Brand awareness, what is it and why do you know it’s super important for your e-commerce company? As a self-defining term of phrase, brand awareness is the be-all-end-all of just how consumers are familiar with your brand. It’s the distinctive qualities and images of your brand people recognize and remember.
As an e-commerce company having awesome brand awareness is crucial to its success. Since everything is done online that means captive visuals and meaningful and consistent user engagement are key. Being online means everything out in the open at all times for people to see and interact with. The stakes couldn’t be any higher for your brand.
Lots of articles indicate one of the best ways to improve brand awareness is user engagement. What they don’t do is explain just how you can actually utilize user engagement to build a better brand. Know what’s what and read on to see how to increase user engagement and build brand awareness.
Where to Start
Before diving right in, let’s make sure you know what user engagement exactly means. User engagement is the overall experience and interaction a user has with a particular website or product understood in numbers or data. Factors of user engagement include the number of clicks a user makes, how many times a user returns, the amount of time is spent on a page, page scroll length, comments or social shares, and so on.
Having this type of information is a valuable resource, but in order to get the information certain initial steps to be taken. Number one is knowing more about who your audience is and what they think of your brand. Knowing your audience means having actionable information that can impact campaign efforts and in turn build brand awareness.
To help determine who your audience is, consider using a brand analytics tool like Latana. A tool like this can help you discover not only which audiences are already aware of you or which aren’t, but also who knows who your competitors are and not you, and what various audiences associate with your brand. With reliable insights, you use them directly with engagement campaigns to steer you in the right direction of building brand awareness.
Utilize User Engagement Insights to Build Brand Awareness
Assuming you’ve made the smart decision and used a brand analytics tool to help you figure out your audience, you’ll be able to use those insights to do a variety of things. Clear up any confusion you might see from the data and make sure your consumers know exactly what you offer. If it looks like your audience is finding you via a Google search or even a social media post, make sure the first piece of content they see is exciting and a clear explanation of what you offer. You want a good value proposition to entice potential customers.
Sometimes you won’t be able to make things as clear as you’d like, a way to remedy this is by making it easy for consumers to contact you and ask questions. Make sure you’re prompt and consistent in giving responses to build a reputation of reliability.
Coupons and Discounts
As an e-commerce company, there are some uniquely specific offers you can do to build brand awareness. For example, online coupons and discounts! Now, businesses have varying opinions on whether or not coupons and discounts is the right route to take in getting more consumers. Regardless, they do work.
Coupons and discounts provide an incentive to potential consumers whether that be an immediate purchase or a sign-up to your newsletter. Consumers unsure of a service or product are more likely to use it if provided with a less risky situation, like spending less money. Plus, people are always searching for coupons or coupons sites to get the best deal. This could potentially be a way for you to find a new audience for your brand and reach new heights with your business strategy.
Giveaways
Speaking of spending less, there’s only one thing people love more than a bargain and that’s free stuff. Think about doing a giveaway to create buzz on social media. This buzz will help people discover your brand, which in turn could result in new followers on your social media pages or build newsletter recipients. Having more people exposed to your brand could help you hook them as future customers.
Video
Coupons, discounts, sales, and giveaways, are definitely classic models of customer engagement that translate well into the e-commerce world. But the number one thing to focus on with anything online related is content. And if content is king, then video is the heir to the throne.
A study by Animoto showed that 96% of customers find videos helpful when making a purchase decision. Videos can clearly explain how a product or service is used with real examples. This type of content can make a brand meaningful to a customer. The best part is that a video can be put on your website, social media, or articles, creating consistency across different platforms.
For those that don’t have the time to create unique and engaging videos, you can hook up with influencers in your industry. Influencers are another great way in expanding your audience and increasing user engagement.
Build user Engagement to Increase Brand Awareness
Building user engagement directly affects how you increase brand awareness and there’s certainly a ton of different ways you can do both. Don’t just choose one of the three tips provided, try them all and more. Take advantage of analytical tools to understand your audience and fill in the gaps to make your brand as distinct as possible.
Today’s world is full of choices. Which means you need to do the utmost to make your brand stand out and be the choice people make. Do this by creating and developing a brand that people want to engage with.
