Brand awareness refers to how recognizable and familiar your brand is to your target audience. This includes how well they know your brand name, logo, products or services, and company values. Developing a marketing strategy for brand awareness will help you build a loyal customer base, execute successful marketing campaigns across all channels, and indirectly grow your profits. Learn more about the importance of brand awareness and how to increase it in this guide.
Why Is Brand Awareness Important?
Brand awareness is important to companies because it helps:
- Boost Competitive Advantage: A well-executed brand awareness marketing strategy can give you an edge over direct competitors by increasing your brand’s visibility and attracting more customers at the top of the marketing funnel.
- Strengthen Brand Equity: Brand equity is the sum of all qualities and experiences—both tangible and intangible—that make one brand more valuable than another. The higher your brand equity is, the more likely your audience is to trust you, invest in your business, and buy your products.
- Influence Purchasing Decisions: Customers are about 50% more likely to buy products from brands they recognize.
- Increase Customer Loyalty and Trust: Familiarity breeds comfort. When people are aware of your brand, there’s a reduced senes of risk compared to an unknown brand. A well-known business often also implies quality and reliability, which is especially true for high-value products and services.
- Lead to Long-Term Growth: Growing your customer base and shaping brand perception takes steady effort. Ultimately, brand loyalty, word-of-mouth, and consistent customer engagement—all fostered by a strong brand awareness strategy—drive long-term growth.
Elements of a Brand Awareness Strategy
A solid brand awareness strategy sets a business apart from its competitors and drives high customer retention. Here’s what every successful brand awareness campaign includes:
- Brand Identity: A consistent brand voice and visual identity are necessary to help your customers become familiar with and understand your business. Aspects of brand identity include logos, color palettes, imagery, and more.
- Brand Positioning: A unique selling proposition (USP) tells the audience what sets your brand apart from competitors. An effective USP will directly address customer pain points to convince them to buy your product over others.
- Community Connection: A content marketing audience analysis can help you tailor your messaging to potential customers across different segments. Tools like heat maps, Google Analytics, and surveys provide further insights into audience interactions with your brand.
- Multi-Channel Presence: A multi-channel presence allows your business to interact with customers in several ways, including email, blogs, and social media. This helps connect businesses with customers wherever they consume content.
Ways to Increase Brand Awareness
The marketing rule of seven suggests that people need to see your brand at least seven times before making a purchasing decision, so your brand awareness strategy needs to be multi-faceted. Here are the practical steps to spreading awareness of your brand.
Write Helpful Content
Google’s helpful content update made it more important than ever to create content for humans first, search engines second. Its core principal is that you should be making high-quality content that matters to your audience rather than trying to game the system. When you produce interesting, helpful, and unique materials—like infographics, long-form content, videos, website FAQs, and more—your audience will keep coming back to your brand and is more likely to share it with others. Simply put, the best way to raise brand awareness is to publish valuable and memorable information that’s worth talking about.
Leverage Organic SEO
To help your brand appear in front of more eyes online, use on-page and off-page SEO tactics to improve your search engine results page (SERP) rankings. On-page SEO techniques include optimizing your titles, headers, meta descriptions, and body copy with thorough keyword research, using an internal linking strategy, and following Google’s E-E-A-T standards. Off-page SEO tactics include building backlinks, local citations, and more. And if your goal is to attract customers to a physical location, you’ll want to invest in local SEO techniques like optimizing your Google Business Profile, maintaining consistent NAP (name, address, and phone number) data across all your business listings, and responding to customer reviews.
Utilize Social Media
Being active on social media can increase brand awareness organically in a similar way to publishing blogs or webpages on your site. It gives your business more platforms to push out engaging and valuable content, which could be shared by a wider audience so that your brand lands in front of more people. A consistent social media presence also keeps your business top-of-mind for your target audience until they’re ready to make a purchase.
