How to create brand awareness, cost effectively, in three simple steps

Most of the companies I work with don’t have the luxury of investing millions to create brand awareness. In fact, some don’t have the luxury of investing anything – at least not in the traditional sense.

Traditionally, creating brand awareness has meant spending heavily on non-measurable, mass media marketing. These traditional branding initiatives don’t just cost a lot; they can take months or even years before having any measurable impact on sales. For most organizations, this strategy isn’t an option—but neither is ignoring the value of a strong brand. The good news is, in most cases you don’t need to invest millions and spend years creating brand awareness. You simply need to focus your efforts on the following three steps:

Step One: Clearly identify the prospects that make up your target market

A great brand is one that’s well known by the majority of its target market. The key to that last sentence is “target market.” Too often, way too much money is spent spreading branding messages to people who will never become customers. It’s not important that you make everyone familiar with your brand, only those who are most likely to buy. So, the first step is to have a very clear picture of your target market. I’m sure, you know their identifying attributes very well. This profile will help you compile a database of every single individual and organization that fits your customer profile. With a high quality prospect database, you can start directing branding messages only to your most likely buyers, eliminating the unnecessary cost associated with creating brand awareness with the wrong audience.

Step Two: Identify prospects who are familiar with your brand

Once you’re executing targeted brand awareness campaigns to your prospect database you can begin measuring the impact of your branding efforts and identifying individuals who know your brand.

By adding a clear call to action (not necessarily a call to purchase) in each of your branding communications, you can measure the overall effectiveness of each message by tracking responses. For example, a magazine ad could contain an offer for free information. By assigning a unique QR Code to that ad, you can gauge the overall effectiveness of the communication by tracking the code.

Say you’re sending direct mail communications and the call to action is to go online to watch a video. In this case, you can use a system like Enthusem.com to assign a personal pickup code to each mailer to track when and how often each individual prospect responds.

Step Three: Keep doing steps one and two

Finally, when you’ve compiled your prospect database and you’re tracking who’s responding to your branding campaigns, you can concentrate on efficiently strengthening your brand among your defined target market. Use the first two steps to guide your efforts, and it won’t be long before you’ve built a strong brand, and you’ll have done it without breaking the bank or growing old in the process.