It isn’t enough to create superior products at competitive prices in today’s crowded marketplace. Manufacturers must first increase brand awareness to capture market share and generate sales growth.
Currently, there are nearly 640,000 manufacturing businesses in America. How does your company stand out from the crowd with so many possible solutions to your buyers’ problems? Brand awareness is key to creating an identity, connecting with your audience, gaining recognition, and remaining front of mind. Whether you’re focused on brand marketing for manufacturers or content marketing for manufacturing companies, brand awareness is essential to your growth and success.
Keep reading to learn ways manufacturers can increase brand awareness to generate leads and increase conversion rates for greater ROI.
Key Takeaways
- Brand awareness is the ability of your consumers to recognize your brand through aided and unaided efforts.
- Direct traffic, engagement levels, and the amount and frequency of online mentions help you measure your brand awareness.
- From audience personas to testimonials and reviews, you can increase brand awareness in five quick ways.
What Exactly Is Brand Awareness, and Why Is it Important?
Brand awareness is the ability of your consumer to identify and recognize your company via a variety of branding elements, including:
- Company name: People should associate your business’s name with the products you provide.
- Logo: Your logo should be a recognizable icon that immediately makes people think of your brand.
- Slogans: Sometimes, a branded phrase can help with company recall.
- Corporate colors: A strong part of your identity, colors have strong associations with people and help consumers quickly recognize your company image.
- Products: Your offering should be unique enough that buyers immediately recognize your work.
All of these branding aspects help to establish a unique brand identity that tells your story and sets expectation levels. Brand awareness lets people know who you are and helps them to remember you at important points in the customer journey.
Ultimately, the goal of brand awareness is to ensure your target audience can recall your business, either aided through prompting with a logo or business name or unaided through general concepts, like what kinds of products you sell. Either way, you want to grow a consumer base that will come to trust you and reward you with customer loyalty.
Customer loyalty is important because between 60% and 70% of your existing customers will buy from you again. Loyal consumers will become brand ambassadors, customers who are so satisfied with your business that they promote you to their contacts and buy from you at every opportunity. So brand awareness isn’t just important for gaining new business. It’s also critical for retaining current customers and nurturing those relationships for ongoing success.
How Do You Measure Brand Awareness?
It’s important to measure brand awareness in manufacturing to know whether your branding efforts are working. There are several ways to determine an increase in brand awareness, such as:
- Rise in direct traffic: if you’re driving website traffic for manufacturing companies by people entering your website into their URL, users seek you out purposefully and are aware of your business.
- Higher social engagement: the more people interact with your brand, the more they learn who you are and intentionally engage with your posts, articles, and profile.
- Number and frequency of online mentions: when your brand is talked about on other sites and pages, more people are aware of your business (and, more importantly, remember you).
The following video provides additional measurement strategies that have been successful for marketing professionals:
Source: Latana on YouTube
When creating brand awareness, you want people to talk about you. The more people discuss your business, mention your name, and share the material from your content marketing for manufacturing companies, the more they learn about your company. This helps grow awareness about who you are as a business, the solutions you deliver, and the credibility and quality of your work.
Tracking these results helps you understand the efficacy of your brand awareness strategy and enables you to make any adjustments necessary to maximize your branding opportunities.
5 Ways to Increase Brand Awareness in Manufacturing
It’s never too late to focus on brand awareness. Every company can benefit from alerting people about your brand, whether an established business or a new start-up. Here are five quick ways to increase brand awareness in manufacturing.
1. Know Your Audience
Brand awareness is an important aspect of marketing for manufacturers. Knowing your target audience is one of the quickest ways to increase brand awareness. Understanding who you’re trying to reach and attract to your business can shape your efforts and help you know what kind of message to deliver. Create buyer personas to identify your ideal target audience, then determine what will resonate with them most and through which channels.
2. Engage On Social Media
There are more than 4.5 billion people on social media today. If you aren’t already using social media platforms (or if you are and simply haven’t maximized your potential), this is one of the simplest ways to boost brand awareness.
Not only are social media posts highly targetable, but they’re also easily shareable. This means you can post specific content to particular viewers. That content will not only get interaction from your readers, but they’ll likely share it with their network and expand the number of people seeing your brand name, logo, and messaging. Social media engagement plays a huge role in building brand awareness.
3. Maintain a Blog with Authority Content
Blogs are a powerful tool for multiple reasons. First, you can establish your brand as an authority in your field by publishing expert content that delivers value to your readers. But you can also leverage it as part of your SEO basics for manufacturing and industrial companies.
By providing search engines with high-quality content to crawl and scan, you increase the chances of earning high search engine rankings, which grants you greater visibility on Google’s first page of results. The more people see your company name, the greater your awareness.
4. Build a Presence in Your Community
Become an active member of your community. Host local events, so people become familiar with your facility. Sponsor activities to not only support your neighborhood but for the chance to post your logo on highly visible banners and marketing materials. Interact with your surrounding businesses and residents so that people get to know your company, understand your values, and support your efforts. The more involved you are, the more opportunities there are for people to learn about you and recognize your name, logo, products, and overall brand.
5. Incentivize Testimonials and Reviews
Consumer reviews are a powerful tool for today’s businesses. In a world of e-commerce shopping where customers aren’t able to see a product firsthand before making a purchase, people trust the experiences of others to influence their purchase decision. Sixty-eight percent of people will patronize a business based on its customer reviews.
Seek testimonials and customer reviews and post them on your website and marketing materials. Provide incentives like coupons, special offers, or downloadable content for shoppers to leave candid customer feedback. Not only do the reviews give you credibility, but more people will associate your brand with positive experiences and remember you as the company with satisfied customers. This is an effective aspect of building brand awareness.
Increase your Brand Awareness for Maximum Results
By following trends in marketing for manufacturing companies, Shanahan Strategy helps to develop effective digital marketing strategies for industrial and manufacturing companies to attract sales and generate revenue growth.
Contact Shanahan Strategy today to learn how we can help you increase brand awareness for maximum results.
