What is Brand Awareness and How Do You Build a Successful Campaign?

Coca-Cola, Apple, Starbucks, McDonald’s, Heinz. Whether you’ve ever shopped with these brands or not, you’ll know their names, logos, and what they offer. It’s also likely you’ll have heard feedback about the brands from friends, family and work colleagues if you don’t have your own.

Whether these names trigger a childhood memory of French fries and milkshakes, your favourite pair of trainers, or family meals of beans on toast — it’s undeniable that these brands are household names.

But how do you get to the stage in your own business when the mere sight of your logo — or your target customer hearing your name — creates a level of recognition that automatically relays what you do and what you are about? This is great brand awareness. Below, we’ll explore what brand awareness is, how you can create and monitor your own campaign and some examples to give you some inspiration.

What is brand awareness?

Brand awareness is the extent to which a brand is recognised and remembered by consumers. It's essentially the first step in the customer's journey towards making a purchase decision and can ultimately result in a target audience identifying a brand among a sea of competitors. This recognition can be driven by various elements such as the brand name, logo, slogan, and even the visual and emotional associations people have with the business.

It’s important to note that brand awareness can be positive or negative. Many businesses have negative brand awareness — not to be confused with poor brand awareness — and prospects may be extremely familiar with what that brand or company does, and still choose not to purchase from them. This may be due to ethics, morals, previous controversies or a poor-quality product. Poor brand awareness, on the other hand, relates to a business’ lack of recognition amongst their prospective customers.

What are the benefits of increasing your visibility?

There are a plethora of great benefits to building your brand awareness, from building trust and credibility to fostering customer loyalty and advocacy. Let’s explore the key benefits of increasing your brand's visibility:

1. Builds trust and credibility

When consumers frequently encounter your brand through various channels, they develop a sense of familiarity. With familiarity comes trust, and people are more likely to buy from brands they trust.

Increased visibility can also position your brand as an authority in your industry, especially if you’re creating thought-provoking or useful content that caters to their pain points. And consumers are more likely to rely on brands that are seen as experts in their field.

2. Can help to expand your customer base

Putting your brand in front of more people allows you to reach a broader and more diverse audience. This can be especially valuable when you're looking to expand into new markets or demographics.

With more people becoming increasingly aware of your brand, you can turn these prospects into paying customers.

3. Sets your brand apart from competitors

In a competitive landscape, having strong brand visibility sets you apart from competitors. Customers are more likely to choose a brand they know and recognise over one that they haven’t heard of before.

Staying top-of-mind can also help to ensure that your brand remains at the top of your consumers’ thoughts, even when they're not actively seeking your product or service.

4. Encourages loyalty

Brands with high visibility often enjoy greater customer loyalty as customers who are familiar with and trust your brand are more likely to make repeat purchases. Satisfied and loyal customers may also become brand advocates, actively promoting your business to friends, family, and their social networks — and this word-of-mouth marketing is a free and powerful way to widen your audience.

Learn more about how to foster loyalty with our customer loyalty guide.

How to identify your target audience

Before you can effectively build brand awareness and launch successful campaigns, it's crucial to pinpoint your target audience so your efforts aren’t wasted. Understanding who your ideal customers are, creating detailed personas, and employing segmentation strategies are essential steps in this process. Let’s break it down in more detail:

1. Identify your ideal customer base — Start by reviewing key demographic factors such as age, gender, and location to provide a foundational understanding of your potential customers. Then, you can dive deeper into their interests, values, lifestyles, and behaviours. Understanding these aspects helps you connect with your audience on a deeper level.
2. Understand their needs — Identifying their challenges and pain points is crucial, as you can then work out how your product or service can address or resolve their issues.
3. Create detailed personas — Once you’ve gathered all your insights, build detailed customer personas to represent a segment of your target audience. Each persona should have distinct characteristics and preferences and also reflect the pain points you gathered in your research.
4. Consider your messaging — As well as building a profile for each audience segment, you should start considering how your brand should communicate with them. Think about what your personas think, feel, see, say, and do to help you craft content and messages that resonate with them emotionally.
5. Map out a journey — Create customer journey maps to visualise the touchpoints your personas have with your brand throughout their decision-making process. Different personas will have various interactions with your business, so knowing which stage is best to target your personas enables you to optimise each touchpoint for maximum impact.
   
   

How to build a brand awareness strategy

A well-thought-out strategy is the cornerstone of successful brand campaigns. Let’s explore the essential components of creating an effective strategy.

1. Have a solid branding strategy

The first step to putting your name out there is to have a solid brand identity that accurately displays your company’s mission, vision, and core values. Think about what you want your brand to stand for and what you want it to be known for in the market.

With your identity outlined, you want to make sure that your brand strategy aligns with the preferences, needs, and aspirations of your target audience. Your brand should resonate with your ideal customers and be consistent to ensure you foster reliability.

Creating logo, colour palette, typography, tone of voice, and imagery guidelines helps to keep your branding consistent. Once established, it can be rolled out across all touchpoints, from your website and social media profiles to packaging and customer interactions.

2. Draft a unique value proposition

Showing why your business stands out and how it addresses customer concerns that other brands don’t give you a unique and competitive edge. Clearly articulate what makes your brand unique and why customers should choose your products or services over alternatives.

You can also go one step further by highlighting the specific benefits that customers can expect to receive from your brand.

3. Use customer feedback

Customer feedback has proved time and time again to be an incredibly powerful tool for bettering your business.

Not only do 64% of customers read reviews before making a purchase, but 80% of businesses use customer satisfaction scores to analyse customer experience and improve it.

When crafting customer surveys, tailor them to seek feedback from your customers that gives you insight into how your brand messaging, products, and services are resonating with them. Then, using your findings to respond to customer input can be seen as a genuine and thoughtful action that gains their trust.

