Raising Brand Awareness Through Internet Marketing Tools

Site:	Saylor Academy
Course:	BUS602: Marketing Management
Book:	Raising Brand Awareness Through Internet Marketing Tools

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Date:	Friday, May 17, 2024, 5:47 AM

Description

Brand awareness is the first stage in a company's branding strategy. Marketers use promotion within the marketing mix to let consumers know about the brand so that consumers understand what the brand stands for.

This scholarly article discusses brand awareness in internet marketing. Note that it was written with a focus on Lithuania, but internet and social media marketing are currently very common and effective everywhere.

Abstract
Introduction
Research Methodology
The Concept of Raising Brand Awareness
Internet Marketing Concept
Internet Marketing Tools
Conclusions

Abstract

This article analyzes the opinions of different authors on raising brand awareness. It also describes and analyzes the concept of internet marketing and its implementation. The article provides analysis investigation of the most urgent and the most effective online marketing tools in developing brand awareness. The article analyzes websites, internet advertising, social networks, and search engine optimization.

Keywords: brand, brand awareness, internet, advertising, internet marketing

Source: Margarita Isoraite, https://www.redalyc.org/pdf/4495/449545793004.pdf
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Introduction

Brands in the world are ranked by a wide variety of criteria, such as: awareness, monetary value, consumer affection, appreciation, loyalty, etc. If you measure the success of brands like speed, during which the mark reaches the incumbent necessary strength parameters of the previous decades, and the world really has successful brands.

A list would likely include the following top contenders: Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook. Every year the importance of the internet is increasing. For every brand it is important to create brand awareness.

The aim of the article is to assess brand awareness through internet marketing tools. Research arises from the primary research investigative question, "Are internet marketing tools raising brand awareness?"

Research Methodology

Scientific literature analysis reveals theoretical aspects of raising brand awareness, internet marketing concept, and internet marketing tools.

The Concept of Raising Brand Awareness

Hoffman, Fodor, (2010) stated that traditionally brand awareness is measured through tracking studies and surveys. Online, however, marketers have a number of ways to track brand awareness. In the social media environment, the company gains increased exposure to its brand, often in highly relevant contexts every time a person uses an application created by or about the company.

According to Keller (2009), the concept of brand equity and the important intangible value that brands bring to organizations has been the most popular and potentially important marketing topic, emerging in recent years.

Homburg, Klarmannn, and Schmitt (2010) argue that brand awareness informs us about this product. Branding campaigns have a unique goal to increase the value of the product, service or other matter, advertising awareness and visibility.

Pikturnienė (2009) admits that brand awareness (memory, vision, decision-making environment) is a necessary condition for selection.

Černikovaite (2011) argues that brand awareness can be a prerequisite to buy the product. The high quality of the goods or services encourage users to buy and produce means an additional profit. Brand associations are typical consumer attitudes to brand, the company delivers their advertising. Such associations can enrich the brand by new features, perceived by the creation of added value, providing consumers with a positive impact on safety or exclusivity, increasing the value of the brand.

Urbanskienė et al (2006) asserts that brand awareness indicates whether this brand raises the consumer's mind and his thought of a certain category of goods and whether it happens quickly. This is one of the main dimensions of the value of the brand. Incidentally, it is important that brand evaluation of the individual user's position is useless, if the user does not know the whole analyzed brand.

Thus, new original target of the brand is well known, but it maintains a high level of awareness on the market. It also states that the user's aspect on the brand's image can be analyzed through associations, arising when the user analyzes the brand in mind. Association assessments may be: brand association prototypes (features, benefits, common position of brand terms); loyalty, strength, and uniqueness. Apart from that, the brand must not be limited to the superposition that brand name's recognition is very important and this causes the association with trademark, when the user attempts to grasp it.

Probably the most important part of the company's strategic plan is to attract new customers and keep them loyal to the business. Loyal customers increase the company's turnover; the increase of company's awareness is a great tool to increase customer's loyalty. Raising awareness among young people is particularly important for every company for successful expansion of their business in the future, as ideally these new clients grow into long time loyal customers. Without that pipeline, the result may be a decline in customer volume.

