All around the world, businesses face an age-old dilemma between what’s more important: brand awareness or sales. Should you focus your marketing efforts on making your brand known to potential customers or on acquiring leads and directly generating sales?
The thing is, every company wants to sell more and increase its revenues, but this seldom happens without a well-made marketing strategy, and an important component of this is brand awareness.
Brand Awareness – the springboard to more sales.
Brand awareness is the foundation of your marketing efforts and subsequently to your sales. After all, selling products to people, without them knowing at least a little bit about them is next to impossible. How many times have you bought a product from a company about which you knew nothing?
A Nielsen study revealed that the majority of people – around 60%, are more inclined to buy products from familiar brands, than from those that are unknown to them. Moreover, the same research states that 50% of consumers are more willing to try a new product from a brand they recognize then trying a new brand.
What do these numbers show us? If one thing is clear, is the fact that brand awareness creates the foundation of trust on which leads or sales can flourish. How does it do this?
Awareness refers to people’s ability to identify and recall your company’s brand. Being able to distinguish a company’s products, for instance, is hugely important. In a competitive market, if you want your company’s goods to be the ones people choose.
After all, depending on the product, there can be tens, maybe hundreds of producers, each with their own products. You can’t expect for anyone to know them all, and because of this, the usual search for buying a new item starts with the products made by familiar brands.
The other component of brand awareness, the brand recall is also extremely valuable. Known by some as unaided recall, the brand recall represents the ability of instantly name, straight from the personal memory, a few producer brands when asked about a certain product category. In general, people can name 3-5 brands in the very first seconds after being asked.
For example, think of luxury cars. For sure a few brand names came into your mind. Those brands have the strongest link with that category of products for you.
Brand awareness is the first step into communicating to potential customers, an introduction to a string of conversations your brand and the targeted audience will have. It’s just like when meeting a new person, and greetings and name exchanges are in order. And you can’t really trust someone if you even don’t know their name, can you?
Along with other marketing methods, brand awareness creates trust which in return besides the one time sale, can generate loyalty. As a study made by the White House Office of Consumer Affairs shows, the cost of getting a new client is 6 to 7 times bigger than the one of keeping an existing client. Furthermore, a research made by Bain & Company revealed that just a 5% increase in loyal customers can lead to a 25 to 95% increase in profits.
So, as you can see brand awareness is a veritable springboard to more sales. Focusing just on getting leads or selling products with little to no focus on awareness will probably bring results in the short-term. However, if you want results both in the short-term as well as in the long-term you need to integrate both in your strategy, as their roles are complementary.
