Remember the time when you loved a TV commercial but were never really able to recall the advertiser? As businesses go on overdrive trying to make the most out of a holiday shopping crowd, marketers face a unique challenge – their responsibility for the season is typically to build a campaign that can not only stand out from the marketing glut, but can also establish sufficient brand-recall for customers to actually convert. Unless your target audience recall your brand along with your marketing campaign, they are never really going to convert into customers.
Here are four ways to successfully build brand recall during the holiday season.
Build Partnerships
If you are a business with not enough brand awareness already, this may be a bad time to start building visibility. The costs associated with building brand awareness and recall can be substantially high. So instead of starting afresh with branding activity, it is a good idea to partner with other businesses that already have an established brand. This way, you may help your partner with a fresh offering while your partner helps you with branding. For instance, if you are a car dealer, you may offer special deals for the holiday season exclusively to customers who shop at a local market or a mall with high footfalls. This is a win-win deal that wins your business a lot of fresh branding as well as recall.
Freebies
Free giveaways have always been one of the most reliable ways to build awareness and brand recall. But for this strategy to work, it is important to identify the right giveaway. A lot of businesses make the mistake of offering commodity products (like calendars or pens) as freebies. The trouble is that such freebie items are dime a dozen and do not trigger brand recall or contribute to future sales. It is important to pick a gift that aligns with your brand. For instance, a premium brand would choose to give away custom branded cigar or wine bottles that creates exclusivity and as a result, better brand recall.
Branded Slogans
If you are looking at advertising (digital, TV or out of home), then take a serious look at branded slogans. Branded slogans are essentially advertising catch-phrases that contain your business or brand name in it. One of the best examples for branded slogan is the memorable ‘There are some things you can’t buy. For everything else, there’s MasterCard’. Such ad taglines distinctly mention the brand name so that when an ad campaign succeeds, it also subsequently raises the brand recall of the product. This is absolutely vital during the holiday season advertising campaigns.
Experiential Campaigns
Experiential marketing campaigns focus on creating an experience that the customers will be able to associate with the brand. The objective is to recall the brand through the experience. Such campaigns have great ROI simply because the marketing campaign focuses on engaging the customers in real-time. Such engagement-based campaigns get your target customers to experience the campaign, and in turn associate the product with this experience, and are hence good at building brand recall. Ideally, your business should launch its experiential campaign a month or two ahead of the holiday season. This way, your target audience would have already warmed up to your product experience and may convert better than through traditional marketing campaigns.