Every day a variety of messages come to us; various manufacturers want to tell us about their products or services. Their main goal is to acquire the advertised product or service, and also increase the company's visibility. Hsiao (2011) mentions several authors' opinions: "this is the buyer's ability to recognize and distinguish the brand so that he immediately understands the goods category owned by the trademark. For example, if someone mentioned the well-known theater name, most people immediately recognize it, and think it is the cinema".

Table 1: Concept brand awareness

Author	Concept
Somayeh Shojaee and Azreen bin Azman (2013)	Brand awareness could be raised through marketing communication channels, which notify, remind, and convince customers about their brands, products or services.
Kelly (2015)	Brand awareness is one of the most commonly cited goals of marketers today.
Arora and Sharma (2013)	There are three strategic roles that help to build the brand. Marketers must use social media to serve their brand building objectives. It can help the brand to: build a relationship to become more trusted; differentiate through an emotional connection to become more remarkable and unmistakable; and nurture loyal fans to become more essential.
Vukasovič (2013)	Brand awareness is created through advertising, promotion, selling, public relations, and direct marketing. The company needs to communicate the values of the brand and then reinforce brand associations to start the wheel of usage and experience, and keep it turning. Through the combination of the stimulus of consistent communications and satisfactory usage and experience, brand awareness, confidence and brand equity are built.
Neti (2011)	Benefits of social media include: brand reach and awareness, consumer interactions through transactions, referrals and reputation management.
Chi, Yeh, Chien, Yang (2009)	A product with higher brand awareness will have higher market share and better quality evaluation. In addition, while consumers select a product, they care about perceived quality and brand awareness.
Aaker (1996)	Brand awareness means the ability of a consumer to recognize and recall a brand in different situations.
Hoeffler and Keller (2002)	Brand awareness can be expressed in both depth and width. Depth means how to make consumers recall or identify a brand easily, and width means when consumers purchase a product, a brand name will come to their mind at once. If a product owns brand depth and brand width at the same time, consumers will think of a specific brand when they want to buy a product.
Percy and Rossiter (1992)	Brand awareness can help consumers to recognize a brand from a product category and make purchase decisions.
Ghodeswar (2008)	Different sources and levels of knowledge such as awareness, attributes, benefits, images, thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and experiences get linked to a brand and its understanding by the consumer.
Hong-Youl, (2004); Aperia and Back (2004)	Brand awareness can also occur without any actual involvement or relationship, for example people might recognize a brand and spread word of mouth (WOM) or have an opinion about it.
Sarangan, Ragel, (2014)	Building strong brand awareness requires creating a brand that consumers are sufficiently aware of it. This involves designing of marketing messages and supporting marketing programs that capitalize on a well-convinced brand positioning. Marketing messages can be designed and delivered through both traditional media such as television, radio, newspapers and on-line media such as internet and social media. Marketers have found that interactive and targeted marketing are the keys to success and that traditional advertising is essentially a waste of money.
Zailskaite-Jakste, Kuvykaite (2013)	In social media brand becomes dependent on the wish and will of a consumer. Consumers themselves decide how to interpret a brand, i.e. shared creativity between a brand and consumers. Companies seeking to expand brand awareness must learn to communicate in such a way when a message would spread among consumers like a virus. Word-of-mouth communication or viral marketing when used together with other marketing communications means can increase brand equity. Therefore companies have to prepare for the communication with consumers.
Karam, Saydam (2015)	Brand awareness has turned into an important variable that impacts customer's perceptions of a brand. Achievement in brand management arises from understanding and overseeing brand image and loyalty correctly to create strong characteristics that will impact consumers when making decisions.

