Have you ever noticed that some business focus less on selling their product or service, and more on building a positive awareness and perception of who and what they are? This is known as brand awareness, and it is an immensely powerful marketing tool. Why? Because people who are ready to perhaps make a purchase or even a donation, they will inevitably turn to the brand that readily comes to mind first.
What Is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness refers someone’s ability to identify familiar aspects of a business/organisation. This may mean recalling a slogan e.g “Service Above Self” or recognizing a logo like the Rotary wheel or remembering a marketing message like Rotarians are “People of Action”. But the brand is not just the logo, its who we are as an organisation and who we are as individual Rotarians and what we do and how we do it. That is the brand of Rotary! And this is extremely important because with proper brand awareness it means we can build upon the feelings and beliefs people have about us, and then use that to reinforce the positive image of Rotary to reach an audience of potential new members. When these prospective new members are driving down the road and see our logo on a street sign or see us out in the community working on a local project, they will instantly connect that with Rotary, and if they do then we have achieved strong brand awareness.
Brand awareness is critical to the success of our clubs and Rotary in general. When people are aware of our brand and our logo, we will “sell” more. People are more likely to donate to our causes, buy a sizzling sausage from us or even click on our club websites or give a “like” to one of our social media posts from a brand they are aware of.
Building brand awareness does not happen overnight though, you need to have the right marketing tools. Thankfully on rotary.org under brand centre tab you can find a lot of marketing materials to help you on your way. It has the correct logos, banner templates, 30sec video clips on Rotary and so much more. These materials are easy to use and easy to recognise to the general public and they are all uniquely ours.
Once you have your marketing tools in place, start marketing across multiple channels, and create a consistent message across them all. Choose platforms with the potential to reach a lot of people, eg social media or community newspapers.
As people develop shorter and shorter attention spans, building brand awareness around Rotary is going to become even more important to the success of your club.
Article by Evan Burrell