Wikipedia defines Brand Awareness as the extent to which customers are able to remember or recognize a brand at any point in time. The importance of brand awareness cannot be overemphasized when it comes to launching a new product or service. Brand awareness creates the recognition of a product or service’s unique quality and value over that of its competitors. Brand awareness also leads to an increase in sales and the overall distinct promotion of the brand.
Since the inception of marketing, various businesses, organizations, and brands have adopted various methods to promote the goods, services, or ideas they offer. As a result, marketing has become an indispensable part of any business.
Prior to the advancement of present-day technology, business owners were restricted to traditional methods of advertising which include the use of Radio, Newspaper, Magazine, Flyers, Television, Billboard advertising, Bumper stickers as well as mouth to mouth or personal selling.
These conventional methods are still in place. However, in today’s world which is popularly called a Global village, these conventional methods limit the reach of brands. The new era of digital advancements has made the world an even smaller global village. As a result, brands no longer rely solely on these conventional methods for brand promotion as their reach is now quite limited.
As of 2020, there are 99.05 million internet users in Nigeria alone. Businesses want to grow and want their brand efforts to be known. Therefore, they take their business where their audience is. Forward-thinking brands have taken advantage of a large number of eyeballs on the internet to get their business in front of the right people. How? By simply integrating digital media platforms into their marketing mix. This is not to say traditional platforms have been abandoned. These platforms are still relevant but without adding digital media to the mix, your brand’s reach will be limited.
WHAT IS DIGITAL MEDIA?
The Centre for Digital Media defines Digital Media as a blend of technology and content. SpringBoard refers to Digital media as any kind of information broadcast to us through a screen that might be found on websites, applications, software packages, video games, and more. All of these definitions are correct. Digital media is a distribution of content across various digital platforms. According to Wikipedia, it can be created, viewed, distributed, modified, and preserved on digital electronics devices. Some examples are audio, video, images, blog posts, social media, e-books, and more.
BENEFITS
Targeted Reach
Digital media enables targeted audience reach. This means promoted brand content only reaches the people who will be interested in your product or service offering. Unlike traditional media platforms that target a general audience, digital media helps to focus the product or services you are promoting to the targeted audience or group it is intended for.
Also, the relevance of digital media for brand awareness, sustainability, and overall business development cannot be overstated. In using digital media platforms, a brand can own an entire website, different free social media pages to display or promote its services or products to a larger audience. Traditional media is more streamlined. You cannot own permanent space to push your product or service without paying for it consistently.
Top of Mind Awareness
Top of mind awareness simply means being among the top brand in your niche consumers remember when a product or service you brand offers is being considered by their peers. Study(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand_awareness#cite_note-1) shows that Consumers will normally purchase one of the top three brands in their consideration set. Digital media, if properly utilized can help your brand achieve this. This is because the major objective of virtually every effective digital media campaign is to increase the possibility that the brand will be included in a potential customer’s consideration sets. Consequently, if consumers are constantly exposed to catchy and valuable content from a brand via digital media platforms E.g. social media, display, etc., the brand can successfully achieve brand retention and top of mind awareness.
Measured Performance
Unlike traditional platforms that can only give you estimates about the number of people who will probably hear or see your advert or content, digital media dives deep to show you valuable metrics that measure the effectiveness of the campaign you have run.
These metrics like the exact number of views, engagement, consumer actions, etc. will help your business make informed decisions about what consumers are interested in, how they interact with your brand, and much more.
Conclusion
It must be noted that although the use of some traditional media platforms like print may be diminishing, it still plays a very important part of the marketing mix. This is especially important for your brand if your target audience is more inclined to print than to digital platforms.
At Caritas Communications, our experienced team of digital media experts constantly helps our clients to create integrated digital media plans to grow and engage their target audiences effectively. If you require digital media services but do not have an inhouse team to help you achieve your business goals and objectives, we are available to step in. Contact us.