Brand awareness can be divided into two main parts:

Brand's recognition. People have heard or seen the brand, but their consciousness can be completely "locked", meaning that they are about this brand and will remember it only in the case if someone mentions it.
Well-known trademarks. These are the brands that most people remember. Most often these are the trademarks of the services that people use most often.
Koniewski (2011) asserts that in total there are five levels of brand awareness:
Company's or brand's rejection and negative associations. If somebody associates the company or brand with something negative, especially if they avoid the company's products or services provided. This can happen for the following reasons, such as: negative customer's complaints, product defects, and other causes that may impair public opinion about the company or brand.
Company's reputation. People were thinking about the company, allowing the decision, if they have not heard about your company, or know what it provides. In order to avoid this, it should make the brand much easier to remember, and associate it with something uniquely different from the others.
Company's recognition. After reaching this level, the customer immediately recognizes the name of the company and knows what it is performing. This allows increasing the company's turnover, because people usually choose the company that they know and have heard about, rather than any other about which they have heard for the first time.
Priority. Potential customers have two choices between two different companies and they can choose where to set up their business. This usually happens due to differentiation. Consumers know which the company is doing in the other way and best meets the needs of the users, the quality of services and communication.
Loyalty. Users regularly choose your company, even if they occasionally suffer from poor service quality, or if a new product with much higher quality and more attractive price entered the market. In order to win the loyalty of users, you need to give them a product that is clearly and strongly differentiated to customers. Visitors need to provide the highest service and its quality that they will not find anywhere else. And finally, the companies have constantly grown together with the customers and adapt to their constantly changing needs.

Brands are remembered with external assistance, if people remember these brands only after someone mentions them, or in case they place them somewhere in their notes; but if people search in their mind for some brands, they will not remember them.

Keller (2009) states that there is a wide range of possible benefits: improved perceptions of product performance; greater customer's loyalty; less vulnerability to competitive marketing actions and marketing crises; larger margins; more flexible customer's response to price decreases and inflexible customer's response to price increases; greater trade or intermediary cooperation and support; increased marketing communication effectiveness; additional licensing and brand extension opportunities.

Internet Marketing Concept

Tsimonis, Dimitriadis (2014) argues during the past decade that the rapid evolution of the internet has offered consumers many new opportunities. Besides the obvious use of searching for information and communicating without boundaries, nowadays it is possible to express feelings and thoughts through social media. First, a real internet marketing tool could be distinguished with the emergence of websites in 1990.

The first simple websites provided people with basic information about the company, services, or products. However, internet content has improved and expanded, and new tools have emerged (pictures, sounds and video clips). The internet marketing execution was one of the most important areas of our lives as the internet occupies more and more of our personal time.

Chi (2011) defines social media marketing as a "connection between brands and consumers, offering a personal channel and currency for the user, centering networking and social interaction".

Campbell (2011) states that internet marketing "is much more to do with what people are doing with the technology, than the technology itself, for rather than merely retrieving information, users are now creating and consuming it, and hence adding value to the websites that permit them to do so".

Somayeh, Azreen bin Azman (2013) admits that improving the level of brand awareness is one of the marketers' challenges, as reflected in the complicated funnel. Brands need to make a strong association with customers in order to achieve the different levels of brand awareness, recognition, recall, top of the mind and become dominant. The existing research, brand exposures, customer engagement, and electronic-word-of-mouth are the factors helping to evaluate the impacts of social media on brand awareness.

Vukasovič (2013) states that the internet provides the opportunity for the companies to reach a wider audience and create compelling value propositions that was not possible before (e.g., Amazon.com range is millions of book titles), while providing new tools for promotion, interaction, and relationship building.

Different authors defined internet marketing in different manners, but essentially all definitions are similar. Internet marketing means marketing activities that are carried out in the Internet space, using the existing web-based tools. Internet marketing includes not only advertising on the websites, but also the factors, such as: e-mails, social networks, etc.

Davidavičienė (2009) states that internet marketing is the internet and related digital technologies marketing objectives and modern marketing concept support. One of the biggest mistakes in business development and the execution of internet marketing strategy is the fact that they did not think forward at least five steps.

A lot of companies are constantly trying to develop and execute internet marketing as soon as possible, without any clear plan, but with the purpose or results to set targets for any guidance that after a certain period of time compared to the company's fulfilled certain actions.

Perfectly planned and executed Internet marketing strategy makes it very easy to distinguish between companies that are committed to work with a long-term perspective, from other companies which carry out internet marketing simply because the market says that it must perform.

