Brand awareness is one of those buzz phrases you may have heard people talking about in meetings, or referring to in reports. The idea of people being “aware” of your brand is surely a good thing, right?
Well, it is and it isn’t. People might have heard of your brand and know what you sell or promote. They might recognize your logo and your branding. But what if they’re not fully aware of what your brand is? What if they only know your name, but not what you actually do? What if they have wrong information about your brand?
The key to solving these conundrums is brand awareness: taking the small things that audiences know about your brand and building it into a cohesive, truthful narrative.
Brands like Coca-Cola, Nike, and Apple have done this successfully over many years. Small stores can do it in a matter of months. Influencers can raise brand awareness even faster.
Building brand awareness takes time and effort – but it’s certainly achievable. You just need to know where to begin.
You need to get your name out there through ads, social media, and great products. The goal is to make your brand familiar and trusted, aligning your marketing strategies with your overall brand message to effectively engage audiences and enhance brand visibility.
In This Guide:
Understanding Brand Awareness
Benefits of Building Strong Brand Awareness
Strategies to Increase Brand Awareness
Measuring Brand Awareness
Challenges in Building Brand Awareness
Future Trends in Brand Awareness
Brand Awareness: What Next?
Frequently Asked Questions
Understanding Brand Awareness
Successful marketing campaigns all stem from focusing on brand awareness. If you can get people to understand your brand, then it makes it a lot easier to sell products and services. It's also a lot easier to enact change if you're a charity or advocacy group. Branding is everything.
What Is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness is about gauging how familiar audiences are with what your brand does. This is usually a familiarity level with your products or services, but can expand into an understanding of what your brand stands for.
This is important, because a brand’s social standing is often what drives sales back to its products and services.
This doesn’t mean your brand has to be eco-friendly or ultra progressive just to guarantee sales. What we mean is, the story you tell audiences about your brand fuels a perception about your product or service.
It starts with recognition and then builds from there. When people recognize your logo, name, or messaging, you’ve achieved a base level of brand awareness.
Brand recall, on the other hand, is the ability of consumers to remember your brand when prompted with a specific product category. This is crucial for establishing strong associations between your brand and its product category, ultimately keeping your brand top-of-mind for consumers.
From there, you can seek to influence people’s perception of your brand through the associations and feelings they have for you. This emotional connection can be just as important as product features in driving sales.
Brand Awareness Vs. Brand Recognition: Key Differences
While often used interchangeably, brand awareness and brand recognition are different concepts. In fact, brand recognition is actually the first step toward full brand awareness. Here's a quick overview of both concepts:
Brand recognition is when people are able to identify your brand from visual cues like logos or packaging. For example, seeing the McDonald's arches on the highway. It's a surface-level familiarity.
Brand awareness goes deeper. It includes recognition, but also encompasses what people know about your brand's values, products, and reputation. For example, you enter a shoe store and see multiple brands on the shelf – you'll intuitively have an emotional connection to some brands more than others.
Recognition is remembering what you've seen in the past. Awareness is understanding what a brand stands for.
Benefits of Building Strong Brand Awareness
Before we look at ways to create brand awareness, it's worth us first understanding how you benefit from the activity. After all, if you need to convince decision makers to invest resources into boosting your brand awareness then you'll need to show them the benefits.
Here are three to focus on.
1. You Enhance Customer Trust and Loyalty
Branding is all about customer trust and securing a reliable level of loyalty. Coca-Cola and Pepsi both have this level of trust with their core audiences, who come back to them time and time again.
Familiarity breeds comfort, which is often what calls the shots when a customer is deciding what to buy. Do they go with something familiar, or new? They tend to stick with brands they recognize.
This means strong brand awareness usually leads to:
Repeat purchases from loyal customers
Positive word-of-mouth advocacy
Higher customer lifetime value
Reduced costs for attracting new audiences
So, how do you build trust? Start by delivering consistent quality in your products and services, and make sure you're messaging across all touchpoints. This creates a sense of reliability that customers appreciate.
2. You Stand Out from Competitors
Brand awareness helps you stand out in crowded markets. In some cases, brand names can become the go-to word for a product, like Tupperware and Kleenex.
When customers know your unique selling points, they're more likely to choose you over competitors. Get it right again and again, and you could be the next Duck tape.
Three of the simplest ways to build brand awareness via differentiation are:
Highlighting your unique features in your marketing material and product launches
Telling your brand story across various platforms
Creating a distinct visual identity that drives brand recognition first, and then brand awareness
By building awareness around what makes you special, you can carve out a place in customers' minds.
That might be the value that you give customers, the personality of your brand, your brand's purpose, or a mix of all of these. Whatever it is, your USP needs to be unique!
