Brand Familiarity: Strategies for Marketers to Establish a Strong Presence

What is brand familiarity?

Brand familiarity is the next step in the process after brand awareness. Awareness means consumers are aware your brand exists, while brand familiarity means they're familiar with it in some way, allowing them to easily recognize the brand and potentially influencing their brand preference.

Unfortunately, while you can say whether a customer has an awareness of a brand, you can't necessarily determine familiarity because there are different levels of knowledge of a brand. For instance, a customer who uses a brand is familiar with it, while a customer who knows what a brand offers is familiar with it. Both customers are familiar with the brand, but only one is more likely to have brand loyalty because they've used the product or service.

A brand that is familiar to consumers is one that they can easily recognize and recall, such as through advertising, packaging, or word-of-mouth and at regular customer brand engagement touchpoints. Brand familiarity can be built through consistent marketing efforts, including paid ads, product placements, and branding.

Brand familiarity is important for both offline and digital brands. The goal is to create brand exposure and ensure that consumers become familiar with the brand name, logo, tagline, and overall brand identity.

High brand familiarity can have several benefits for a company. It can enhance consumer trust and confidence in the brand, as familiarity often breeds a sense of reliability and credibility. It can also make the decision-making process easier for consumers, as they are more likely to consider a familiar brand when making a purchase. Additionally, brand familiarity can lead to a positive brand attitude or perception by building trust, which can foster brand loyalty.

However, it's important to note that brand familiarity does not guarantee business success on its own. Other factors such as product quality, price, customer service, and overall brand reputation also play crucial roles in shaping consumer perceptions and influencing buying decisions.

Understanding your target audience can help you find strategies to shape brand attitudes and improve advertising effectiveness by developing a brand familiarity construct. You should first identify your target market and conduct consumer research to understand their brand attitudes and preferences.

You can uncover consumer opinions about your brand and its competition with comprehensive market research. For instance, you might find that consumers are aware of your brand but don't know much about it. With that information, you can create more effective marketing campaigns that increase brand awareness and educate customers about your values, mission, and products.

Then, you should analyze your competitors' strategies to gauge audience expectations and determine the best method to build brand familiarity.

Develop a consistent brand identity

Every quality marketing strategy begins with branding. Without branding, your brand won't have an identity that can help it stand out in a crowded marketplace.

There are different types of branding, ranging from your corporate and personal brand to individual branding for each product line. To increase brand recognition and familiarity, you must remain consistent in your brand story and branding elements. For instance, you should have a memorable logo and visual identity and develop unique yet consistent messaging across all brand touchpoints.

If you have multiple brands designed for different target markets, you can consider how different branding elements might affect brand recognition. Do you want to focus on an individual product line or the entire business?

Whatever you decide, your brand storytelling must remain consistent throughout every customer touchpoint, both online and off.

As mentioned, you build brand familiarity through a variety of marketing strategies that increase consumer brand engagement and improve brand perception. Brand awareness plays a critical role in brand familiarity, but it's not the only thing to consider. First, consumers must be aware the brand exists. Then, you'll need to provide them with content and information that increases their brand familiarity.

Create valuable and engaging content

Content can be used to both attract and convert customers. Brand awareness campaigns can bring prospects to your website, where they can become familiar with your brand by learning more about it and its products and services.

You can create videos, podcasts, infographics, blog posts, and articles to help your prospects learn more about your business and its industry.

Keep in mind that promoting this content is just as important as creating it. Organic strategies can help you attract customers, but usually, a combination of organic and paid strategies can yield the best results if your goal is to improve brand familiarity because they allow you to measure results quickly and learn new ways to improve performance.

Incorporate SEO best practices into content creation

The main goal of content is to drive website traffic and increase brand awareness. Only after a visitor has landed on your site can you start to build brand familiarity. Keyword research and optimization will help you rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) to drive more website traffic.

You should use on-page optimization techniques like keyword implementation to help search engines understand your content and rank it effectively. In addition, you should have a mobile-friendly design and navigation that makes it easy for customers to learn more about your brand.

SEO is a cost-effective way to build brand familiarity over time. However, it's important to realize that SEO takes time. You won't improve brand familiarity with a single optimized blog post. Instead, you'll have to continuously create optimized content that drives traffic to your website, where you have a chance to communicate with customers at yet another touchpoint.

Your website isn't the only tool for establishing brand familiarity online. With social media, you can measure brand attitudes, increase customer brand engagement, and develop brand loyalty strategies that keep customers coming back for more.

Finding the right social media platform and developing a content calendar can help you save time while building valuable relationships with customers that make them remember your brand in the future.

Choosing the right social media platforms for your brand

Consumer research can help you determine which social media platform is right for your brand based on consumer preferences. Ultimately, you'll need to determine the best ways to communicate with your audience based on the unique user profile of each platform.

For instance, LinkedIn is a social media platform for professionals. If you're a marketing agency promoting your services to businesses, it's a good option. Meanwhile, if you're an e-commerce business that sells pet supplies, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook are better options for your brand.

Developing a content strategy for social media

Having a social media marketing content strategy means posting regular updates and taking the time to engage with followers. Engaging with your followers can influence their brand preference and perception of your business, making them more likely to purchase your products over the competition.

Social media gives you the unique opportunity to tell your brand's story on a more personal level to build customer relationships. You can even leverage user-generated content (UGC) and influencer partnerships to strengthen your brand online.

Your social media content strategy should consist of a variety of different content types ranging from videos to infographics, photos, and other visual elements that engage your audience. It may take some experimentation to determine which organic posting strategies work best based on your audience's preferences, but reviewing your post performance regularly can be beneficial.

Monitor and adapt your brand familiarity strategies

Building brand familiarity means taking additional steps after building awareness. While you must have brand awareness before leading customers through the marketing funnel, your marketing efforts shouldn't stop there. You can't expect customers to convert on their own.

Instead, you must generate interest to entice customers to want to learn more about your products and services. Mailchimp can help you build a brand familiarity strategy that increases brand awareness and recognition. Try our suite of marketing tools to help you drive websites and conversions with quality content.