The latter company can usually be very easily identified, such as by a lack of information on websites, a shortage of images, or a lack of updates. These are just a few examples of companies that still do not fully understand the internet marketing potential, how much it can help to expand their business, and reach a much larger audience of potential customers with relatively very low costs.

According to the author, one of the most important emerging questions is how all planned internet marketing strategy corresponds nowadays to constantly evolving and changing technology. The best response to this question is to answer this question: "How do you plan to expand your business?".

If the business cannot answer this question, then it has an even bigger problem that needs to be resolved. If the company has the answer to this question, then the forecast should be set where they will be successful in six months, a year or even longer; and accordingly, to create a strategy that will cover both the company's product development and sales.

Internet Marketing Tools

Website

A dedicated brand website is potentially the most powerful brand building tool. A company's website is a critical element of internet marketing and online activity. This is the company's second home online where customers and visitors can, at any time and from anywhere, visit and see the latest news, offers, or products.

However, if the website is designed poorly or not appealing to the eye, is slow and has unnecessary elements, or simply is unattended, it may bring more losses than benefits. In those cases, website visitors will have a negative opinion about the company and its activities, and it is very likely that in the future they might not revisit such page and even avoid the real shop.

Hill (2011) distinguished the following five key points to create a beautiful and user-friendly website:

Bar. Perhaps the most important part of the URL, poorly designed it can make a website completely unusable and eventually scare away visitors. It is very important to create something aesthetically pleasing, but not to overload the field of design. The simpler the design, the easier it will be to understand and manage the website.

Brand integrity of the company. If the company has developed and is developing its own brand, it is essential to incorporate it into a website design, as customers and visitors will associate website design together with the company's brand. This result also creates unified corporate brand integrity.

Text layout. Most people read a web page as they read a book, from top to bottom, and from left to right. During creation of a web page, the most important information should be made on the right top side, in order to help relevant and updated information be seen easily and immediately.

Content. The creation of a short and clear message makes it simpler and easier for visitors to read information, understand and remember it. If the page is overloaded with information, visitors may get lost, not understand where and what to read, may not remember the information they obtain, and may finally get tired of reading and leave the site. When writing text, remove completely unnecessary information, leave white space between rows, and make sure the text is easy to read on a screen.

Trust. Creation of a website that is beautiful, accessible, and appealing to clients and visitors that meets the needs of web design, allows the company to form a larger and stronger sense of mutual trust.

People will notice it immediately and positively assess it; the recovery will be felt in the enterprise. It is not enough to create a beautiful website; it is necessary to maintain a warm, pleasant and fast relationship between employees, the existing and potential customers.

Summing up, if the company has created a beautiful and well thought-out web page, with useful information, visitors will have a more positive experience. That in turn will contribute to the improvement of the image of the company. Some companies are improving their public image when existing customers provide positive feedback.

Advertising on the internet

According to Adjugler (2008), almost 15-20 years ago, when the internet had just started to spread and gain its popularity, the internet advertising space could be compared with advertising in the media. Customers bought advertising space in a desired site for a certain period of time and placed it without knowing whether the advertisement would interest visitors.

Advertising rates were determined by simply taking into account the advertising space and the average amount of site visitors, even without knowing whether they will see the ad or not. Traditional media usually follows the same principle, only the price is determined according to the market circulation.

Such advertising was and is very inefficient for attracting visitors and showing the prices, so advancing technology improved advertising opportunities. Over time more modern and efficient advertising appeared that allowed for a few changing ads in the same ad space, so it was possible to find out which ads were more interesting to visitors or completely uninteresting.

Later a "cost per thousand advertising principle" developed, a standard set of advertising cost per thousand website visitors where the advertisement was displayed. Over time, other payment models more aligned to modern times emerged, such as "cost per click" (pre-determined price for a click on an ad), and the number of clicks can be shown.

For a while, advertising became much more imaginative, with moving animations, etc. Modern software has become so sophisticated that it is able to provide advertising exclusively in a particular region or population to reach different target audiences, based on demographic data.