3. It's Easier to Launch New Products
Having strong brand awareness means you get a head start on competitors when introducing new products. It's one of the reasons why it's so hard for new confectionary brands to enter the snacks market. Why would someone buy your totally new, untested, and untasted snack when they can try the new style of M&Ms or Snickers.
Customers who know and trust your brand are more likely to try your latest offerings.
This then has a circular effect because you can offer products and services that:
Carry a lower base price because your marketing costs are lower
Have faster adoption rates
Contain greatly reduced risk perception
What's more, you can leverage your existing brand equity to generate excitement for new releases. This makes it easier to expand your product line and enter new markets.
>> Learn more about brand equity.
Strategies to Increase Brand Awareness
Let's now take a look at some ways you can build strong brand awareness, no matter your industry. From increasing awareness with audiences on social media to boosting your B2B marketing efforts, here's what you can do to get started.
Content Marketing and Storytelling
Content marketing is one of those marketing strategies that can be hugely effective if you get it right. The aim is to get your brand in front of audiences. The difficulty is doing it in a crowded marketplace.
You need to understand your audience and tailor your content to it. For example, a car manufacturer launching a new family SUV would want to channel its content towards parents. That means creating videos, imagery, editorials, blog posts, and other forms of content, and publishing it in the right places.
Brand storytelling is an offshoot of content marketing that focuses specifically on brand awareness. It helps forge emotional connections.
So, make sure you share your company's journey, values, and mission. This humanizes your brand and makes it more relatable.
You see brand storytelling in TV commercials all the time. Brands choose not to "sell" a specific product but instead advertise their entire brand. This is about raising brand awareness so that, when you see a product ad later, you already know about the brand and what it stands for.
Social Media Engagement
Every brand awareness strategy must have a social media plan attached to it. If you're a small business, then social media's free platforms can become invaluable. For bigger corporations, social media is often the place to find new audiences and engage with customers one-on-one.
A successful brand awareness campaign on social media needs consistency and smart storytelling. Your visuals and your messaging must align. Social media users like familiarity, so everything you post has to come within a set of style parameters.
You can use social media channels to push your brand through interactions, giveaways, viral videos, and ads.
Just be sure to be authentic. Get social media wrong and you could suffer a public relations disaster that leads to negative brand awareness. That's really hard to eradicate.
Influencer Partnerships
Partnering with influencers can rapidly expand your brand's reach and, when done well, boost positive awareness. Make sure you do your research and choose influencers whose values align with your brand. If the partnership feels forced, then audiences will spot this and turn away.
Small brands can work really effectively with micro-influencers without breaking the bank. They often have higher engagement rates and more niche audiences, which is ideal for getting a high return on investment from your campaign.
If a relationship with an influencer is going well, then consider a long-term agreement. This can help keep your costs down and you'll grow as the influencer grows.
You can then measure the impact of your influencer partnerships through software like CisionOne. This helps you understand which collaborations drive the most awareness and engagement. From there, you can build brand awareness step-by-step over each collaboration.
Sponsorships
Sponsorships are a traditional way of increasing brand awareness. They're similar to what brands do these days with influencers. The idea is to attach your brand to a celebrity or an event, in the hope of creating brand awareness for your company.
The World Cup in soccer is a perfect example of brand awareness efforts in action. VISA, Budweiser, Hisense, Hyundai, and adidas have all benefited from aligning themselves with FIFA for World Cup tournaments.
Meanwhile, Nike is synonymous in tennis with Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer, Fanatics makes NHL jerseys, and Ralph Lauren produces golf's Ryder Cup uniforms.
Sponsoring events or involving your brand in some way gets your logo out there. You can boost brand visibility, while increasing awareness on a more emotive level.
Increasingly, brands are using sponsorships to drive impact too. Accounting software Xero sponsors women's soccer in the UK, partially to increase brand recognition and awareness, and partially to drive the sport forward. Sponsorships are influential and brands are starting to understand that.
Using SEO and Advertising Properly
As hard as it is to create brand awareness without having a social media presence, it's equally difficult to do it without a search engine optimization strategy.
SEO is about aligning your content so it sits at the top of search engines, primarily Google. When people search for your brand, you want to make sure you're in control of what they see.
After all, no one wants negative reviews placed above their brand's own website. So, make sure you get a solid SEO strategy in place.
Advertising, meanwhile, is where you can really enhance brand awareness. From posting social media ads to TV campaigns, your brand strategy needs to involve some level of advertising.
Boosting brand awareness through ads is all about memorability. Audiences need to see or hear your ad, and immediately recognize your brand. This first step – brand recognition – leads to brand awareness when you talk about what your brand does, and what it stands for.
Take Southern Comfort's "Whatever's Comfortable" ad from 2012. The ad featured a man walking on the beach in Speedos (recognize that brand?) and holding a glass of whiskey. That's it. The ad went viral and boosted recognition of Southern Comfort.
