What is Brand Awareness?

First, a brand awareness definition. What is brand awareness? It is the extent to which audiences recognize and remember your business. The higher the level of brand awareness you can generate, the more potential customers will be familiar with your brand, logo, messaging, and products.

It’s tough to understate the importance of brand awareness. As noted above, brand awareness strategies have the power to increase your market share, expand your reach, and lay the foundation for the rest of your campaigns. A shoe retailer, for instance, might launch native ads promoting their new boots across publisher sites. They can then use the data from those ads to retarget people who already engaged with their content and generate lead. Looking for more inspiration? Try these brand awareness examples.

Before building your campaigns, however, be sure to clearly determine your brand awareness objectives. For instance, you might be looking to drive traffic to your website, increase your TikTok followers, promote a new product line, enhance your brand reputation, or improve brand familiarity and recall.

Once you decide on your goal, it’s important to know how to measure brand awareness. Again, there is no standard or universal way to measure brand awareness. The metrics you choose will depend on your strategies, goals, and campaign channels. For example, common brand awareness metrics include:

• Impressions

Ex: How many users viewed your email ad within a publisher newsletter?

• Website visits

Ex: How many users clicked on your search ad and made it through to your landing page?

• Social media engagement

Ex: How many users viewed or completed your Instagram video?

• Search volume

Ex: How many users viewed your promoted search result after asking a relevant query?

By identifying and consistently tracking brand awareness analytics, you can better optimize strategies to meet your goals and understand exactly how target audiences engage with your business.

How to Create Brand Awarenes

Building brand awareness can be tough, especially when you’re fighting for customer attention across saturated platforms. That’s why it’s important to understand how to create brand awareness with a range of proven strategies.

To start, you can use these foundational tactics to build your brand awareness campaigns:

1. Start with a Powerful Brand

It’s tough to build awareness for a weak brand. So make sure you first take these steps to create a strong and powerful brand presence that hooks in new customers:

Align products to your brand identity. Each of your offerings should tie back to your brand identity and mission — not just visually, for instance, but also in terms of matching your overall brand message, voice, and vision.
Be recognizable. Choose a name, logo, and color palette that stands and is easy to remember. Again, be sure to align these aesthetic assets to your brand voice and message, delivering a uniform and easily recognizable experience for your customers.
Design a cohesive brand story. Create opportunities to connect with customers on an emotional level by pulling back the curtain on your brand and telling a compelling story.

2. Make Marketing a Key Player in Brand Strategy

In today’s retail landscape, your content marketing strategy can be as important as your products themselves, since branding plays a vital role in customers’ decisions. As such, it’s crucial to build brand awareness into your overarching market strategy.

For example, you might start a brand awareness campaign to reach a wide audience with native ads across top publisher sites. Then you might retarget people who engaged with those ads, reaching them more personalized, niche marketing tactics that appeal to their specific interested and keep them moving along the funnel.

As another example, you might use trend marketing techniques to establish your brand as a thought leader and go-to source for expert insights. After building brand awareness with this approach, you can encourage repeat readers to sign up for your email newsletter, generating leads and subscriptions for future campaigns.

3. Start a Referral Program

You can start a referral program to help turn loyal customers into advocates and build brand awareness through word of mouth — one of the most powerful and effective awareness strategies. As studies have shown, 49% of consumers say friends and family are their top sources of brand awareness (Ambassador).

Natural dog food brand, Ollie, for example, invites current customers to “Feed a Friend” for discounts on future purchases:

Not only can referral programs help you reach new customers; they can also build affinity and nurture relationships with your existing, most valuable customers — mobilizing them to become trusted ambassadors on behalf of your brand. In fact, you might even incentivize loyal and repeat customers to join your referral program by offering discounts, rewards, and exclusive access to new products or content.

4. Improve Your SEO

One of the best ways to build awareness is by boosting your search results rankings. This way, when potential customers query with relevant keywords, your content and landing pages can surface to meet them — driving new traffic to your site and attention for your brand.

That’s where search engine optimization (SEO) tactics can help. If you’re looking to improve your ranking on Google and Bing, for example, consider implementing these SEO strategies:

Conduct keyword research. Discover which keywords are most relevant to your target audiences. What topics are people searching for? What questions are they asking? Focus on keywords with high potential engagement and but low competition among other brands in your industry.
Build high-quality content around those keywords. Use those keywords to inform your content strategies, creating informative, educational, and valuable content that helps answer your customers’ questions and address their pain points. For example, you might incorporate keywords into the headline, body, and visual metadata of your blog posts, making them easier for search engines to discover.
Continue to optimize keywords. Customer preferences and behaviors are always changing. So remember to frequently conduct keyword research and update your content and landing accordingly.