How to use social media to increase your brand awareness

Social media offers an effective platform for brands to promote themselves, maintain customer relationships, and find new leads. It’s common for people to hear about new brands because a friend or contact mentions them on social media, tagging them in a post when they’ve really enjoyed their product, making it a highly effective way to generate new leads.

As social media is one of the most cost-effective ways to promote your brand, here are a few of our top tips for how you can use social media as part of your brand awareness strategy.

Pick the right platform

It can be hard to keep up with all the different social media platforms. We get it, but you don't have to use them all. Instead, choose the right ones for your target audience. Use your persona research to focus on which platforms your customers, potential customers, and audience spend their time.

Just focusing on a maximum of three sites – for example, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter – will ensure your marketing efforts are both targeted and manageable. Below is a quick social media platform categorisation table* to get you started.

(Data sourced from Statista)

Show your personality

It's common for a brand's social media presence to start looking like every other brand. Rather than making an effort to stand out, they play it safe by just posting a link or a photo and adding a couple of hashtags.

If you want to raise your brand awareness, you need to go the extra mile. People want more than just links and promos – that means showing your brand's personality. Give your brand a distinct voice by posting human-centric content that makes it sound human rather than a bot.

Don't be afraid to have an opinion

Showing your brand's personality means not being afraid to let it have an opinion. People increasingly want brands to take a stance on the issues they feel passionate about. But just parroting what everyone else is saying won't do much to raise brand awareness.

Don't be afraid to stand by your brand's principles. It's a great way to get people talking and help you stand out from everyone else, but you need to tread lightly and avoid alienating your audience. Don't just stir things up for the sake of clicks: be bold because they’re your brand's genuine values.

Polish your profiles

When a follower looks at your social media profiles, they should be able to recognise your brand straight away. You also want them to understand what your brand is about quickly. From your profile images to social bios, how you set up your profile will determine whether people will recognise your brand.

But, you have just a few seconds to get their attention and tell them who you are. Therefore, an uncluttered, well-optimised profile with a good photo will clearly spell out your brand to anyone who doesn't already know you.

How to measure brand awareness

How can we measure brand awareness for our businesses? While it’s difficult to get inside a customer’s brain, there are plenty of metrics we can explore to both measure and monitor this.

Web traffic

The traffic to your website is a great place to start. By taking a benchmark of daily, weekly, or monthly traffic volumes before you begin, you can accurately track this over time to measure any increases.

We suggest monitoring the following web traffic metrics:

• All traffic volume
• New users vs returning users
• Traffic sources: particularly organic, direct and referral traffic (direct will show the volume of people typing your web address straight into their search bar, whereas referral will demonstrate traffic to your website from other sources)

Social listening

Social listening tools are a must-have for anyone taking their brand awareness seriously. These tools allow you to track social media mentions and conversations about your brand, whether or not you are tagged. This can also support you in addressing any complaints or negative reviews — another bonus point for good brand perception — and can help you monitor mentions.

As well as social listening, other key social media metrics to review are:

• Social media engagement
• Followers
• Social media messages

You can also set up Google Alerts for your brand name, industry, product or service. This will send you an email (at the frequency of your choice) tracking all mentions online for the keywords you set up, allowing you to track brand mentions over time.

Branded search volume

As well as potential customers typing your website straight into Google — realistically, this is likely to occur during a follow-up visit to your website rather than the first occurrence — prospects may search for your name, product or service using search engines.

What’s great about this is that there has to be brand awareness prior to them searching for you, and if this increases over time, it’s one indicator that your brand awareness strategy is heading in the right direction.

To learn more about search engine marketing, take a look at our guide on how to increase organic traffic to your website here.

Net promoter scores

Using your net promoter score (NPS) is a solid method that allows you to understand your brand perception from the inside out. Instead of asking new customers how they found you or monitoring interactions from prospects, ask your current customers how likely they are to recommend you based on their experience so far. This is a good indicator of positive brand perception and, again, can be benchmarked and re-visited over time.

NPS is one simple question: how likely are you to recommend us to a friend, relative or colleague?

This is answered on a scale of 1–10, where the following bands apply:

• Score 0–6: Detractors – Unhappy customers who are likely to go elsewhere and possibly damage your brand with word-of-mouth.
• Score 7–8: Passives – Satisfied customers but could be swayed by the competition. Not necessarily brand loyal.
• Score 9–10: Promoters – Loyal customers who will continue to buy from you and refer your brand to others
  
  

Examples of brand awareness campaigns

One of the first examples of an effective brand awareness campaign is this video by Old Spice. Uploaded in June 2010, it quickly gained 5,600,000 views in 24 hours, and it now has over 61,000,000 views and is still, to this day, remembered as one of the first examples of a viral brand campaign video, shaking up the modern marketing world in the process.

Hashtag brand awareness campaigns have also proven to be very effective. Key examples include:

• #IceBucketChallenge: Generating $115 million for The ALS Association in 2014 through the Ice Bucket Challenge
• #ShareACoke: Increasing annual sales volume by 11% YoY by encouraging users to buy and gift a Coke through personalised bottles
• #ShareYourEars: Raising over $1 million by asking customers to tweet #ShareYourEars and donate $5 to Make-A-Wish for each tweet. Disney later doubled the amount, donating $2 million.
  
  

Increase your brand awareness today

To conclude, brand awareness is critical for businesses that want to survive in the long term. Before even thinking about the campaigns to run, start with audience research to narrow down your targeting, platforms, and the types of campaigns that they are likely to respond well to. From this, you can consider which platforms and content will serve your audience the best.

Make sure your message is clear, aligns with your brand, and, most importantly, is consistent across all platforms. In doing so, you are sure to create a successful brand awareness strategy that drives results.