The impact of brand awareness: Top tips for driving more sales for your business

It’s important to create an experience for your customers. You want them to buy your products or services, but before you can get them to convert, you need to start by creating brand awareness.  

Consumers like consistency. When it comes to the impact of brand awareness and sales, think about your own purchasing behaviour.  

When thinking about your business brand, ask yourself these questions:  

• What makes you buy one product over another?  
• Why do you gravitate towards certain brands?  
• What is it about a brand that makes you keep coming back for more?  

A strong brand identity creates loyalty, which helps drive sales through returning customers. A strong brand is not about stuffing promotions and deals in your customer’s face. It’s about creating and delivering a total package of smooth service, intuitive UX, great products and appropriate communications, so your customers won’t be able to stop talking about your products or services.  

In this article, we’ll dive into how you can achieve brand awareness, how to create a strong brand identity, and how you can increase sales using branding.  

What is brand awareness?  

Before we get into how you can use branding to drive sales, it’s key to understand that brand awareness doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time for people to recognize what your business is all about.

Brand awareness establishes trust and builds equity for your product. When a customer becomes familiar with your brand or product and understands the value, they won’t think twice about where they spend their money.   

How to create a strong brand identity  

When you think about why you connect with certain people more than others, it’s usually because of their personality or something that makes them unique. The person might be charismatic, a great storyteller, or is just fun to be around. Before you create a brand identity for your business, consider how you want to be perceived.  

Think about how your target audience should feel when they interact with you. Establish and carve out your corporate values and a mission statement that strongly aligns with how you want to be perceived and what you stand for.  

Here’s how to infuse some personality into your brand:  

Pick your target audience  

You can try to win over everyone, but you’ll soon realize that most of the time you just can’t. Not everyone is going to like your message, so you need to choose who you want to interact with. Determine who your ideal clients are and find ways to connect with them.  

Use your analytics to focus on who they are, where they like to shop, what they believe in, and what type of content they prefer to consume. Once you get a better understanding of your ideal client, you’ll be able to find better ways to serve them so you can help solve their problems. 

Find your why 

You already know why you’re in business, but do your customers? Create a strong mission statement that defines the purpose of your work and your values. It doesn’t have to be a long and boring statement. Explain what you do, who you serve, and how your brand is different in your own way.  

Examples of brand missions 

Google:  

 “Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” 

Coca Cola:  

• To refresh the world... 

• To inspire moments of optimism and happiness... 
• To create value and make a difference. 

BMW:  

“to become the world’s leading provider of premium products and premium services for individual mobility.” 

Lush: 

“to make their products by hand with only vegetarian ingredients and little-to-no preservatives.” 

Create a Brand Book and Style Guide 

Before you launch your business, you’ll want to create a set of guidelines for your employees and a style guide to help customers identify with your brand. If you’d like to get started with these documents, download these free templates for a Brand Book and a Style Guide and get creating. 

As we’ve mentioned before, branding is about consistency. Use your brand book and style guide to set the tone, colors, images, fonts, and voice for your brand. Your brand is more than just a logo. While your logo is part of the puzzle, it’s only one piece. You need the whole package to create a strong brand.  

Don’t rush through this part of the branding process. While it’s normal for brands to rebrand from time to time, you don’t want to create too many distractions by changing things too often. Create a brand book/style guide that you, your team, and your customers will love for years to come.  

Need inspiration for creating your own brand guidelines? These are some of our favorite brand books/style guides.  

Set the tone 

When you’re creating content for your brand, make sure your employees understand your brand voice and how you want to communicate with your target audience. Brand alignment builds trust and authority with your customers. Spend time educating your team on how to respond to messages via social media and email, and what type of content you’d like to share. Make sure there isn’t a disconnect between your brand and your stakeholders by creating a brand voice that both your team and clients can stand behind.   

How can you increase sales using branding?  

Now that you’ve put effort into your style guide and identified who you want to serve and how you’re going to communicate with them, you’ve set the foundation for a strong brand.  

Brand awareness and loyalty are strong components of increasing revenue, especially when it comes to long-standing customers or repeat purchases. Position yourself as an expert in the field, and become the go-to resource in your niche. Brand awareness helps people connect with your company. It helps build recognition and trust, which can drive more sales and draw likeminded people to your brand.  

Examples of activities that drive more sales and traffic 

1. Create helpful free content and resources like e-books and reports to drive more brand awareness and establish thought leadership. Use keyword research to come up with relatable topics that have potential to rank well.  
2. Provide value that gives your clients instant wins so they can keep coming back for more.  
3. Use the power of storytelling to create blog content that people love to share.  
4. Use polls and ask questions on Instagram stories or your email list to determine what your customers need and how to serve them better.  
5. Check your social media engagement and reach to see what type of content people are connecting with and use it as your guide to creating more quality content.