After that, the company produced ads that focused more on its products. People already recognized the brand, now they needed awareness of what Southern Comfort actually sold.
Measuring Brand Awareness
Being able to drive brand awareness is one thing, but you need to measure your efforts if you're going to understand the value of your campaign. Here are some ways to measure brand awareness, from direct feedback to analyzing social media posts.
Surveys and Customer Feedback
This is a simple way to measure brand awareness that almost anyone can do. Surveys help you gauge brand awareness directly from your target audience. By asking questions about brand recognition, recall, and associations, it's possible to gauge their understanding of your brand – and how effective your campaign was.
It's also important to catalog and analyze customer feedback. New customers are more likely to give their opinion on a product or service after making their first purchase. They might be delighted, or might be highly critical.
If you're struggling to get feedback, you could offer discounts on their next purchase if new customers provide their opinions.
Social Media Metrics
You can use a social listening tool like CisionOne to assess how people talk about your brand on social media. It's also possible to assess their interactions with your posts – be it reposts, comments, likes, or anything in between.
Social media platforms offer valuable insights into your brand's reach and engagement. Even if your brand isn't proactive on social media, it's worth understanding what people are saying about you.
Monitor conversations about your brand across platforms and understand exactly what people feel about you.
You might notice that people have a positive view of your product but don't like your current marketing efforts. In this case, you probably need to create a new brand awareness strategy.
Website Traffic Analysis
We mentioned getting on top of your SEO practices in our section on increasing brand awareness. Well, you also need to monitor that flow of traffic to see what's going on behind the scenes.
Your website traffic can reveal a lot about brand awareness. If people are directly searching for you, then that's a really good sign. However, if your web traffic is coming mainly from social media posts, then you may need to dig a little deeper.
By using a combination of Google Analytics and a social media tool like CisionOne, it's possible to get a full picture of how people are reaching your site. From there, you can understand where you're most discoverable – and therefore where your brand awareness efforts should be channeled.
Brand Mention Tracking
Media monitoring tools can also help you track brand mentions across digital platforms – from social media to news sites, blogs, and everything else. You can use the data to assess volume trends over time. See when people are talking about you.
This data can be invaluable. If you notice that no one mentioned your brand in the days after launching some intensive advertising campaigns on newspaper websites, then perhaps you need to switch your focus to social media. If the data shows your brand mentions spike during crises, then this could lead to severe reputational damage.
The great thing about brand monitoring tools is much of the data collection is automated. This saves time, meaning you're free to initiate a full response to issues when the tool alerts you.
Challenges in Building Brand Awareness
Building brand awareness comes with several hurdles that can test even the most seasoned marketers. It is, after all, a long process that takes time.
Companies face fierce competition, limited resources, and the need to maintain a consistent image across all touchpoints. This isn't easy and no one expects you to conquer it immediately.
Here are the sort of issues you're likely to come up against as you try to build brand awareness.
Market Saturation
This is a tough one. Marketplaces are generally crowded these days, especially online. Suddenly brands that were only known to local audiences have national brand awareness, and can ship anywhere in the world.
A soap brand from Illinois could now easily be competing in the same marketplace as one from Shanghai.
So, how do you overcome market saturation? You need to stand out. To cut through the noise, consider:
Developing a unique value proposition and talking about it a lot
Creating eye-catching visuals that reflect your brand identity and use them everywhere
Using targeted marketing to reach your specific audience, with the help of a marketing tool
Brands competing for attention often resort to flashy campaigns. But substance matters more than style – especially if you plan to build brand awareness correctly. Focus on what makes your offering truly different and valuable to your customers.
Budget Constraints
This is something that really harms small brands and start-ups. You're unlikely to have the money to compete against established brands. So, you need to be smart with your marketing strategies and have value at the forefront of your mind.
Some ways to do this effectively include:
Using social media to create cost-effective outreach organically
Partnering with influencers or complementary brands, starting with micro-influencers
Encouraging user-generated content to amplify your message, including reviews
Analyzing your target audiences to channel your marketing efforts to the right place
Maintaining Brand Consistency
Consistency is always an issue for companies that are trying to create better brand awareness over a number of years. Staff can leave or you might end a relationship with an advertising agency. You therefore have to ensure new employees or agencies will follow the same strategy as before.
Businesses also often make tough financial decisions around marketing – it's hard to maintain brand consistency if your budget suddenly disappears.
And then there are changes in technology. A business that invested heavily in their Instagram advertising campaigns might suddenly find their target audience has fled to TikTok.
