which potential customers recognize a brand. It is usually expressed as a percentage of target market. It happens to be the main objective of advertising especially when a product is introduced.
The ultimate goal of any business happens to be revenue generation. You put in all your effort and time to increase sales and income. Every business owner wants the same to attract new customers to their product and encourage repeat purchases. This is where pops up the idea of brand awareness. For doing anything that we talked just now you first of all need to generate brand awareness among the people to turn them into potential customers and finally customers. If your brand is well-known and easily recognizable, it means that you have achieved successful brand awareness for your business. You need to generate brand awareness about your product and services in order to distinguish them from other similar product & services and competitors.
It is essential to create reliable brand image, slogans and taglines in order to create brand awareness. Not just that you also must have a consistent brand message that you want to communicate. Strong brand awareness implies high sales and high market share. Brand awareness helps consumers to become acquainted and familiar with a brand and distinguish it from others in the market.

Why is Brand Awareness Important?
Awareness is one of the most important weapons of a strong brand. It is very important for customers to be aware with your brand, your products and services for them to buy from you. Brand awareness plays a major role in a consumer’s buying decision process because more aware consumers are of your brand more likely they are to purchase from you. Here are a few reasons as to why brand awareness is important for your business.
 Builds an Image for Your Company
Brand awareness tends to build an image for your company. You generate awareness about your brand in order to educate consumers about the name of your business and its offerings. But the second goal that is achieved by brand awareness while define your brand is letting the consumers know who you are and what you do for them to trust you.
 People widespread get to know your Business
Brand awareness is important for people widespread to know about your business. Consumers only prefer to buy a product from a company if they are well acquainted with that. Generating awareness about your brand among people help you meet this parameter.
 Crucial for consumer’s buying decision
It is the brand awareness that influences the purchase decision in the consumers. The consumers who recall your brand while making a purchase are more likely to buy from you. If you want brand recall to happen very often then you need to pay some extra attention to brand awareness.
 Boosts Your Customers’ Confidence
When a customer buys a product, there is some sort of perception of risk associated with it sometimes. However, brand awareness reduces this perception and consumers feel more risky if they buy a product from the brand they have never heard of before. This is how brand awareness increases trust between you and the consumer.
 Makes Your Company easily recalled
Brand awareness reminds the consumer about your brand while buying any product that you sell. You put your brand out there for consumers to be aware with your offering in and out and it helps your consumers to recall your brand instantly if they require a product that you sell.

Why Your Brand Needs Digital Marketing Strategy to spread awareness
You might be wandering what the heck is this digital marketing all about and why is it so hyped about these days? Everyone talking about it and trying to get their marketing transformed in to it. Do all the brands really need a digital marketing strategy? The answer is yes! They do.
As on date your brand of course needs a digital marketing strategy and the reason being the increasing inclination that people have towards the digital devices. You have to have a digital marketing strategy in order to meet the up-and-coming demands of the consumers. The advent of smart phones and on top that people using it on a large scale for multipurpose activities including marketing, social media and so on has made a digital marketing strategy the most sought after thing for your brand overnight. Well! This was one simple reason to support why your brands needs digital marketing strategy to generate awareness however there are some solid reasons as to how it technically works. Let’s go ahead and discuss them to utilize your digital marketing strategy to the fullest.
1. Online Branding
By getting a digital marketing strategy you get to have an online identity, an online branding. Consumers might come across you while searching on internet for the product that you are selling and might feel interested to buy from you.
2. Reduction in the heavy advertising cost
With conventional media you pay a good amount of money to advertise your product still your product does not reaches the right target market. In such case you must think wisely and act wisely and get a digital marketing strategy in place to not only reduce the advertising cost but also reach the right segment of the audience that you are supposed to.
3. Ability to measure the marketing performance at its every step
You are putting in all your effort and money to make your business boom high still for want of the right measurability you end up wasting a large amount of money as cannot prioritize your work efficiently. The conventional media of course allows you to calculate the ROI but that too only through reader ship and footfall. However, when it comes to digital marketing it offers you with an amazing tool called web analytics through which you can measure your performance at every level. It helps you make adjustment in your plan during the process is going on and save a lot of time, effort and money.
As a result you can optimize every part of your marketing venture through analytics
4. Generating awareness for your business
Generating awareness about your product is letting the people know who you are and what you do, which is very important. Everything comes later the first important thing is to generate awareness about your product among the people. There are so many ways in digital marketing through which you can get this accomplished such as by creating a blog, circulating press releases & newsletter, local directory listings, creating social profiles, submitting articles, participating in community, forums and blogs, making videos, through email marketing and so on.
5. Targeting the product to right segment of audience
In digital marketing with the help of the data that you get from various channels, you can make the segments of your audience depending on their attributes and then can target your product accordingly. This is done in three steps that are segmentation, identifying consumers’ needs and developing behavior based profiles respectively.
6. Spreading the business defying all geographical constraint
The best thing about digital marketing is that you don’t have to face any geographical constraints and can spread your business across the globe or wherever you want. There are many digital marketing tactics that will help you reach the target market in lower cost such as getting a website, performing SEO for your website, getting inbound links, using email marketing, getting active on different social media outlets, using pay per click advertising and so on. So that when the consumer will search for the product that you sale, you will be visible in the search results bringing in leads for you.
7. Customer engagement
Being interactive in design digital marketing lets the customer to interact and get engaged. Unlike the traditional marketing, here the user has the command to browse through whatever they wish to, making it far more interactive and engaging.
8. Trust building
Through blogs, videos and other mediums you tend to provide a lot of useful information to the consumers, which leads to a great trust building between both of you.
9. Increase in Sales
By providing the facility to shop online, digital marketing has become everyone’s favorite. If the consumer likes any product and wish to purchase it they can instantly place an order through online shopping but in traditional marketing they need to physically visit the showroom and the in the due course their mood might get changed. Besides, the recent study also reveals that this trend of people buying stuffs online will only increase in the coming time bringing in more sales for your business.

