Raising Brand Awareness Through Internet Marketing Tools

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. 

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.