When starting an MSME business, especially in the culinary or F&B sector, you need to understand branding so your business can level up. Branding is like the identity of a business that makes it unique and easily accepted by the market.
Inside branding, there is something called brand exposure, which is an important factor. This marketing strategy is usually done by approaching your business target audience both online and offline.
So, how do you increase brand exposure for your business? Let’s dive into the explanation below.
What is Brand Exposure
Before discussing how to increase brand exposure in business, it’s good to first understand what brand exposure really means.
Brand exposure is a method or strategy carried out within branding. Simply put, brand exposure is an activity of advertising a product or showing the existence of a brand to the public. Yes, its goal is to introduce your product to people.
The more intensively a business improves brand exposure, the greater the chance for your product to become top of mind or achieve brand dominance in the hearts and minds of consumers.
Usually, business owners will use influencers to create specific content. Well, that content discussing your product is when brand exposure begins to rise.
Before applying a strategy for brand exposure, there are four stages you need to understand. Here they are:
Brand recall: Consumers can remember the name of a product or brand.
Brand recognition: Consumers can distinguish your product from others.
Top of mind awareness: Consumers will remember the offered brand when triggered or asked about the product category.
Brand dominance: Consumers can only recall one brand for a certain product category. For example, when someone mentions toothpaste, the brand that comes to mind is just one specific name.
Read more: Understanding Brand Activation: How to Apply and Examples
Benefits of Brand Exposure
After understanding what brand exposure means, what are the benefits of applying this strategy? Here are some advantages you can get:
Brand Awareness: Brand exposure can increase reach. Reach here is a metric measuring how many people see your brand.
Interest: Related to consumer interest in your product or brand. With consistent brand exposure, gradually your product will attract more attention. Even if they already know your brand, they could become even more interested.
Consideration: After creating interest, consumers start considering whether to use your product or not. They think about the quality and benefits you offer. Their confidence can increase if supported by other factors, such as influencers talking about your product.
Action: When the audience has considered, it’s time for them to make a purchase decision. At this stage, you just need to wait for sales results. If you apply this strategy properly, your profits will grow significantly.
How to Increase Brand Exposure
Here are some ways you can do to boost your brand exposure. Check these out:
Utilize Social Media
In today’s digital era, social media plays a big role in business development. You can see many big and famous brands have official social media accounts to communicate with customers.
The purpose of using social media in business is to help your product reach a wider market more practically.
Also, using social media for promotion saves cost, time, and effort compared to printing posters or distributing brochures, which can be expensive and time-consuming.
In fact, with social media, you can even do brand exposure efforts for free. Having your product on social media also increases engagement.
So, you need to learn marketing techniques suited to the platforms you choose. Through social media, you can also easily research products based on consumer groups.
Not only that, you can interact directly with consumers and analyze your competitors.
Participate in Events
One way to increase brand exposure is by actively joining events such as workshops, bazaars, and so on. These events are usually attended by many people, so it opens the opportunity to introduce your products directly to the audience.
However, you should not join just any event. Choose events that match your target market. That way, when you start offering products, your business can target the right market.
You also need to actively look for information about event organizing, for example by joining communities. If possible, you could offer to sponsor certain events. Your product will get bigger exposure.
Collaborate with Other Brands
For MSME business owners with small-scale or new businesses, collaborating with other brands can help increase brand exposure.
You can offer collaboration to owners of bigger brands, since bigger brands usually have wider markets.
This method is quite effective in exposing your brand and speeding up brand awareness.
However, you should carefully decide which brand to collaborate with. Consider the credibility of that brand, as it will affect consumers’ impressions of your product.
Also, ensure the partnership is mutually beneficial or a win-win solution. Make sure no party feels disadvantaged in this collaboration.
Leverage Influencers
To speed up increasing brand exposure, you can use influencers to promote your business brand.
Many brands cooperate with influencers to introduce and invite their followers to check out a business product.
When choosing influencers, be selective. Don’t just pick an influencer who is trending. Consider their engagement rate with followers.
Can they influence and motivate their followers to be interested in your product? The easy way to check is by reviewing the influencer’s followers growth and engagement rate.
It is also important to pick an influencer with good communication skills, because they will be the ones delivering and introducing your product.
By doing this, gradually your brand exposure will rise, creating awareness among the public to buy your product.
Optimize Marketplace
Another tip to increase brand exposure is to optimize marketplace platforms, especially if you focus on selling products through online shops. Usually, a technical team will help your business with marketplace optimization.
This help may include content writers, graphic designers, and digital marketing strategists. These roles increase your chance of success in selling products online.
Unique Packaging
Another way you can do is to create a unique product packaging design, different from usual. You’ve probably seen unboxing videos of various products. This shows that the product experience can be felt the first time the product is opened.
That’s the explanation about what brand exposure is and how to increase it. Besides the ways above, you can also use the Opaper business app.
You can use the Opaper F&B business app to market your business and increase brand exposure. It has a customer database feature that makes it easier to share your promotions to loyal customers.
There are many other useful features in Opaper, especially if you want to grow your F&B business faster. Download the Opaper app now and enjoy various benefits to advance your business.