In order to stay on track and maintain consistent consumer awareness, you should:
Create a strong brand awareness strategy that new employees can adopt seamlessly
Add detailed brand guidelines that align with your strategy
Train all employees on brand standards
Regularly audit your brand presence across your marketing channels
Remember, your brand isn't just what you say it is—it's also how your employees represent it. Investing in employee branding is another smart way to turn your team into powerful brand ambassadors.
Future Trends in Brand Awareness
The way brand awareness works changes regularly. New tech and shifting consumer habits are reshaping how companies connect with customers. We're now in an era of digital brand awareness, where most customers learn about brands via Google and social media platforms, rather than the TV or magazines.
Let's look at some key trends that will shape brand awareness in the coming years.
The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Marketing
AI is transforming brand awareness strategies. Ultra-smart algorithms can analyze massive amounts of data to predict consumer behavior and preferences. Tools like CisionOne are able to decipher this data and give users pointers on their marketing strategies.
For example, AI lets you target your messaging far more precisely.
AI is also being used in content creation, which again means you can personalize your marketing material to fit a specific target audience.
Brand managers will still have to oversee the process, but AI is going to become very useful indeed.
Personalization and Customer Experience
Customers now expect particular brands to offer tailored experiences. The way we use all social media means there's reams of data on every one of us out there. You can use data to create personalized content, product recommendations, and ads. This makes your brand more relevant and memorable.
Social media will keep evolving as a brand awareness tool. Short-form video content on platforms like TikTok and Instagram is becoming crucial, while Facebook and YouTube are constantly trying to adapt to keep up.
As a brand, you'll also need to adapt your messaging to these quick, engaging formats.
Sustainability and Brand Values
Earlier in this guide, we mentioned how brands create awareness about themselves through their impact work. Well, these brand values often align with sustainability.
The world is changing and resources are becoming more scarce, and more expensive. Brand awareness levels around sustainable, eco-friendly practices are growing. It's not too late to change your suppliers or your production methods to more sustainable solutions, and then talk about them!
Transparency about your practices builds trust. Share your supply chain details or how you treat workers. It's this sort of openness that can set you apart from competitors.
Remember, social responsibility is crucial. A business that pollutes its local environment is probably not going to have a good reputation. Get involved in causes that matter to your audience and show them you care about more than just profits.
Brand Awareness: What Next?
Now that you know how brand awareness helps businesses thrive, it's time to get started on your own strategy.
It's a never-ending task, but it gets easier the more you do it. The most recognizable brands have been working on their awareness campaigns for decades. They stay in people's minds, are instantly recognizable, and have core values that form a connection with current and potential customers.
Remember to do the basics right and you'll also develop an amazing brand. Keep your message consistent across all channels and stay up-to-date with new trends. Listen to your customers and evolve with them.
Remember, strong brand awareness can lead to more sales, greater influence, and protect your business during times of crisis.
Stay patient and persistent, measure your campaigns, and build brand loyalty that spans generations.
Building brand awareness takes time, but the rewards are worth it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Brand awareness is crucial for business success these days, especially with so many people able to access brands online. Industries are highly competitive, so you need good awareness of your brand to secure a healthy market share. Let's explore some common questions about how companies can build and measure it effectively.
How can a business enhance its brand awareness through social media?
You can boost brand awareness on social media by sharing engaging content and keeping it all "on brand." Consistency is just as important as posting eye-catching images, videos, and stories that reflect your brand's personality. Interact with followers by responding to comments and messages promptly – use this direct communication with your target audience to build trust.
What are some effective methods to measure brand awareness?
There are loads of ways to track brand awareness. You can use an analytics tool to assess social media mentions, website traffic, search activity, and user experiences. You can try primary research methods like surveys and focus groups to see what people think of your brand. Check your social media follower growth and engagement rates, as these will indicate whether more people are getting to know your brand or not.
In what ways does brand awareness impact consumer behavior?
A brand's visibility is one of the biggest influences of behavior in consumers. Remember, often consumers rely on the comfort of knowing a familiar brand when making a purchase. High brand awareness builds trust and leads to word-of-mouth marketing, as people recommend brands they're familiar with to friends and family.
What strategies are most successful for improving brand awareness in digital marketing?
Content marketing is a great place to start here. Write blogs, shoot videos, create branding, and align your messaging to match what your audience needs. Use SEO to improve your visibility in search results and conquer Google. You can also partner with influencers, who can introduce your brand to their followers. Finally, try running targeted ads on social media and search engines to reach new potential customers. You'll never know where your brand voice could take you until you try.
Could you share some examples of successful brand awareness campaigns?
Apple's "Get a Mac" ads featured relatable characters that highlighted the brand's benefits. It was a really good way to differentiate Apple from Microsoft. Another great campaign was Southern Comfort's "Whatever's Comfortable" ad. The commercial managed to increase brand awareness in the whiskey, and Southern Comfort followed it up by more specific advertising about its product.
