Shifting from Brand Awareness to Brand Affinity

Building your brand is one of the main motives behind marketing. First impression is the last impression and branding helps you to make a memorable first impression on your customers. Other than that, branding also helps you to attract more people towards you. A lot of people talk about how important Brand Awareness is, and no doubt it is important, but more important is brand affinity. And in today’s blog, we will discuss Brand Awareness and Brand Affinity, why you need to shift from the former to the latter and how you can do the same.

Brand Awareness

The 21st century is the century of the Internet. There are thousands of websites which sell products, most of them selling the same thing. Hence, promoting your business through marketing AND brand awareness, brand affinity, and brand loyalty are very important.

Due to the ease in starting a new business, it has been more difficult to get noticed and actually sell things. Here comes the reason why Brand Awareness is so important.

Brand awareness means that people or rather, your targeted audience know about your brand. And the consequent things you do to make people aware of your brand also come under brand awareness.

Brand awareness is really important because the more people know about your brand, the more likely they are to buy it, and the more likely they are to spread the knowledge to their acquaintances. Establishing brand awareness, according to Allie Decker at Hubspot, is very valuable when marketing and promoting your company products.

Brand Affinity

Brand Affinity can be said as a subsidiary of brand awareness. Just getting the attention of a person isn’t enough. You have to hold it, too. This is where brand affinity comes in. It is the most durable kind of brand loyalty, one that is completely based on unwavering trust.

Gigi Devault defines brand affinity as , “a metric that lets market researchers make predictions about how a customer will behave.”

In simple terms, brand affinity is about making an emotional relationship with your customers – one that will last. It is the positive feelings or love a customer has towards a particular brand, hence the word ‘affinity.’

Increases Brand Awareness

Designing, writing, and sending emails doesn’t require you to spend much, or for some services, at all.
With the many affordable marketing tools available around us in the market, creating and sending emails has become more of an undeniable choice for the start-ups and small businesses that might have a tight budget on digital marketing.
Direct access to the personal email inboxes of ideal prospects is granted to you without having to pay much.
This makes email marketing to be one of the most affordable and cost-effective marketing services for your business.

Difference between Brand Awareness and Brand Affinity

Just knowing someone isn’t the same as knowing about someone. This is the basic difference between brand awareness and brand affinity. When you first heard the term Amazon, you came to know that the ecommerce site exists. It may or may not have made you go there right away and buy products off it. But after using it a few times, when you see they are reliable and you rely on them for every delivery, it is brand affinity.

Why Do You Need to Stop Concentrating on Brand Awareness and Shift to Brand Affinity?

Brand affinity is important as it helps you in building your brand. Brand awareness doesn’t exactly build your brand – it spreads the word of your brand. Which do you think is more important, gaining more customers, or caring for the customers you already have? If your answer is the former, then you’re going to lose all the customers you currently have whilst you’re in the pursuit for new customers. Hence, brand affinity is more important than brand awareness.

How to do the Shift?

1. Know your audience

When you understand your audience, you know what they want. You can collect the said information by surveys, sales, reviews, social media, etc. But the more you know what they want, and deliver it to them appropriately, the more they trust you and rely on you.

2. Connect with your customers.

Talk to them personally. Email them regarding special offers and things as such, made especially for them. Connect with them through social media, blogs and any way possible, really.

3. Listen to the online communities.

Online comments can be a big eye-opener regarding how truly your products are being accepted out there. It can help you grow better and perfect yourself.

4. Find your Brand’s Personality.

A certain kind of brand personality will attract the loyalty of a certain kind of audience. Because your brand reflects their personality as well, they will be more drawn to you.