Brand Awareness: This is one of those concepts that you know you need to understand, but maybe you find it a bit…difficult to define? You are not alone.
At first glance, everything is simple. Brand awareness = people know about your brand. But how to measure it? And what precise definition of brand awareness makes sense for your business?
Below, we’ll explain everything you need to know about how to create an effective brand awareness strategy.
What is brand awareness?
Brand awareness is a measure of how well people recognize your brand, including how “aware” they are that your brand even exists. Brand awareness is not just an individual metric, but a concept that touches on many different KPIs, from traffic to social media voice share.
We’ll talk more about how to measure brand awareness later in this post, but for now, think of it as one of the indicators of a brand’s health.
Why is brand awareness important?
Strong brand awareness and brand awareness means your brand is in the spotlight when people think of the category of products or services you sell. They recognize your logo or slogan, making it easier to communicate effectively through social content, especially in images or short videos.
Brand awareness is a mandatory first step before building brand loyalty. After all, customers can’t love your brand until they get to know and recognize it.
Think of it like the difference between Coke and generic cola from the store. No one wears a T-shirt showing their love for regular cola. Of course, people buy it – usually because it’s the cheapest option. But no one preaches a common brand.
The most expensive brands are usually the most recognizable. Nike is the most valuable clothing brand. Apple wins in the consumer technology category. And, yes, Coca-Cola is a leader in food and drink.
You don’t have to reach the level of these behemoths to capitalize on brand awareness, but you can model a lot in how these companies have built their brands.
How to Increase Brand Awareness: 9 Tactics
1. Create a recognizable brand
Building a brand is an important first step towards brand awareness. This means that you need to have a clear idea of what your brand is and what it represents. What does your brand look like? Sounds like? Support?
Some key components of a recognizable brand include:
Brand Voice
What tone are you using? Are you formal or casual? Bold or serious? Playful or businesslike?
You don’t have to use the same tone in every format. Your brand voice on social media can be more light-hearted and fun than the voice you use in, say, print ads. Your voice may even change slightly from Facebook to TikTok.
But the way you talk to customers and about your product should ultimately be recognizable across all channels. Choose a few consistent keywords and phrases and follow your style guide.
Brand Aesthetics
Consistency is the key to brand building and brand recognition. This is true both for your look and for your words.
What are the colors of your brand? Fonts? How do you generally look on visual platforms like Instagram and TikTok?
For example, check out these Instagram posts from Old Navy, Banana Republic, and The Gap. All three brands are owned by the same company, but they each target different demographics with their respective social aesthetics.
Brand values
We talked about defining how you look and sound. But brand values define who you are as a brand. Having a clear set of brand values is the most important component of building a recognizable brand.
Don’t get hung up on your ideas of what values should be. It’s not just about charitable work or corporate donations (although that can certainly be an aspect of how you live your brand values). It’s more about defining what you represent as a brand and how you embody that in your interactions with everyone from customers to employees.
Make sure your brand values align with those of your target audience. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, 58% of consumers buy or advocate brands based on their beliefs and values, while 60% of employees use beliefs and values when choosing an employer.
This is not about empty words. What you do is just as important as what you say.
Source: Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report 2022: The New Impact Cascade.
Logo and slogan
You may argue that these are part of your brand’s voice and aesthetic, but they are important enough to deserve to be named on their own. These are instantly recognizable images of your brand.
If you read “Just Do It”or see a checkmark, you don’t need anyone to tell you that you are looking at a Nike product or ad. Red Bull gives you what? (Say it with me now: Wings.) Think about these aspects of your brand as they will become your brand’s currency.
Source: Nike on Facebook.
2. Tell a brand story
This correlates with some of the elements we’ve already talked about, but goes a little further than your brand’s values and voice. Your brand story is the story of your brand and how it got there.
For an entrepreneur, the story of a brand might be that they noticed a problem in their day-to-day work and invented a solution to solve it.
For a larger business, your brand story can be a conglomerate of your mission and your story.
Every brand has a story. But the most important component of brand awareness is telling the story. Use storytelling to showcase your brand story, such as through customer experiences or highlighting key milestones in your growth.
