Branding is at the center of every successful business, helping them to stay on top of the competition, reach new customers, and ultimately earn more money through sales.
However, branding can be complex to master, especially since there are so many external factors you need to be aware of when developing your approach.
One of the most influential and exciting strategies businesses should strongly consider is brand salience, an innovative way of building awareness and becoming a household name in your niche.
This article will guide you through everything you need about brand salience. You’ll learn how it works, the science behind the idea, and most importantly, the best ways to use it to your advantage in business.
Just what is brand salience? And why is it important?
Whether it’s groceries, new clothes, a meal out, or even a simple cup of coffee, we make daily ad-hoc purchases. When considering what to buy, we’re often drawn to brands and names we know and trust to deliver what we need at that exact moment.
Brand salience is the level at which your brand is thought of, recognized, or noticed when a customer makes a purchase decision. Strong brand salience means that you’re recognized as a household name, as customers are drawn to trust you and will buy a product or service from you with confidence.
On the other hand, brands with low brand salience are an afterthought, as customers may be unfamiliar with or even unaware of their presence in the market.
Brand salience relies heavily on creating positive memory structures, or positive associations, with your customers. With consistent messaging, customers become familiar with your brand, begin building a relationship with you, and will think of you first when needed.
Four easy ways to improve your brand salience
Like any metric, brand salience can be improved all the time. Below are four different ways you can utilize the strategy to grab a customer’s attention or make a lasting impression on them:
1. Create an emotional connection with the customer
Emotions are powerful things, especially when it comes to marketing. Customers are more likely to support a brand if they feel some connection to it.
Research has shown that over 62% of customers feel emotionally connected to the brands and products they buy most from. From this, we begin to see that customers can be motivated by your storytelling and the emotions you tap into just as much as the product or service itself.
Department store John Lewis, for example, is famous for creating highly emotive Christmas advertisements. Customers eagerly await the campaigns every holiday season to see what emotional story they will tell next.
2. Improve your brand awareness
Brand awareness is how familiar a potential customer is with your brand and can be quite influential in helping grow your brand salience. However, building awareness in this digital age can be challenging for many new businesses.
Especially as we live in an age where many customers search on how to block ads, traditional ways of reaching target audiences can be difficult. Instead, you must be savvy in your messaging to ensure you reach customers.
Ways to improve your brand awareness include:
- Being consistent: Ensure your brand appears the same wherever it appears, using the same color scheme, logos, and tone of content that is easy to remember and identify.
- Using different platforms: It’s no longer viable to build awareness through one avenue, as customers use a variety of social media platforms, like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. These platforms can allow you to engage directly with customers, share news and updates, and identify rising trends relevant to your niche.
- Partnering with influencers: Partnering with social media influencers can be an effective way of building awareness across social media and capitalizing on existing audiences.
- Focusing on media relations: An essential way of building brand awareness and salience is by contacting relevant media organizations and journalists. Positive coverage of your business can help make a lasting impression on readers.
3. Personalize experiences
Nowadays, customers expect memorable experiences when engaging with a brand. Research has shown that up to 86% of customers have said that personalization influences their purchase across various sectors, including groceries, entertainment, health and beauty, and electronics.
Personalization means that the customer feels seen and that the messages they receive are relevant, timely, and individualized. This can be done simply by addressing customers by name and recommending and curating relevant products and services in which you know they have shown interest.
Other highly effective methods include creating loyalty programs, which reward customers for spending their time and money with you and improving and simplifying the user experience when using websites or customer services.
By creating memorable experiences, customers grow to trust your brand messaging and help improve brand salience at the time of purchase.
4. Monitor your performance to identify your brand salience
Marketing is fast-paced and ever-changing, with different trends and customer habits merging daily. As such, keeping your finger on the pulse and being flexible in your approach to brand salience is essential.
You can gather customer feedback through specialized surveys, interactive quizzes, chatbots, and focus groups. These can help relay critical information about customer perception and satisfaction, helping you adjust your messaging and work on improving potential weaknesses.
You can also analyze customer activity to identify potential problems harming your brand salience. For example, suppose many customers have a specific item in their basket but decide not to commit to the purchase.
In that case, brand salience is weak, and something is happening in those closing moments that work against you and drive customers away. By making changes and testing for improvements, you can actively measure how your brand salience is developing.
It’s important to keep in mind that various elements contribute to brand salience. By implementing each of the strategies discussed in this article, businesses can set themselves apart from their competition and create a strong and lasting relationship with their customers.
