How to Build Brand Awareness (w/ Strategies & Examples)

Have you ever encountered Game of Thrones fans, Starbucks lovers, or Apple users?

They all have a certain loyalty to their respective brands. Try to sell an Apple user on the latest Android phone and you will be promptly ushered out of the room.

Brand awareness helps brands accomplish this by ingraining them into the consumers' lifestyle habits and purchasing behaviors. They don't have to think twice before becoming customers again and again.

With the aid of this guidebook, you will be able to build promotions that will enable you business to grow in its brand awareness and to develop it along with your company.

Let's start now.

Brand Awareness: What is it?

Brand awareness evaluates how well your intended audience is able to recognize and understand your brand. Brands with high brand awareness are frequently described as "going viral," "attention grabbing," or just "mainstream." When marketing and promoting your business and products, especially in the beginning stages of a business, building brand awareness is important.

It's true that brand awareness is a fluid term.

Brand awareness will probably annoy most marketers and business owners who prefer to measure success with clear and specific numbers.

But that doesn't lower its value just because it's not a metric that can be precisely defined. For a business to succeed and to achieve its overall marketing objectives, building brand awareness and properly measuring brand awareness is crucial.

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What makes brand awareness important?

Brand trust is crucial in a world where customers frequently undergo extensive research and search others before placing an order. Consumers who become emotionally attached to your brand are more likely to make repeat purchases with little to no thinking, which fills the gap between trust and loyalty.

Brand awareness leads to brand trust.

New customers are more likely to trust you if you give your brand a key personality. Brand awareness initiatives give your company a platform for honesty, feedback, and storytelling. These are all techniques that enable us to develop mutual trust with people. The relationship between a person and a brand is similar.

If we develop brand awareness amongst our target audience then we can help our brand to stand out to the consumer. When customers recognize your company, they can easily find your products. Brand visibility is often portrayed as one phase in a marketing process. Create brand awareness and reach your prospective customers with specialized knowledge.

Connections are developed through brand awareness

I bet you've FedExed a package at some point. I'm sure you have Googled something when you had a question. I'm assuming you grabbed an Aspirin to take care of a headache.

Am I right?

Take note of the words used. Each product's brand name is also a noun or verb.

In brand-neutral language, Aspirin should be referred to as an anti-inflammatory, Google as a search engine, and FedEx as shipping/sending. Even if we aren't using one of their specific products, it is easier to talk about the brand as a whole.

Brand awareness achieves this. It links specific brand actions and products, subtly encouraging consumers to use their terms in place of generic ones. That's how brands like Pampers, Band-Aids and Sharpie are able to take over an entire category. Before you know it, their marketing is being done for them by simple searches or a purchase.

Brand equity is enhanced by brand awareness

Brand equity is a term used to describe a brand's value, which is based on customer perception and experiences with the brand. Positive brand equity is a direct result of positive experiences and perceptions, and the opposite is true for negative views.

Here are a few advantages of having strong brand equity:

• Ability to raise prices without critique
• Increased stock price and value of the brand
• Grow the business by expanding new products and services
• Greater social impact and service to the customer

How does a company build (and strengthen) its brand equity?

By increasing brand awareness and persistently highlighting positive consumer interactions. The basis of brand equity is brand awareness.

When a customer becomes familiar with a brand, they begin to recognize it on their own. They want to buy from it, start to prefer it over competing brands, and develop a loyalty that encourages purchase decisions while also inspiring referrals to friends.

Because of this, brand awareness is crucial.

It forges strong bonds of trust with your clients, builds positive connections, and develops priceless brand equity that enables your company to establish itself as a household name and a mainstay of the market.

How to Increase Brand Awareness

It takes time for your audience and the wider public to become familiar with your brand. Additionally, it doesn't result from basic marketing or advertising efforts.

Multiple efforts that go beyond getting paying customers lead to strong brand awareness.

You won't get very far if you try to increase brand awareness by running a few ad campaigns on Facebook. The customer will focus highly on the product and not your brand. That means that they can be easily enticed to purchase from another company who offers the same product at a lower price.

Not to mention, once the ads stop, so does your reach.

Here are some strategies for building a strong brand awareness framework and leaving a long-lasting impression on your audience:

Be yourself, not a corporation

What do you like to learn about a new friend as we get to know them? We find out about their interests, passions, preferences, and other things. We also pay close attention to what they say, the things that interest them, and their hobbies.

These are the qualities that your brand should identify and highlight. You need to define yourself as more than a business with a product or service if you want to make an impact on your audience. How else might you describe who you are? What phrases would you use to introduce your company to a brand-new friend?

Interact with your audience

Everyone benefits from social interaction and spending time with others, whether they are quiet or outgoing, introverted or extroverted. It's how we stay in touch, grow intellectually, and meet new people.

Your brand is no different.

