When you’re trying to build your business, it can be hard to attract customers and keep them coming back. This is where brand awareness has a huge impact. This concept can be hard for some small and medium-sized businesses to achieve. That’s why we have compiled this list of five ways to raise your brand awareness. These methods include:

1. Using social media and posting consistently

2. Working with influencers

3. Creating merchandise

4. Holding giveaways

5. Creating content

You can apply these methods to both online stores and brick-and-mortar locations. Find out how you can use these strategies for your own business below. But why do we care so much about brand awareness in the first place? Keep reading to understand why brand awareness is so important and what you can do to bolster yours.

Importance of Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is so important because it’s crucial to acquiring customers and ensuring they return to your shop or website. Brand awareness is how a customer recognizes your business and it’s what encourages them to come back. Their return also depends on your business’s image and trustworthiness in the eye of the public. As customers decide who to shop with—whether to go with your brand or your competitor’s—brand awareness plays a huge role in their decision-making.

Using Social Media

Social media has become such a critical part of building brand awareness that many of our recommendations fall under this umbrella alone (but not all). Many social media marketing methods are completely free (save for the obvious ones like advertising.)

Post Consistently

Consistency is key when it comes to posting on social media. Most of the popular social media platforms and their algorithms are tailored to picking up consistent content creators. The more you post, the more likely your target audience will come across one of your posts and interact with it or follow you. On top of this, most customers won’t be convinced to click through and shop after seeing your posts just once. You’ll have to post consistently in order to appear multiple times on their social feed while they’re browsing. Another way to appear on someone’s social feed more often is to invest in paid social ads, although this can get expensive.

Work With Influencers

Are you familiar with any influencers in your industry who have a medium-to-large following? Flex your networking muscles and reach out to see if they would like to partner with your brand. Influencer marketing has become extremely prevalent in the social media world, and it can be useful when you’re building your following and brand recognition. It can be difficult to partner with influencers who have huge followings, so start small. Reach out to a popular local spot to see if they would feature your products or services. Influencer marketing is a world in itself, but once you get going with it, you’ll pick it up quickly.

Create Your Own Line of Merchandise

One of the more traditionally effective ways to boost brand awareness is to promote your logo through merchandise marketing. Creating your own merch may seem like a hard-to-reach goal, but it’s easily accessible to many companies with a variety of budgets. To start creating your own merchandise, all you need is a good logo, a source for bulk apparel orders (such as here at KBethos), and a way to customize them with your logo. It’s not hard to find customization options for your bulk merch—you can easily find embroidery, screen printing, and other customization options online or locally. Once you receive your customized merch, you can start selling it or giving it out to customers for free. This may seem contradictory, but branded apparel and other items work a bit like billboards to attract more eyes and interest in your business.

Hold Giveaway Contests

One way you can combine your social media marketing efforts with your merchandise is to host giveaways. Once you gain a bit of a following and start recognizing reoccurring names in your notifications, reward your dedicated followers and attract new ones by hosting merch giveaways on your various platforms. Giveaways are also an effective way to boost your brand recognition through word of mouth. You can encourage or require your followers to tag a friend in order to participate in the giveaway, which in turn helps get more eyes on your giveaway, social media page, and products. When your giveaway period ends, ship the merchandise to your winner or have them stop by your store.

Start a Blog or Video Channel

Creating quality content for your website is one of the most important ways to bolster your search engine rankings and increase the quality of your site. Try starting a blog and posting articles on your site to feature products, answer customer questions, and keep up with news in the industry. The more unique and high-quality content you put out, the more likely your website will get picked up by search engines and score that coveted page-one ranking.

Another option is to do the same thing with video content. You could film video content and publish it on YouTube or put it directly on your website. Videos are unique because they’re excellent at grabbing a viewer’s attention. Another great aspect of video content is that your viewer can associate a face to your brand, along with your logo and anything other branding you include.

These are some of the easiest and most effective methods for building your brand, whether you have an online store or a physical one. Follow these five methods to raise your brand awareness to help kickstart your business. If you’re interested in starting with branded merchandise, you can easily shop with us here at KBethos. We have lots of wholesale materials such as bulk plain snapback hats you can customize with your logo. Hats and apparel make great items to start with; almost no one can turn down a good hat or T-shirt. Soon you’ll have lots of loyal customers lined up to support your business.