Although there are a number of promotional tools, the perfect tool for all advantages and disadvantages still does not exist. The use of promotional tools varies widely from the advertiser to the objectives and the audience, so this should also be taken into account.

According to Chan (2015), using both internet and traditional advertising contribute to the company's brand promotion and awareness-raising. The author used the present literature, confirming that internet advertising is an especially effective tool to improve the company's brand awareness.

According to him, the advanced modern internet technology allows internet users to apply only the most relevant and updated information on exactly what they need without any unwanted content. Using the latest and the most efficient analytical data processing programs, Internet users can get ideas on certain issues as well as understand and investigate their deeds.

Most importantly, all of this information comes from social networks, online forums or discussions. This allows businesses to provide the most important and most relevant content to consumers that meets their expectations in order to increase their awareness of the society companies can "run noise" in the Internet space. This can be done by creating a viral video or advertising widely throughout cyberspace in order to promote positive public feedback "word of mouth".

Social networks

Social media marketing involves the use of internet social media tools, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn in order to reach consumers innovatively. Social networking helps to promote the company and its activities. Active social networks try to attract more new customers or visitors. People are always much more interested in engaging with corporate social networks, than just visiting their websites.

In social networks people can directly, very simply, and informally interact with a business, and create much stronger two-way communication. This enhances mutual trust and strengthens brand image, and eventually can increase corporate visibility. In order to achieve this, business social networks have to be particularly active, just as much or even more than their users.

Genslera, Völcknerb, Liu-Thompkins, Wiertz (2013) argue that the rise of social media and the associated possibilities of large-scale consumer-to-consumer interaction and easy user generation of content focus the spotlight on the importance of recognizing, and if possible managing, the multi-vocal nature of brand authorship advocated by the cultural branding view. Consumers in particular are more empowered by social media, as these technologies enable consumers to share their brand stories widely with peers.

The popularity of social networks (e.g. Facebook) have grown exponentially in recent years. Whereas once only few people knew or used social networks, nowadays almost everyone has and actively uses social networks.

Social networks are free - visitors do not pay for their activities in social networks, and benefits can be much higher than from ads.

Social networks enhance two-way communication. Users can communicate much faster and conveniently with companies via social networks, expressing their views and proposals.

Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and LinkedIn are popular social networks. However, only a few of them can be analyzed as the most popular social networks, because some of them have not gained great popularity in Lithuania.

At the time of this study, Facebook in Lithuania is used by 68% of the population, 46% of which use it on daily basis. Meanwhile, the second largest social network Google+ is used by almost 27% of the population, only 8% of them use it regularly. Professional social network LinkedIn In Lithuania is used by almost 6% of the population. Other foreign popular social networks, such as Twitter, Pinterest, or Tumblr are not popular in Lithuania.

Facebook. Facebook's story began with a simple idea to create a single student's social network for high school students where they could easily communicate and share information. However, the situation has arisen that after the great success, Facebook has become accessible to everyone, no matter where they lived, worked, or studied. After several years it experienced great success, to the point where every fifth person in the world had a Facebook account.

When creating a Facebook page for your business, it is important to provide enough information about your business so people visiting your page can immediately be aware of what you do, know the company's working hours, etc. Be sure to include important information such as: the level of prices, the information about the service, product's range and their groups, payment methods, and contact information.

It is also helpful to provide information about the company, such as its history, the services provided, its goals and values. It is advisable once in every few months to check whether the written information is correct and whether it is still relevant for that period. It may happen that the company has moved, or changed its working hours and contact information. Information should be presented in an engaging a way as possible. If it is too boring, you might risk losing potential customers.

For creating a good and attractive page, it is important to provide:

photo and a brief description;
few sentences about some recent events;
good knowledge of your business or local community;
special offers, discounts or promotions (briefly and clearly);
information about the company's announcement in press.

