How to build brand awareness: from strategy to practice

People can’t buy from businesses they don’t know about. It might feel like an obvious thing to say, but it nevertheless gets to the heart of the challenge faced by any business: brand awareness.

Now reliant on the internet as the primary marketing tool, modern organisations find themselves in an attention economy where they don’t just contend against their direct competitors, but the entire world, for the eyeballs of consumers.

A clever brand awareness strategy, however, can ensure that your business gets in front of a good number of the right eyes at the right time.

Brand awareness is a measure of how well your target audience knows your brand, and how familiar they are with your products and services. It isn’t necessarily the audience’s ability to recall a brand name – they may just recognise certain distinguishing features of the brand: the colour, the font, the packaging or jingle.

Recognising and feeling comfortable with a brand often forms a key step in a consumer’s decision to purchase an item, particularly when that purchase is a large or otherwise important one. Building strong brand awareness is a critical step for all consumer-facing companies, particularly when you’re trying to gain traction at the very early stages of the business.

If this all seems a little vague, that’s because it is. Unlike other marketing efforts built on solid metrics like impressions, website visitors and click-through rate, brand awareness can is a little less tangible and quantifiable. But while it can feel difficult to measure, the rewards for focusing on and investing in brand awareness can be huge.

Brand awareness is important because it sits at the very beginning of the sales funnel, forming the first step of the customer journey. From there, awareness turns into familiarity, familiarity turns into a purchase, and this first purchase is hopefully followed by more, resulting in a loyal customer. At its best, brand awareness creates passionate brand ambassadors who can do the selling for you.

It can lead to people feeling an almost odd level of connection to certain brands. Most of us, for example, would pick a side between iPhone and Android, perhaps because we’re simply more familiar with one than we are with the other, or perhaps because we feel something deeper toward those brands. You might also feel a deeper connection to Nike than to Adidas, to Coke over Pepsi, or to one supermarket chain over another.

Brands with high levels of awareness can become less reliant on advertising over time. Instead of a potential customer Googling “running shoes”, they type in “Nike shoes” and head direct to the Nike website.

Brand awareness is also important because it’s a good general measure of success. By tracking brand awareness you can get an overall sense of whether your marketing is gaining traction with consumers. When awareness goes up, it’s a good sign that revenue will soon follow. If awareness doesn’t increase, it’s a good sign that you should rethink your marketing strategy.

The ultimate goal of brand awareness is the same as almost any business effort: to make more money. But as noted above, creating brand awareness is the very first step to a sale – it’s not enough to secure business on its own.

The challenge is to get a customer thinking about your brand right at the moment they’re ready to purchase. Think about putting ‘Colgate’ or ‘Kleenex’ on your shopping list rather than ‘toothpaste’ or ’tissues’ – the connection between brand and product is so strong that one has become synonymous with the other. This is called brand salience, and should be the destination that your brand awareness efforts drive toward.

How do you get your customers thinking of your brand when they’re about to make a purchase? It is the result of consistent investment in brand awareness, but more specifically it’s about creating prompts that match the customer’s needs at the moment the purchase decision is made. The fast food taglines and jingles that jump into your head just as you’re deciding what to have for dinner, for example.

Another factor to consider is brand equity – the levels of quality and value that consumers believe your brand represents. Where brand salience helps you to secure initial sales, brand equity helps you to secure many more, and potentially charge more for the pleasure, as it’s a measure of the trust that customers have in your product, service or brand.

Brand equity is mainly earned through delivering a high quality product or service time and time again. But marketing can play its part, such as by capturing and sharing the positive experiences of your current customers.

Perhaps the most famous and successful brand awareness campaign of all time is that of Coca Cola. Coke has long understood the power of brand, forever cited as one of the most recognisable in the world. But this didn’t happen by accident – the company has spent well over a century investing in marketing designed to make ‘Coke’ synonymous with ‘soft drink’, and to connect their product with all manner of things, from Christmas to happiness to fun with friends.

These marketing campaigns are notable for the lack of selling they do. No mention of prices, no mention of deals, no ‘by now’ or ‘available at all good retailers’. The purpose is simply to insert the brand into the public consciousness, and to gently associate it with positive experiences, such as sharing a drink with a friend.