For example, Harley-Davidson produces The Enthusiast, a magazine that features rider stories as well as driving tips and information about new models and equipment. Rider stories are also shared on their social channels:
3. Create value outside of your product
The key way to create long-term brand awareness is to create value that goes beyond your product. Consider how you can inform, educate, or entertain.
Do you or your team have specialized knowledge? Don’t keep it to yourself! Share your knowledge through a blog, podcast, YouTube channel, or newsletter.
This should not apply to direct sales. Instead, it’s a relationship building and brand awareness practice that creates more opportunities for your audience to get to know your brand.
For example, Patagonia creates films that align with their brand’s values and story. Their products appear in films but are not imposed. The value is in the films themselves. The webpage that streams the films states, “We are a storytelling collective who make films on behalf of our home planet.”
This overlaps a bit with the last couple of points, but the focus here is on creating content that is easy to share. While it’s not always possible to predict what will go viral, you can certainly take steps to make your content more accessible and accessible to the public.
First, you must follow social media optimization best practices, such as posting consistently and at the right time.
But also create content that your followers will want to share. This aligns with the idea of providing value in your content rather than always trying to make a sale. Try adding a call to action that invites you to share your resources or tag a friend.
Also make your content easy to share using the social media buttons on your website and blog, which can help provide social proof.
5. Contribute to your community
Not all brand building happens online. You can increase brand awareness by contributing to your community in specific ways, such as sponsoring events, offering corporate donations, or encouraging employee participation in charitable causes.
It could be sponsoring a major event such as Vancouver’s annual fireworks competition known as the Honda Celebration of Light.
Or it could be as simple as submitting an item to a silent auction for a local fundraiser.
6. Offer a freebie
Everyone loves freebies. Offering something for free is a good way to get skeptical potential customers to try your product. It can also create buzz about your brand online.
Whether it’s a free sample, a free trial, or a freemium business model, getting to know what you have to offer for free helps grab people’s attention and increase awareness of your brand.
What is the difference between free trial and shareware?
In a free trial, you offer all or a version of your regular product or service for free for a limited time—usually 7, 14, or 30 days.
With the Freemium business model, you offer the basic version of your product for free indefinitely with the option to upgrade to a paid plan for more features.
For example, Hootsuite offers a limited free plan and a 30-day free trial on the pro plan.
Source: Hootsuite Professional
The above point is all about building brand awareness by making it easier for people to try your product or service. This item also includes free stuff, but here it’s about using a giveaway to get your brand noticed on social media.
The tag-a-friend social contest entry model is a particularly good way to drive new visitors to your social accounts and, in turn, increase your brand awareness. If you partner with another brand or content creator, you will further increase the size of your potential new audience.
Instagram may have reverted the suggested content algorithm changes for now, but it does look like featured content will remain on the Meta platforms nonetheless. Mark Zuckerberg highlighted this in his latest earnings call:
“Currently, about 15% of the content in a person’s Facebook feed, and slightly more than in an Instagram feed, is recommended by our artificial intelligence from people, groups, or accounts you don’t follow. We expect these numbers to more than double by the end of next year.”
And, of course, featured content on FYP is the driving force behind TikTok.
Featured content increases your chances of being discovered on social platforms because your content is seen by users who don’t yet follow you. This additional exposure is a good way to increase brand awareness.
But as Instagram found out when it got too carried away with recommended content, people only like what they like. Basically, displaying your content in users’ feeds is only part of the equation. To create real brand awareness, you have to create content they really want to see.
We have full blog posts on how to work with each of the social platform algorithms if you want to dive into this social media marketing strategy:
- Instagram Algorithm (TL; DR: Reels. Reels. And more Reels.)
- Facebook Algorithm
- Algorithm TikTok
- Twitter algorithm
To ensure that the content you create is truly valuable to your potential audience, you also need to understand who that audience is. For more information, check out our article on how to find your target market.
9. Run infomercials
All social networks know that brand awareness is a key business goal for many brands using their tools, which is why they offer ads specifically targeted at awareness.
Which targeting option is best for building brand awareness? The specific label may vary depending on the platform, but it will always be named something like “Awareness”, “Brand Awareness”, or “Reach”.