Table 2: Facebook Statistics


Facebook Statistics	Data
Total number of monthly active Facebook users	1,440,000,000
Total number of mobile Facebook users	874,000,000
Increase of Facebook users from 2014 to 2015	12%
Total number of minutes spent on Facebook each month	640,000,000
Percent of all Facebook users who log on in any given day	48%
Average time spent on Facebook per visit	18 minutes
Total number of Facebook pages	74,200,000
Facebook Demographics	Data
Percent of 18-34 year people who check Facebook when they wake up	48%
Percent of 18-34 year people who check Facebook before they get out of bed	28%
Average number of friends per Facebook user	130
Average number of pages, groups, and events a user is connected to	80
Average number of photos uploaded per day	205
Number of fake Facebook profiles	81,000,000
Global Facebook Reach Statistics
Number of languages available on the Facebook site	70
Percent of Facebook users who are outside the United States	75%
Number of users who helped translate Facebook	30,000
Facebook Platform Statistics
Average number of aps installed on Facebook each day	20 million
Total number of apps and websites integrated with Facebook	7 million
Every 20 Minutes on Facebook
Links shared	1 million
Friends requested	2 million
Messages sent	3 million
Facebook Company Statistics
Highest Facebook stock price	$96.95
Lowest Facebook stock price	$18.06
Total number of Facebook employees	4,619
Total Facebook revenue in 2014	$12,466,000,000
Total Facebook revenue in 2013	$7,872,000,000
Total Facebook revenue in 2012	$5,090,000,000

Google+. Google+ was created and managed by the company Google. Google is a California-based, multinational internet company, providing digital products and services, such as: online search and advertising, cloud computing, and software. In May 2015, Google was ranked first amongst the most visited multi-platform web properties in the United States with 242 million U.S. unique visitors and a market share of 64.2 percent among the leading U.S search engine providers.

Google's market capitalization in February of 2015 was valued at 370.2 billion U.S. dollars. Similar to Facebook and other social networks, Google+ allowed you to create personal or business accounts. People can share and look for the content as well as in all social networks. Despite the similarities between these two social networks there are important further differences:

Circles were considered the most frequently mentioned and the largest Google+ advantages and differences, compared to Facebook. Just like in real life, people could create their desired groups (such as family, close friends, relatives, classmates, co-workers, etc.) in Google+ network. They can also add the desired parties to one or more circles. All this makes you to share information only with certain individuals.
"1+" - this is equivalent to Google+ Facebook "like" button. People clicking on this button show that they like the content.
Human mention. Writing a comment or message and pressing + sign and immediately without entering the person's or company name, they will be automatically informed about their commemoration. This made it easy to share news or information to certain people, and companies could become much more active in communicating with the public or customers.
"Hashtag". Makes it easier to find messages with a specific theme or content. Users create and use hashtags by placing the hash character (or number sign) pressing the # in front or unspaced phrase, either in the main text of a message or at the end. Searching for that hashtag will present each message that has been tagged with it.
Hangouts. Online chat with Google+ users, where up to 10 people could participate.

The search engine usage statistics for 2013:

Google: 67.5%
Bing: 16.7%
Yahoo: 11.6%
Ask: 2.6%
AOL: 1.7%

Figure 1: search engine usage statistics for 2013

In general, it is advisable to post new content at least once a day, or even up to several times a day. In addition, if your message mentions a person or company that is worth highlighting, tagging them allows people to find it much easier.

Conclusions

Brand awareness can be raised through internet marketing tools, which notify, remind, and convince customers about their brands, products, or services. The client may encounter the brand in various ways, for example, reviewing videos, playing games, spending time on the site, communicating with other customers, and watching advertisements.

In order to increase brand awareness it is necessary to do the following: increase interaction with your brand, build positive brand associations, increase brand loyalty by linking it with the target audience, and motivate customers to get acquainted with your brand and associated products.

Publications in various media channels strengthen the brand's position in the consumer's mind and increase brand recognition. Brand awareness is created through advertising, promotion, selling, and public relations through the internet. Internet marketing includes not only advertising on the websites, but also emails, and social networks.

Social media marketing involves the use of internet social media tools (such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) to reach consumers in innovative ways and to increase brand awareness. Social networking helps to promote the company and its brand awareness.