A more modern example of brand awareness done right can be found in Dollar Shave Club – a subscription personal grooming service that launched in 2011 and was sold to Unilever for US$1 billion just five years later. The key to their brand awareness success was comedy – their cheeky launch video brought the startup incredible publicity, and more importantly, they managed to successfully convert this attention into a significant and very loyal customer base.

As we mentioned at the top, brand awareness isn’t as simple to measure as other marketing strategies like pay per click (PPC) advertising and social media. That’s not to say brand awareness is impossible to measure – it simply relies on qualitative metrics as well as quantitative metrics.

As with other marketing efforts, you can measure certain elements of your brand awareness campaign in quantitative ways – hard numbers that are measurable and verifiable, telling you things like how many and how often. Here are a few KPIs that you should track:

• Website traffic: How many visitors are you attracting to your site? If the number is going up, so too is your brand awareness. Google Analytics is a particularly useful tool.
• Direct website traffic: How many people are navigating to your site directly by typing in your URL or clicking on a bookmark in their browser? With most people now navigating to sites through search engines or social media, direct web traffic numbers can offer a more accurate indication of how effective your marketing has been in helping people become aware of your brand, and convincing them to visit your site.
• Branded search traffic: Branded search traffic is any search query that directly references a brand – e.g. ‘Nike shoes’ versus ‘running shoes’. Use Google Search Console to check for your branded search volumes. If they increase over time this is a good sign that you’re not just generating brand awareness, but brand salience and equity too.
• Social media metrics: Social media platforms allow you to make deeper connections with your audience. The amount of followers, impressions and engagement you attract can be a great indication of how well your brand is cutting through the noise. Social media platforms also offer deep insights into the audience that you’re reaching, allowing you to check that your marketing is resonating with the right people.

Qualitative measurements are a little different to quantitative measurements in that they’re less tangible. These metrics are focused more on opinions and experiences, and answer questions like why and how. Useful qualitative measurements include:

• Brand awareness surveys: There’s no better way to understand your level of brand awareness than to simply ask your target audience. You can whip up a simple survey on Google Forms then send it out to the email addresses in your CRM, or you could do an informal survey on social media, perhaps in your Facebook Stories. Don’t just ask people whether they’ve heard of your brand – take the opportunity to investigate what they know about your brand and their opinions of your brand.
• Google Alerts: How aware of a brand is the internet at large? What are people saying about a brand? These seemingly complex questions can actually be answered quite easily – by setting up a Google Alert. This is a simple notification that is emailed to you when a new result comes up for a particular topic – in this case your brand. The process of setting up a Google Alert is quite simple, and doing so grants you access to real-time brand awareness feedback.
• Social listening: Social listening is the social media equivalent of Google Alerts – the practice of keeping an ear out for mentions of your brand across Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok and more. There are a number of tools purpose-built for social listening, such as Sprout Social, Brandwatch and Brand24, and each does more or less the same thing, collecting, analysing and presenting actionable brand awareness and opinion data.

The process of building brand awareness is about one thing above all else: creating a successful marketing strategy. The best marketing strategies take a two-pronged approach, combining long-term brand building efforts with short-term customer acquisition efforts.

Let’s take a look at eight of the most popular tactics for building brand awareness.

Paid ads still have their place in our modern world, although in the last decade or two traditional channels like broadcast and print have slowly been overtaken by digital options like display ads and paid social posts. Google Ads plays a key role in the marketing mix for most brands because of its unmatched impact: it can be used to build brand awareness and get your business in front of the ideal audience right at the moment they’re looking to buy.

If your target market is broad, you may consider an old school TV, radio or newspaper spot, as these marketing channels still have significant reach, and we all know how quickly a catchy jingle or snappy tagline can boost brand awareness.

If you’re looking for a way to target a more specific audience, there’s no better tool than social media. The relationships you can build on social media are simply far deeper than you can grow through other channels. You can use your profiles to post informative and/or entertaining content that shows a bit of brand personality and helps you to slowly grow a captive audience that is truly engaged with your brand.

