What is Brand Awareness and How to Improve it using Referral Marketing?

Increasing brand awareness is of paramount concern for any marketing team. It is brand awareness that drives the significant sales of a product or service. It also leads to creating loyal and long term customers. The immense power of referral marketing can be used to generate brand awareness. But, many businesses still do not know how to harness the power of referral marketing. Here, we are providing a guide on how to use referral marketing to grow and spread awareness of your brand.

What is Brand awareness?

Brand awareness means how much customer is aware of your brand or business. It is a critical part of the decision-making process. People usually make a purchase from those brands that they have heard of before. It does not need the recollection of the name of the business by the consumer. It is enough if the consumer only knows the facts and features of a product or service by a brand.

It can be those unique features that differentiate your product from any other product in the market. The differentiating features could be as simple and unique. Example – A person may refer a product to his or her friend by the color of the packaging. In that case, the color is the differentiating factor. Therefore color differentiation is creating brand awareness.

 The two significant concepts of brand awareness are recognition and recall. Apart from them, a multitude of things that are vital for building awareness.

Why you should not ignore brand awareness

Ignoring brand awareness and not trying to boost it can cause harm to the business. Business can become invisible in the market; even it has the right product or service. New products are always entering the market. So existing businesses must keep finding ways to stay relevant in the market.

Thus, in the marketing world, every business keeps trying to boost its brand awareness. Even well-established businesses are part of it. The business uses different techniques, such as advertisements or promotional schemes, to increase awareness.

Importance of Brand Awareness

• It is a way to analyze how well customers know about the brand.
• It helps to find out how users are making buying decisions.
• It can be a sign of the success or failure of the brand’s power, consumer happiness, equity, and loyalty
• It assists in product differentiation
• It grows the sales of a business by creating a good impression that encourages people to buy.

How do referral programs drive brand awareness?

Referral programs operate through word of mouth. This word of mouth can be done in many ways. It can be through face-to-face discussions and telephonic conversations.

 It can also be online reviews, social media, testimonials, and other similar sources. All these sources provide chances to boost the brand awareness of a business. It is one of the most effective ways to increase awareness of a business. Only a fraction of the expenditure compared to other marketing methods are involved. It is also highly helpful in generating high user acquisitions and conversions.

To create and develop brand awareness, it is a must to highlight your brand. Conversations should revolve around your brand. The best way to do this is through a referral marketing program. A successful referral marketing is one which rewards the referrer and the referred.

This provides incentives to the referrer to provide referrals. It also fascinates the referred to take up the referrals.

 You can even reward those consumers who genuinely like and recommend to everyone they know. These consumers have a much higher impact on buying decisions than other referrers. Businesses should also reach out to those people who influence your targeted market. Even if they are not the targeted consumers of the business, they should be rewarded.

Your referral program process should be smooth so that timely rewards can be given. This is possible only after accurately tracking the referrals. The referral program should be made as easy as possible. People should find it relatively easier to refer your business to others. A template or a sharable link on social media can be created. 

One of the most common referral marketing programs gives discounts on service. It will be cost-effective for the business, and even it will make referrers happy. These consumers are likely to share their experiences and recommend the business. They do this through various means like word of mouth or social networking. People trust these referrals, that comes from the people they know. This trust factor is more than any other type of promotional tool. 

Along with referral programs, tracking software is an absolute necessity. The tracking software helps to analyze the data related to a referral program. It optimizes it to provide the best interests of the business. Accurately tracking referrals will help you to reward the referral source rapidly. Rapid rewards provide the required incentives to the user to provide more referrals. It can be the factor that decides whether your referral marketing program will be a success or not.

Conclusion

Different concepts come together to create brand awareness. These are brand, brand recall, brand recognition, and branding. All these concepts together create a successful campaign to boost brand awareness. The best method to boost brand awareness is by implementing referral marketing programs. It has the power to reach out to thousands of new customers at once.

Keep learning and sharing.