Brand awareness really is one of the most important factors to look at in the whole advertising and marketing process. Every business wants their company’s brand to stand out and have a strong presence in their industry. This makes their product and services stand out from the crowd and be instantly recognisable to potential customers thus making them an immediate choice gaining them new business over their competitors.
Each day as we walk down the street, we see advertising in shop windows and billboards, on the side of buses and on the walls of train stations. These adverts are constantly making an imprint on our subconscious mind, and we can easily recognize them. These big-name companies who advertise in the prementioned locations do so primarily to maintain that brand recognition. Cola-Cola for example is a company that has invested hugely over the decades on maintaining their brand. When someone mentions to you the words Cola-Cola you think immediately of the famous Red with white writing logo. It is amazing that this image comes into your head before the image of a glass filled with the brown liquid! The same is true for McDonalds, when you hear that word the image that comes into your mind is the ‘Golden Arches’ logo and not a burger. This is fantastic brand recognition! The best!
In reality though, moving companies unfortunately do not have the advertising and marketing budgets that these big multi-national powerhouses have. This however does not mean that you shouldn’t work to maintain your brand and make it recognisable in the industry and beyond. You should! It is essential!
Brand awareness is the extent to which customers are able to recall or recognize a brand under different conditions. This is very important in the moving industry as you want your potential customers to think of you first when they have a move coming up and call upon your moving services ahead of those of your competition. To achieve this, you don’t need an advertising and marketing budget of thousands of dollars, you just need to be brand smart! By concentrating on and perfecting the below factors you can achieve a high level of brand awareness and stand out from the crowd!
The first item on the agenda is Brand Consistency. This is important and one that I see being messed up a lot across the moving industry. It is impossible to achieve brand awareness if your marketing is all over the place. If you are using different colours for different advertising, different fonts for written material and different styles of blog posts or social media posts then it is difficult to create an image of your brand in the customers subconscious. You need to show a clear and consistent advertising and marketing strategy. Stick to a concrete format for your social media posts and use the same colours and font for all advertising materials. This builds your brand and helps to get it stuck into your customers’ minds.
Brand maintenance is the next key to brand success. I see so many times across the moving industry that a moving company rolls out a superb marketing campaign but then goes quiet. This is such a shame and a wasted opportunity. A brand needs to be maintained or it gets forgotten! A great tip to maintain your brand presence is to draw up a simple check list laying out the things to do each time you make a social media post. For example, you can have, ‘Marketing Mondays’ every week and have a checklist for your staff to follow. Here is a quick example:
- One blog post every Monday
- Share this blog post on social media channels
- Get all employees to ‘Like’ and ‘Share’ the blog post
- Post photos from a move last week
- Get all employees to ‘Like’ and ‘Share’ the blog post
This simple check list keeps your marketing campaigns consistent and regular and will go a long way in your quest to achieve brand awareness and to get ahead of your moving competition!
