Peak brand awareness is the holy grail of marketing. If you’re the Nike, McDonalds, or Apple of your industry, then you’ve got it right – the trouble is, there’s no much space at the top – and there’s a lot of hard work to even get you out of the starting blocks.
The thing is, aside from hard work and patience, there’s no real secret sauce when it comes to building brand awareness – there are just some key principles that are proven to work.
So, you apply those principles to your website, your uniforms, your office and your mailshots – but there’s often one area that people overlook.
Very few brands look at app stores and recognise them as an opportunity to make your brand known. In fact, apps are usually down at the bottom of the list of marketing priorities.
We’re here to tell you that this needs to change. In fact, we’ve put together three significant reasons you’ll want to track down a specialist software company who can help ASAP.
Fly your flag on customers’ phones
We spend a serious amount of time on our mobile devices. In fact, it’s estimated that we spend upwards of 3 hours using applications alone. Now, even if the big social media platforms get the lion’s share of that time, you’ll know that even rarely used apps get a click or two when boredom really sets in.
The thing is, just having your brand name or logo sitting on a customer’s phone sets you apart as being trustworthy. In fact, the customer doesn’t even need to be an active user of your app – they just need to be seeing your name and branding semi-frequently.
The key here is building familiarity – even if there’s no reason to trust the brand per se. Familiarity is a powerful tool – after all, you’d be more likely to trust your next door neighbour with a spare key to your home compared to a stranger randomly picked off the street – but objectively, there’s no reason to believe that your next door neighbour is any more worthy of that trust than the random stranger.
Trust in brands happens all the time. Chances are, you’ve probably never driven a Tesla – but you assume they make a good product. You’ve perhaps never worn any Lulu Lemon yoga pants – but you trust that they’re a quality product simply because you know the name.
Familiarity is the first step towards trust, so by putting your brand in front of people with an app, you’re fast tracking your way to trusting awareness.
Create a referral system
With your app on customers phones, you can turn them into your best advertising and marketing tool – you just need to pay them off!
The good news is, it doesn’t cost much to get an existing customer on your side. In fact, some of the best referral schemes offer ‘X% off your next order’ – which secures their repeat business too.
Referral schemes are a genius way of doing business – because you tap into the type of marketing that people love the most; word of mouth recommendations. Like millions of other people around the world, you almost certainly click to take a look at customer reviews when you shop on Amazon – and even if you don’t, you probably still notice the number of stars a product has when you’re browsing.
There’s some solid psychology behind this – as pack creatures, we’re conditioned to follow other peoples lead, especially when we know the outcome will be positive.
There’s no finer way to suggest that someone recommends you that an app based discount code or similar – especially when all the person needs to do is send an app download link to the person they’re referring. When the apps downloaded and the discount code is secured, you’ve got another installation on another phone – and all the recognition that goes along with that.
Remove hurdles from your current web/ecommerce solution
There’s a lot to be said for establishing yourself as a brand that provides a quick online solution for customers – and since apps often don’t have the same restrictions and cookie issues that browsers do, they’re a great place to offer your customers an ultra-straightforward way to interact with your brand.
Put plainly, we’ve been conditioned to be lazy. If there’s a shorter, simpler way of doing things, then that’s the preference.
And why not?
After all, why take more steps than required to get a product or service you need?
It’s part of the reason marketplaces like Amazon do so well. Could you track the products down elsewhere at the same or better prices? Sure. Are you going to spend the next 3 hours carrying out increasingly obscure longtail searches on Google while manually keeping track of the best priced and rated coffee machines? No – you’re most certainly not.
So, why not use your app to give customers a gateway with which they can access all your website functions with just a single press? That way, you’re removing the need to enter your domain name, search for you on Facebook or Twitter, or start trying to look up what you do one Google (running the risk of being hijacked by a well place advert along the way).
Other helpful app features
Aside from the brand recognition and trust building features we’ve talked about, there are also other significant benefits associated with having an audience using your app. In fact, for some businesses, the fact that you can use push notifications to directly interact with your audience is alone reason enough to build at application.
It’s suggested that we open our phones roughly 80-100 times a day, depending on our age. Roughly 50% of those opens are inspired by a notification – so why not trigger notifications and have people open their phone directly into your app? Again, it’s another sure-fire way to put your branding in front of people – building awareness every time. In fact, you could use your next push notification to let your customers know about a great new referral code…
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