To help increase engagement on social media, post high-quality content in different forms—like stories, videos, polls, contests, and user-generated content—and follow an 80/20 split on posts, where 20% are direct advertisements for your products or services, and 80% are helpful tips, industry insights, behind-the-scenes, on-brand memes, and other valuable information. Another highly effective social media awareness campaign strategy is partnering with like-minded social media influencers and local businesses to tap into their audience.
Invest in Paid Marketing
While organic reach through social media and search results is essential for long-term growth, relying solely on it for brand awareness has limitations. Organic growth takes time. When you pair your organic efforts with paid brand awareness strategies like pay-per-click campaigns, you can achieve faster results, boost the performance of your organic content, target a more relevant audience, and gather detailed analytics along the way.
For more successful brand awareness campaigns, segment your audience by demographics, interests, behavior, age, and more. Then use targeted ads to give each segment a more personalized and relevant advertising experience. Generally, the more personalized and relevant your paid campaigns are, the higher your chances of success are, but running A/B tests on your campaign—like headers, images, button design, and other elements—is always the best way to know what’s performing and what needs to change.
Engage with Your People
Putting effort into engaging with your community will help humanize your brand, making it more relatable and memorable—enhancing brand awareness. But your interactions with your audience needs to go beyond selling a product. Foster a deeper connection and build trust with followers on social media, at local events, or through online forums.
Your community is more than your audience, though. Keep in contact with past customers and ask them for testimonials. Offer them incentives like discount codes, prizes, or exclusive experiences to encourage more mentions and word-of-mouth recommendations of your business. Also use your employees as authentic advocates for your brand by building a positive company culture and empowering your staff to share their experiences while working at the company.
Sponsor Events
Along with digital marketing efforts, a traditional brand awareness tactic like event sponsorship could get the word out about your business and reach your target audience in an unexpected place. Find an event or an ongoing cause that matches up with your company’s values and is relevant to your industry. For example, a tech company could sponsor a hackathon or coding bootcamp. Then, display your logo and company name on handouts, banners, or branded promotional items like pens or water bottles that the attendees can easily see.
Be Consistent, Not Rigid
While brand authenticity and consistency are important in a multi-channel marketing strategy, Aaron Mackel, Hurrdat’s Digital Strategy Director, notes:
“Consistency matters, but if you’re going to have a presence on drastically different channels, you have to be adaptable to what is expected on that channel, as well. This comes down to knowing and defining the voice of the brand, which makes sure it can be adaptable from platform to platform.”
How to Measure Brand Awareness
Brand awareness can be challenging to measure, but there are both qualitative and quantitative data points you can gather to help you track the success of your campaigns. Here are KPIs to measure brand awareness:
- Site Traffic Numbers: Higher traffic numbers indicate that more people are discovering your brand and visiting your website, which could suggest your brand awareness is increasing.
- Social Engagement: Social media metrics such as likes, comments, shares, and followers measure active interest in your brand and demonstrate your organic reach. The higher your positive social engagement is, the higher your brand awareness will likely be.
- Google Trends Data: Similar to site traffic, you can analyze search volume for your brand name and related queries over time. An upward trend suggests that more people are searching for your company by name, which would be a strong indicator that your awareness improved.
- Brand Mentions: By setting up Google Alerts to monitor mentions of your brand across the web, you can gain insight into how much people are talking about you. Metrics like the number of media mentions, audience size, and traffic generated from public relations campaigns are strong starting points.
- Social Listening: This involves analyzing conversations, feedback, and sentiments about your brand online. Social media listening will give more context about the data you’re tracking.
- Brand Awareness Surveys: Directly ask your target audience if they can identify your brand logo, name, and slogan. Test how aware people are with your brand’s products, services, and values. And learn how people perceive your business’ quality, trustworthiness, and more through brand awareness surveys.
Want to build brand awareness? Hurrdat Marketing can help with all your digital marketing needs—including content marketing, search engine optimization, paid advertising, and more. Contact us today to get started!