Indeed your brand needs a digital marketing strategy for the innumerable benefits that it has. Your brand does not remain limited to a certain area. The exposure that its gets with the help of digital marketing is unrivaled provided you and implement your digital marketing strategy well.

How to increase brand awareness with limited resources
Generating leads for your business is something which comes later. The first thing is to generate awareness about your business among the people for them to flock your website. Initially, you need to spread awareness about your product and services to the people and generate the need for your product among them. Although it is one of the challenges for the marketers to bring the qualified traffic to their website but if you act smart and judicious nothing is impossible. There are many conduits you can make use of to generate awareness about your business among the public. Getting attention of the consumers is not a big deal. The big deal however is to convert them into your potential customers.
There are various channels available to you through which you can generate awareness about your business among the audiences. Following are some of these channels that you can make use of in order to get traffic to your website:
1. Have a Business Blog
The best way to generate awareness about your business among the people is to have your own business blog. This is how you can circulate important and relevant information among the people through your blog and they get a lot of value out of it.
2. Circulate Press Releases
Press releases are a wonderful way you can generate awareness among the people with. You have the option to include the link to your site in your press releases.
3. Move Newsletters
It’s quite helpful in driving traffic to your website if you have the people already coming to your Blog. Go ahead and make it little bit easier for that sort of information or content to show up in their inbox as that is how you can drive traffic and drive conversion.
4. Local Directory Listings
Make sure you submit your local listing and include your company website on Google, Yahoo and Bing local directory. These are influential links for search engines.
5. Social Profiles
Social media is a wonderful way to generate awareness about your business among the audiences. Staying active on the Social Media outlet is meant for you. A fact that cannot be denied is as per the recent studies social signals are responsible for up to 7% of website ability to rank. Even if you set most of the links as no follow, Google can follow them. Besides, think about the social media outlet where people are spending their maximum time and try getting traffic from there.
6. Article Submission
Article sharing is a wonderful way to generate awareness about your business among the people. Write immaculate and informative original articles and submit them to various articles sharing sites meant for your business. What matters is your content; make sure it’s as informative and flawless as it could be and people are going to flock your website like anything.
7. Community, Blogs and Forums
By participating in various community, blogs and forums you can indirectly generate awareness among the audiences by giving links to your website. Never mistake between adding value and spamming. You can prudently share a link while interacting through blogs, forums and social media sites that will add value to the conversation.
8. Make a few videos
Videos are a wonderful way to generate awareness about your business among the people. You cannot even estimate how fond of videos people are. They find it easier to gather the information they are looking for through videos. It could be an easy way to get the people engaged through videos and get traffic to your site. You are simply conveying the information and people get a lot of value out of it. You do that work ones and then it’s useful all the way down the line.
9. Use email marketing.
Based on the information given by the visitor on the landing page of your company you can create a list of people whom you need to send your information in the form of a mail. Besides, depending on the stage of the consumer in the sales funnel and their behavior on your site you can optimize your emails and send personalized and more specific emails to the recipients. This is another good way to not only generate awareness among the consumers but also to nurture your potential leads.
10. Internet Advertising
You can generate brand awareness through internet advertising that is delivering promotional marketing messages to the consumers over the internet. It includes search engine marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, many types of display advertising and mobile advertising.
11. Pay per clicks
Pay per Click (PPC) marketing is definitely an incredible tool for marketers who are willing to invest and get a good traffic to their site leading to sales. A well set up PPC Campaign can drive a lot of potential customer to your site and does wonders in generating revenue for your company.

