Product awareness

Product awareness is about people knowing about your offering, gaining a deeper understanding of its functionality and most importantly how it meets their needs. This brings big benefits:

• Increased reach - The more customers that know about you, means more considering you for purchase.

• Reduced marketing costs - The more customers know about you, the less you’ll have to market. This may even result in word-of-mouth and organic discovery, further lowering costs.

Authenticity is very important to customers. This means doing what you say. For example, if you push your environmentally friendly characteristics, these should match your actions. In this report by Stackla, they found “88% of consumers say authenticity is important when deciding which brands they like and support (with 50% saying it’s very important”).

Improving awareness for a target customer group

The success of these improvement initiatives be tracked using Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).

• Advertising campaigns - These are designed to bring awareness of products and services through paid channels. These should show how you differentiate from the competition. Your advertising should follow your brand guidelines such as colours and tone of voice. Advertising is a subset of marketing.

• Marketing campaigns - These are broader than paid advertising and focus on ensuring your offerings are desirable to your target customer group. Marketing can include after-sales messaging that aids customer satisfaction and retention. For example, upskilling existing customers in a new product feature. Many of the activities listed here fall under the definition of marketing. For example, you may run a campaign to upskill people in a new product feature and include a video or an article about it.

• Be clear on your differentiators and ensure you regularly message these.

• Promote how your product aligns with your brand values. This is especially effective where they align with your target customer group, such as being environmentally friendly.

• Create valuable content:

  • Thought leadership and innovation in the form of videos, blogs and articles.

  • Allow customers to easily share this with others.

  • Monitor social media for the latest discussion topics, FAQs and misinformation.

• Encourage customers to leave positive reviews of you on third-party platforms, ideally with information about what they liked about your product.

• Create customer testimonials:

  • Have a clear goal and make the information concise.

  • Be easy to understand.

  • Demonstrate the benefits the customer has achieved, ideally numerically.

• Demonstrate expertise by taking part in events such as conferences, podcasts and meetups.

• Appear in the media, ideally without paying. This is known as earned media. This is because you have to put in sufficient effort to make yourself newsworthy, and there can be costs, such as larger venues to pay for.

• Work with influencers and industry experts to get your brand more coverage:

  • It is especially effective to have someone trusted to promote a product without being paid to do so

  • Be a guest on a blog or video (such as YouTube)

Measuring product awareness

The information below is provided as a starting point. There are many tools on the market that help automate the gathering of these metrics.

• Search volume - The amount of direct searches for your product on platforms like Google.

• Direct traffic - The number of people putting your URL directly into their browser. For example, www.innosee.co.uk.

• Product page views - Tools like Google Analytics and Hotjar can tell you the number of page views and how long customers stayed there (time on page).

• Social media:

  • The amount of mentions on social media.

  • The amount of interaction with social media content. This can include likes, comments and shares.

• Customer surveys - From these, you can gain quantitative (numerical) and qualitative (the reasons behind the numbers) results. Surveys allow you to gain valuable information about your customer’s knowledge and opinion of your product.

• Referrals - People arriving at your website from external sources such as social media platforms.

• Earned media - The amount of attention you are receiving from the media where you have not paid them. This can be from sources like blogs, newspaper articles and reviews.