Then there’s the advertising on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok, which use treasure troves of user data to help you reach very specific audiences. If you want to build positive brand awareness with mothers in their mid-40s who live in your area and who have an interest in sports, you can do exactly that.

Speaking of social media, a strategic #sponsored post can turbocharge your brand awareness overnight. Influencer content is the process of paying a social media personality to post about your brand, granting you access to their audience of followers.

If you choose your influencer wisely, you can build awareness and brand recognition amongst a passionate and engaged group of highly targeted customers. While it might be tempting to aim for mega-influencers like Cristiano Ronaldo or Kim Kardashian, a far more budget-friendly and effective strategy is to find influencers with smaller follower counts – perhaps in the hundreds of thousands – but who have developed a more trusting and engaged relationship with those followers.

PR is more of an old school way to build brand awareness. It shares some similarities with influencing, though it doesn’t have the ‘pay to post’ aspect. It’s a strategy that sees you telling your story through broadcast, print and digital media, using press releases and other messaging to catch the eyes of journalists, editors and publishers. You might alert the media to the grand opening of a new store, to the release of a new product, to an award you won or an anniversary you have celebrated. These stories are designed to boost the profile of your brand while also putting it in the best possible light.

Public relations are usually handled by an expert team of marketers or PR specialists, as there is a lot of nuance to developing and implementing a successful PR strategy.

The importance of Google to your brand awareness efforts cannot be understated. Search engines are the starting point for the overwhelming majority of internet visits, and the higher up the Google rankings your website appears, the more awareness you will generate.

There are two ways to get to the top for relevant queries: through Google Ads – see above – and through search engine optimisation (SEO). SEO is the practice of making your website as Google-friendly as possible. This encompasses strategies like including plenty of relevant keywords in the text of the site, and showing your trustworthiness and authority by earning backlinks from other websites. The technical nature of SEO means that it is another brand awareness strategy that demands expert assistance in order to work.

Brand partnerships are a case of ‘I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine’. The key to this strategy is to find another business who has a similar target customer to yours, but who offers a product or service that is different, and ideally complementary, to your own. You can then partner with one another in order to access each other’s audiences.

As an example, consider a brand partnership between a brewery and a food truck. A day of selling to hungry and thirsty patrons not only lines the pockets of both businesses, it also offers them the chance to post a whole heap of content to social media, sharing and tagging one another to build awareness within one anothers’ audiences. There might even be a deal that encourages the customers of one business to try the other: get a discounted meal with every jug of beer, or vice versa.

There are two ways to use an event to build brand awareness: hold your own, or sponsor someone else’s.

Holding your own event, such as the launch of your business or a new store, can help you to build brand awareness beyond the event itself, as you can capture content to post on social media, and you can issue press releases before the event to generate buzz and after the event to squeeze out more brand awareness juice.

Obtaining naming rights to someone else’s event is another effective (and less laborious) strategy. Industry conferences, for example, will often be sponsored by B2B businesses who are looking for a little more name recognition.

Brand awareness isn’t simply about getting your name out there – it’s about building a reputation too. By investing time and effort into thought leadership, your brand can become synonymous with quality, innovation, authority and trustworthiness.

Thought leadership is the process of sparking conversation within your industry or specialisation, through channels like articles, videos and social media posts, by speaking at events or on podcasts, or by being active in professional groups. These efforts can raise brand awareness among industry movers and shakers, and your reputation as a leader can eventually help to raise awareness of your brand amongst new audiences.

Brand awareness isn’t just about ensuring your target customers know about your business – it’s about ensuring they want to buy from your business. In a busy modern marketplace, where brands are competing against the rest of the world for the attention of consumers, this is no small feat. But with a bit of expert help, you’re far more likely to succeed.

At Traction we have a team of marketing experts who have helped a wealth of Kiwi businesses to put their brands up in lights. Our brand awareness strategies cover the full gamut of tools, techniques and tactics, including social media, Google Ads, search engine optimisation and remarketing.

We have a deep passion for helping other local businesses succeed, so no matter your organisation, industry, product or service, if you’re looking to drive more awareness of your brand, we’re here to help. Get in touch with our friendly team today.