12. White papers
A white paper is a reliable report or guide helping readers to understand an issue, solve a problem, or make a decision. It provides a lot of value to the users through the information that it contains and is a wonderful way to generate brand awareness among the people.
These were a few channels that help you generate awareness about your business among the people. Besides, you can use web analytics to determine which conduit is performing best and can channelize efforts respectively.
Case Study: Brand Awareness through Digital Marketing
How Mr. Tariq Zaidi, a successful entrepreneur & founder of RealtyGuru.co.in (Real Estate Portal for Expatriates) was successful in generating and increasing awareness about his business to the right target market.

Overview
Realtyguru is a real estate company that leases out high end properties like rent apartments, flats, houses in New Delhi and NCR region to people mainly expatriates. Expatriates are people who come from other countries to India on a temporary work permit. The company was founded on 23 October 2010. Initially when it was started it only had a fist full of clients but now after marketing the business online , saw 40% overall increase in business and number of clients went higher.
Challenge
Initially when Mr. Tariq Zaidi founded RealtyGuru as a real estate company very few people knew about it. He was only able to close one to two deals a month. The biggest challenge for Mr. Zaidi was to generate awareness about his business among the potential customers and reach out to the customers both in Delhi & abroad mainly the European countries. He was leasing out properties mainly to expatriates but his product information could not reach the target market. He employed few sales people to promote his product. His business overheads went very high but the profit margin was very low. Besides, there is too much competition in offline marketing be it tele-calling or sms marketing or whatever. Somebody told him that he should prefer online marketing to reach his target market at relatively very low cost. He agreed to that and met the Director of DSIM Mr. Kunal Choudhary. After he had a conversation with him over his concern he enrolled himself in one of the weekday batches of the digital marketing training at DSIM.

Analysis
Mr. Zaidi chose digital marketing to promote his business because he realized about the wide reach digital marketing has. Not just that when compared to the conventional marketing, digital marketing is far more cost effective. Mr. Zaidi analyzed that why his business was not reaching the target market. As far as Delhi is concerned he was anyway able to make some business through conventional marketing media but for the expatriates, he was initially clueless what to do, how to generate awareness about his business among them. But the moment he realized the fact that how digital marketing can help him extend his product beyond the boundaries, he underwent digital marketing training by DSIM in order to market his business online and get qualified traffic to his website.
Solution
Mr. Zaidi took digital marketing training from DSIM. He learnt how to create a website and various technicalities to market it online. During the training he created his own website and various digital marketing strategies for his business which mainly included landing page creation to generate leads of expatriates from European countries by online advertising and advertising on search engines like Google. He used various other digital marketing platforms to generate awareness among the potential customer for them to flock his website. He also used email marketing to convert leads into sales. Later on he went ahead measured and analyzed different online marketing platforms that include website, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, online advertising, social media, email marketing, lead generation and more. This is how he found the ultimate marketing strategy that worked best for his business. He preferred to compare time frame trends in order to assess the accomplishment of each internet marketing campaign for RealtyGuru. It helped him know what is working for the campaign and what part of the endeavor is going in vein. It also helped him know the areas of improvement and decide where to invest time and money both.
Specific initiatives included
 To make the website compelling for new and repeat visitors high quality photography, video and rich media were used.
 Multiple opportunities for feedback and interaction were created.
 Multiple ways were designed to share content via social networks.
 Website’s structural design and copy were optimized for search engine visibility.
 Clear calls-to-actions were created to move the customer smoothly through the sales funnel.

Results
Within three months it lead to a dynamic web presence for RealtyGuru attracting and engaging more and more prospects. The result started showing up and they were visible on search engine ranking page bringing in a lot of traffic to their website and a lot of enquiries regarding the property. At DSIM, he also learnt how to make lead nurturing strategy in order to convert visitors into potential leads and finally to potential customers. Great thing to know about it is that there is 127 % increase in query and 34% overall increase in business. Business increased by 43% of expatriates and 23% of local customers. He started converting 12-15 customers in a month within a span of 10-12 months. Not just that through email registrations a sound stream of new leads is being consistently added to the database.

