Simply creating brand awareness is not enough to generate the number of sales opportunities needed to develop a successful business. While awareness is extremely important, what is even more vital is creating an affinity for your brand. First, let's take a look at the difference between brand awareness and brand affinity:

What Is Brand Awareness?

Brand awareness means that your audience knows your company name and has a general understanding of what it is you do.

What Is Brand Affinity?

Brand affinity means that your audience knows exactly what you do, trusts your brand, and has started to develop a positive relationship with it.

How Can You Create Brand Affinity?

Much like the overall perception of your brand, brand affinity will be driven by your marketing efforts. Many of these principles hold true for improving results on any type of campaign.

1. Create Interesting Content

Your content can't simply be informative. It needs to be entertaining and capture the attention of your audience. This involves going in-depth on the subject matter, showing expertise, and providing something of value. The idea is to get your audience to seek more of your content and consistently look to you as an authority in your industry.

2. Use Various Content Mediums

In order to keep your content fresh and appeal to a broader cross-section of your audience, you need to produce different types of content. This includes audio, video, and written content. Everyone has their preferred way to consume information, and the same person may prefer a video one day and a written blog the next.

3. Have A True Distribution Strategy

Organically syndicating your content across multiple channels and platforms is a must to create brand awareness, and by extension, brand affinity. The key is to create content that fits each channel. What works on LinkedIn may not be well received on Twitter. Not to mention the varying mediums and character restrictions across each platform.

4. Showcase The Human Elements

If you want people to love your brand, you need to humanize it. You need marketers who connect with and engage audiences. You need salespeople that share a bit about themselves and get to know what makes their prospects tick. You need project managers who are personable and dedicated to delighting your customers.

5. Get Feedback From Your Customers

The ultimate test for brand affinity is to find out what your customers think. This doesn't mean sending out a mass email with a survey. It involves talking with them. Find out which parts of the customer experience were enjoyable and ask what they think needs improvement. This can help with future marketing, customer acquisition, and retention.

Winn has over 30 years of experience supporting marketing efforts for some of the largest B2B tech firms in the world. Contact us today for help on your next campaign!