You won't be known as anything other than a company with a single goal if you only make an effort to connect with people when you're trying to make a sale.

You must be social if you want to increase brand awareness. Share content on social media that has nothing to do with your goods or services. Engage with your audience by asking questions, leaving comments on posts, or retweeting content you find interesting.

Utilize your social media platforms as though you were a person trying to make friends rather than a company looking to make money. Use social media to bring personality to your brand. No one shares a sponsored post. People share content that either speaks for them or speaks to them.

Tell your story

Whether you are selling products or building your brand, storytelling is an incredibly effective marketing strategy.

Why?

Because it provides a genuine anchor for your audience to grasp.

Making a story for your brand humanizes it and gives it character. Incorporating narrative elements into your branding naturally markets both your brand and your product or service.

What should the subject of your story be?

Whatever you want, as long as it's real. It might be the story of your company's founder, the first office space your company rented out, or an "underdog" story—how your small business succeeded amongst the competition.

Authenticity has an impact and can significantly increase brand awareness.

Get others to share your work

Make it simple for your audience to share your content. These could be product pages, blog posts, videos, or social media posts.

The most efficient method of building customer trust and awareness is through word-of-mouth. Someone will pay attention to a product, and brand, if they see that a friend or family member is endorsing it.

"Is this a company worth looking into? Do they offer any other top-notch goods that I can trust? How do their social media accounts look and what topics do they talk about?"

By merely clicking "Share," customers will increase brand awareness for you if you make it simple for them to post about your brand.

Brand awareness is all about impact.

It builds trust with your crowd in ways that don't just solicit profits, engagement, or blind faith.

Brand Awareness Techniques

You are already aware of how to begin developing your brand awareness from scratch. It's time to put together a streamlined but effective brand awareness strategy.

Present your brand through guest blogging

One of the best low-effort ways to raise brand awareness is through guest blogging. Utilizing the traffic that is already going to another website, you can increase awareness of your brand while providing relevant and helpful content to a new audience.

In other words, instead of simply pushing your content on people who aren't prepared to purchase from you, lend your brand voice to another section of the market.

Promote your brand everywhere

Think about Grammarly. It seems like nobody was aware of Grammarly until a few years ago. When you think of online proofreading software, you immediately think of this brand. That's as a result of their aggressively distributed YouTube videos, affiliate marketing, and social advertising campaigns.

There are similar software available, but Grammarly has cornered the market through effective marketing campaigns. This places their brand top of mind for most marketers.

Create a persona for the business or hire a creator

In the past, company mascots and characters were reserved only for massive corporations. The GEICO gecko, Flo from Progressive, and even the King from Burger King, were all created to sell their respective products.

Fortunately, businesses of all levels can hire other creators at a fraction of the cost to represent their brands.

This enables you to not only personalize your brand but also convey the kind of consistent customer experience that audiences will come to expect.

Alternatively, you do not have to hire a person. A great example of this is GEICO. As soon as you spot that likeable lizard, you recognize GEICO. A potentially pricey but equally effective way to give your brand a face is by creating an animated mascot.

Create a logo that best captures who you are

Nike is no longer just Nike. When you see that checkmark, you immediately recognize it as Nike. How about the yellow "M" from McDonald's? Or the bitten apple of Apple?

Create a symbol that you consistently use in your marketing, advertising, and organic campaign work with your branding team or a freelance graphic designer. You might also think about following the lead of Amazon, Tesla, and Google by integrating the symbol into the packaging of your products.

Create a short, catchy slogan

Continuing the Nike example, the phrase "Just do it" immediately brings the brand top of mind. One of the most effective and straightforward ways to raise brand awareness is by developing a memorable motto or slogan.

It's challenging to summarize your entire identity in a single sentence. It must describe how you are unique, what you have to offer, and why clients should pick you. Think about the slogan of KFC: "Finger Lickin’ Good." You now understand in just three words why you should choose their chicken over other fast food places.

How to Strengthen Brand Awareness

What if you grew in brand recognition and built upon that solid base? What can your brand do to promote itself and steadily raise awareness?

Here are a few suggestions to increase brand awareness.

Offer a free introductory product

A free basic product or product line is provided under the freemium business model; only premium or enterprise-level products are subject to a fee. A lot of software companies, including Grammarly and Canva, use this pricing strategy.

Customers can sample your brand and service before purchasing by providing a freemium option. It's a chance to "try before you buy." Offering a freemium option with the caveat that the brand's watermark will appear on any publicly accessible portions of the good or service is a common practice. Freemium is a win-win scenario since the user receives the product for free and the brand receives free advertising when customers use it.

Another excellent example of this is Jotform. Customers who use the freemium version of Jotform's survey software are required to have a Jotform message at the bottom of the page.

Freemium might be the best strategy for increasing brand awareness and audience engagement, depending on your type of business and product offerings.