The 6 Best Strategies to Improve Brand Awareness

Once you’ve established the basics of your brand awareness strategy, you can start to find ways to increase brand awareness and scale your reach. After all, building brand awareness is a constant, ever-changing process that requires continuous adjustments to enhance results.

That’s where these strategies come in. Consider utilizing these six tactics to take your brand awareness campaign to the next level.

1. Run Facebook and Instagram Ads

Even if you already have a social media presence, you can use Facebook and Instagram ad placements to target specific audiences based on their preferences — helping them discover new brands and products that they may like. You might use a lookalike audiences feature, for instance, to target people who are similar to your most valuable customers, increasing the likelihood that they’ll engage with your posts.

This form of content advertising, in particular, can be effective because these social ads are designed to match organic social content, fitting seamlessly into users’ feeds. Meaning, you can launch brand awareness ads that help expand your reach and improve results without disrupting the user experience.

2. Partner with Influencers to Review Your Product

Use influencer marketing to access niche, existing communities of engaged followers. After all, these influencers have already earned the trust and attention of their followers. By partnering with them, you can help build valuable awareness for your brand and even start driving sales. For example, you might tap influencers to review your products and invite their followers to make a purchase with a custom discount link.

3. Incentivize Client Reviews

Highlight customer reviews and success stories by placing them on your landing pages and even in your ads. Showcasing these testimonials can help potential buyers learn more about what your brand has to offer — giving them the inspiration they need to move along the customer journey.

To elicit these reviews, you might send follow-up emails to people who’ve made a purchase and invite them to provide their feedback in exchange for an incentive, such as a discount on their next order.

4. Interact with Followers

Improve social media engagement by frequently and directly interacting with your followers. That is, don’t just blast out vague messages to the masses; have someone on-call to respond to questions and concerns and provide personalized feedback. Brands can also run social media contests, giving users an opportunity to be individually recognized and rewarded for their engagement. All of these strategies can help boost brand awareness and affinity in a crowded social media landscape.

5. Implement Remarketing Campaigns

Remarketing campaigns can take your brand awareness efforts to the next level by reengaging people who’ve already clicked on your ad or consumed your content. Since these users have demonstrated their interest in your messaging, they’re more likely to respond to brand awareness ads, leading to greater results at more efficient costs.

A beauty retailer, for example, might target a broad demographic with ads leading to a blog post of beauty tips. The retailer can then retarget people who clicked through and read the blog, inviting them to subscribe for more content.

6. Leverage Native Advertising

Native advertising is one of the most effective strategies for building brand awareness. Unlike traditional banner ads, native ads match the form of their surrounding content, yielding more intuitive and less disruptive user experiences.

As a leading content discovery platform, My Digital Wala provides the tools that advertisers need to launch engaging native ads across the open web. With their choice of premium placements, advertisers can tap into a network of over 9,000 top publisher sites, driving brand awareness among audiences who are already engaged and ready to consume new content. My Digital Wala also supports a range of innovative ad formats, including native video ads and Motion Ads, which play on a short loop, similar to GIFs.

A globally recognized fast-food chain, for example, partnered with My Digital Wala to promote its new burger using native video ads. The ads ended up driving a 58% video completion rate and 68% viewability — outperforming every other distribution platform.

Find more inspiration with our brand awareness case study examples.

Final Thoughts

Building brand awareness is crucial for business success. Implementing the strategies outlined here can effectively enhance your brand’s visibility and engagement in the market. From refining your brand identity to leveraging a range of digital marketing channels, each strategy plays a vital role.

Generating brand awareness doesn’t have to be overly complex, either. With the right tools, strategies, and outreach channels, you can build brand awareness campaigns that engage wide audiences and keep them moving through the funnel.

Just remember that driving awareness is an ongoing effort. It’s crucial to frequently evaluate your campaigns and optimize your brand awareness strategy to stay competitive in an ever-changing market. You can use native advertising, for example, to continuously increase brand awareness across the open web.

With platforms like My Digital Wala, you can seamlessly connect with your target audience and drive meaningful results. Ultimately, integrating native advertising into your marketing strategy can unlock new engagement opportunities and propel your brand to greater heights in the digital landscape.