Source: meta ad manager.
This is how Meta describes the brand awareness goal for advertising on their platforms:
“The brand awareness goal is for advertisers who want to show ads to people who are more likely to remember them.
The Brand Awareness goal gives you an estimated Ad Recall Gain (People) that shows how many people we estimate would remember your ad if we asked them within two days.”
LinkedIn puts it a little more simply: “Tell more people about your products, services, or organization by choosing a Brand Awareness objective for your ad campaigns.”
Meanwhile, TikTok calls its signature hashtag ad format “the master of mass awareness”and one of the “biggest and best ad formats for broad and recognizable awareness.”
In short, brand awareness ads are an easy way to make sure your PSA budget goes towards building your brand awareness.
How to measure brand awareness
As we said above, brand awareness is not the only indicator. But there are a number of statistics that you can use to measure. Here are some of the most important brand awareness metrics and how to track them.
Please note that while each of the social platforms offer their own analytics tools, they give you a siled view of your results one account at a time. To get a general idea of the success of building your brand awareness, it is important to consider all platforms together.
Achieve
Reach measures the number of people who see your content on social media. The more people who see your content, the more people are likely to begin to recognize what makes you different as a brand. (That’s why it’s so important to have a consistent brand voice and aesthetic.
When tracking reach as a measure of brand awareness, pay close attention to the number of followers and non-followers.
Non-followers who see your content are potentially getting to know your brand for the first time, creating new awareness. They see your content because it was recommended to them either by one of their social contacts or by a social algorithm.
Impression
As noted above, reach measures the number of people who have viewed your content (or more specifically, the number of accounts that have viewed your content). In contrast, impressions measure the number of times people have seen your content.
If the number of impressions significantly exceeds the reach, people will view your content multiple times. This can be a great brand recognition signal. After all, the more times someone views a single piece of content, the more likely they are to remember the brand behind it.
Audience Growth Rate
Audience Growth Rate shows how fast your audience is growing. This provides excellent brand awareness signals as followers are certainly more likely to learn about and recognize your brand than people who are not already following you.
To calculate your audience growth rate, take the number of new subscribers in a given period and divide it by the total number of existing subscribers. Then multiply by 100 to get your audience growth rate as a percentage.
Social Share of Voice
Social voice share is a good way to measure your brand awareness in comparison to your competitors. It shows how much of the social conversation in your industry is about your brand.
To calculate the social share of the vote:
- Count all social media mentions of your brand, both tagged and untagged.
- Do the same for your main competitors.
- Add both sets of mentions together to get the total number of mentions for your industry.
- Divide your mentions by the total.
- Multiply by 100 to get a percentage.
Direct traffic
Direct traffic is a measure of how many people get to your website by entering your website address directly. (As opposed to finding you through a search engine, social media, etc.)
If someone knows your URL, they know your brand pretty well.
By using a web analytics tool like Google Analytics, you can see how people are finding your site on the web. Look for direct traffic information to see how many people enter your URL directly into their browsers.
3 Examples of Social Media Brand Awareness Campaigns
1. Balveni
The Balvenie Whiskey brand awareness campaign included a YouTube web series in partnership with Questlove. The series featured meaningful interviews with celebrity creatives and thinkers, and increased brand awareness.
Seeking a Craft: Season 1 | Series trailer
The marketing campaign attracted 5.1 thousand customers. new YouTube subscribers and boosted brand awareness across key metrics above their respective benchmarks.
2. Naked juice
Naked Juice used video and photo collection ads on Facebook and Instagram to reach its brand awareness campaign. The ads, which appeared in both feed and stories, used bright images and large text overlays to increase brand awareness with or without sound.
Source: Facebook
The campaign showed an increase in brand awareness by 3.7 points.
3. Savage X Fenty
Savage X Fenty used brand awareness advertising objectives to reach new audiences on Facebook and Instagram. Informational advertising was specifically aimed at creating a strong brand feeling, with sales or offers being secondary.
Targeting all women in France, Savage X Fenty created half of the ads themselves and created the rest in partnership with a group of Instagram influencers.
Source: Instagram
These brand awareness ads resulted in a 6.9 point increase in ad recall.