Publish free content

Content creation is now simpler than ever. Consumers can search the internet for any and all answers, worries, and do-it-yourself tasks.

Because it's the simplest way to express personality, opinions, and issue positions, content is an effective way to increase brand awareness.

Content does not always need to be in writing. You can share social media posts, release podcast episodes, videos, and more. Though they're undoubtedly the simplest, written content like blogs and downloadable ebooks are not the only choices.

Additionally, content can live in other places besides your website. Opportunities to reach out to new audiences and diversify the kinds of content you produce are offered by guest posting and paid advertising.

If your company isn't producing content, you might be losing out on some significant opportunities for brand awareness. A fantastic way to genuinely communicate with your audience and promote your brand is through content.

Develop a podcast

Over one-third of Americans aged 12 and older regularly listen to podcasts. There is no denying the significance of podcasts in both our daily lives and marketing strategies.

Creating podcasts used to be a challenging process that was only accessible to those with a recording studio and expensive microphone. Making and releasing a podcast is now simpler than ever, and doing so can greatly benefit your efforts to increase brand awareness.

Why?

Because podcasts offer a way to authentically connect with your audience, just like written or visual content. Podcasts give you the chance to teach, inspire, entertain, or guide your audience and gain their trust rather than outright promoting your product or service, which we've already established isn't always the best way to increase brand awareness.

Here are some excellent podcasts created by well-known companies:

• The CMO Podcast by Gallery Media Group
• Stuff You Should Know by iHeartPodcasts
• Short Wave by NPR

Look at how these brands picked podcast themes that are relevant to their brand and products. By doing this, they can keep increasing awareness and connect the podcast to their brand.

Increasing brand awareness through podcasts enables you to experiment with promotional and marketing options that you might not otherwise pursue, leading to the discovery of fresh, potent ways to engage your audience.

How to Measure Brand Awareness

How can you tell if your efforts to raise brand awareness are successful? How can you tell whether you need to change course or fix an issue?

It is impossible to gauge brand awareness in the conventional sense.

There is no Facebook Ads interface that breaks down "awareness" KPIs. However, you can still examine initiatives and metrics that will enable you to assess the recognition and customer perception of your brand.

Here are a few methods to evaluate your brand awareness and determine where your branding strategies need to be adjusted:

Measuring Brand Awareness by the Numbers

You can use these points to create an overall snapshot of your brand awareness. View these metrics for quantitative measurement:

Visitors arrive directly on your website

First off, this form of direct traffic is the outcome of people going to your website on purpose after typing in your URL. Your direct traffic figure will show you how many people are visiting your website as a result of your marketing efforts. This is a crucial data point because many customers find brands through social media, advertisements, or by Googling the brand or product. Customers who visit your website directly do so because they are already familiar with your brand.

Focus on site traffic numbers

This figure only represents total site traffic, which will show you how much of the online community is viewing your content and engaging with your business. Since they are familiar with your company, it doesn't matter that it won't exactly reveal where people are coming from.

Consistent social media engagement

Followers, likes, retweets, comments, and other metrics are all examples of engagement. It is an indicator of your brand's social media presence, brand awareness, and the effectiveness of your content.

Measuring Brand Awareness by Organic Mentions

You can use these strategies to determine who and how many people are aware of your brand. Try these to qualitatively measure:

Set up Google Alerts

By doing this, you can keep up with the online conversation surrounding your company. It will notify you of any news or press mentions from outside sources. Keep in mind that as your brand develops, its online presence will move beyond your website.

Use these free Google tools to monitor your brand's performance:

• Page Speed Insights: Increase site speed
• Google Search Console: Improve how Google sees your site
• Google Analytics: View site performance metrics
• Google My Business: Collect reviews and feedback

Pay attention mentions on social media

Monitoring social media for natural mentions and engagement is important. Who is using your hashtag, tagging your account, or mentioning it in comments on other people's posts? Additionally, your audience becomes more aware of your brand as more people talk about it on social media.

Use brand awareness surveys

Receiving direct feedback from your audience and customers as part of this process can be very beneficial for understanding not only who is aware of your brand but also how they perceive you. You can create polls on Instagram, TikTok or Twitter and share them with your followers. This is a great way to collect honest feedback from the people who interact with your brand on a daily basis.

Although there is never a perfect number, keeping an eye on these points will help you guide campaigns and stay in touch with your audience. Whatever method you use to measure brand awareness for your business, be sure to record and document your growth over time.

It's time to get noticed

Brand awareness is a powerful tool that can significantly affect your advertising strategies, customer perception, and earnings.

You'll have a devoted audience that chooses your brand over competitors, consistently purchases your products, and urges their friends and family to do the same. Use these methods for establishing and growing brand awareness.

If you think your brand has been heading in the wrong direction, now is the time to stop and regroup! Checkout our Branding Kit & Course Corrector to uncover what makes your business unique and how to market yourself to the right people.