In the last few years, “brand awareness” became one of the most popular buzzwords in the digital marketing world. Every week, I receive marketing emails from digital consulting agencies telling me how they can help me “build brand awareness” or “increase brand awareness”. That sounds great on paper, and I think brand awareness can be a positive thing. However, what I’m seeing is that the necessity of building brand awareness has become overblown, especially for small niche businesses on a limited marketing budget. I wish I had time to ask these marketing agencies what they mean exactly by “increasing brand awareness”, and I suspect some of them are preying on businesses with limited knowledge of marketing strategy.

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