About DSIM
Delhi School of Internet Marketing is a trademark of “Kixx Media Pvt. Ltd.” as a leading Internet Marketing Training provider for Corporate, Professionals, Entrepreneurs and Students. It provides full-fledged live classroom training for industry executives and entrepreneurs. Trainers at DSIM teach marketers how to reach right target market with lower acquisition cost in the best way possible. They have trained more than 552 professionals from various industries such as IT, Travel & Tourism, Advertising, Public Relations, Finance & Banking, Fashion and Retail.

Take-aways!

Your brand needs not millions to make an impression. However, it needs a wise planning and its implementations. Actually in spite of being just only a part of the entire digital marketing social media can be a great start. Facebook, twitter, Pinterest , Instagram, Tumblr and You tube are the key to generate awareness on a large scale but there are more ways you can not only generate awareness about your brand but also make an impression. Here are some ways you can build your brand in limited resources as there are other things you need to spend your time and money on.

1. Ultimate Customer Service
Customer service is the word. Your customer service can make or break your company’s reputation and the trust that you customers have in you. It is a big world and even your business. Not everything will go on track all the time. Something might get derailed sometime. In such scenario instead of panicking and reacting in haste you should act smart and wise and have the courage to deal the concern in the most subtle way. Turn the mishappening into the opportunity to generate awareness about your product among the masses. Let the people know how much you care for your each customer. These kinds of incidents become more valuable than those typically expected situation as the customer interaction with you unveiled your true colors in front of your customer.

It might or might not happen that somebody who bought something on facebook will share it with their peers but then they will for sure share if something went wrong and you went out of way to get that corrected. Besides, try being proactive when it comes to your customer service. Try spending some extra time if doing that will nurture your relationship with customers. A situation well handled and well resolved makes the customer feel special and builds up brand affinity which in turn leads to word of mouth buzz as people love to talk about the brands they kind of start trusting in. Actually, word of mouth is found to be a chief player in creating new customer base. Besides, figure out where your customers are on the social media outlet and engage with them, communicate with them.
2. Think unconventionally & from a new perspective
Don’t just stick to the conventional ways of doing things instead be innovative and discover some ways of your own that will perk up your venture. You need not spend millions to generate awareness about your product and services among your audiences. You can make a splash even with limited resources if you know the ways. Identify with the longings of your consumer and work accordingly. If they love videos, create some interesting and informative videos for them to get a lot of value out of it and build trust in you. Besides, the buzz that content marketing has created in the world of marketing cannot be comprehended in words. So go ahead with some real good and informative content to entertain and educate your consumer and generate awareness about your brand at the same time. Try bringing a little bit creativity in your content and add some humor to it if possible.
3. Co-marketing
Being a brand you always look for ways to expand your audience, so it is wise to hunt for brand partners who can share an audience with you by getting into some kind of collaboration. Like it happens in the fashion world all the time many designers team up to work together and are able to do a better business. These pooling up of resources have always been proved to be beneficial for both the partners in generating brand awareness and building audiences eventually leading to sales. Both can have their own contributions and take-aways and can have a win-win opportunity for both. However, you need to be a little bit wary of who you collaborate with as integrity has to be maintained in all circumstances.

4. Tap the wisdom of crowd
No matter what, crowd is always smarter than what you expect them to be. This is why tapping the wisdom of crowd is as important as co-marketing is. You can take the help from an outsider to have their perspective to decode your vision sometimes when you need that; this is when crowdsourcing helps it happen. Crowdsourcing is the practice of getting required services, ideas, or content by asking for contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers.

Conclusion
Brand awareness is the base of your business. How your business will perform depends on how intensely and smartly you have generated awareness for your business. Brand awareness is not all about creating an image for your company it’s about monitoring it from beginning till the end using various marketing techniques to do so. Generating awareness for the brand improves sales, augments your customer base and on top of it keeps those customers to come back again and again. So, don’t give up. It is just that you need to be a little extra smart and follow marketing ventures that will increase awareness for your business in limited resources. Besides, be persistent in your endeavors.

It is understandable how expensive generating awareness about your business through traditional media is and you yet not receive the desired results. It might have taken your plenty of time too. You were doing everything that you could do in the conventional media and was still not getting the outcome you were seeking. This is why we recommend the digital marketing to follow to generate awareness about your business in lesser time, lesser resources and that too among the target market people you wished to extend your offer to who are more likely to buy your product or the services.

DSIM Team
DSIM Blog is created to help you to know all aspects of Digital Marketing ranging from basics of Digital Marketing to Advance Level Topics, Read our posts and feel free to reach our team for any queries.