Brand awareness is a measure of how much 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.
Marketers know that they need to build brand awareness. According to the US-based Content Marketing Institute, building brand awareness has been a top goal for B2C and B2B marketers for years.
Why is Brand Awareness Important?
Brand awareness helps keep your brand top-of-mind with your audience. If people know your brand, they can become familiar and comfortable with it. Then, when faced with a decision to buy from you or your competitor, they are more likely to buy from you. Here are several functions in which brand awareness will make your business succeed and grow:
- Recognition and trust: Awareness paves the way for customer trust and loyalty. A trusted name stands out in crowded markets.
- Competitive advantage: If consumers instinctively recognize your brand, you stand a better chance of capturing their attention and driving sales — even if your competitors have similar offerings.
- Long-Term Business Growth: When people identify with your brand values, they are more likely to stick with you, making your marketing more efficient in the long run.
The Different Levels of Brand Awareness
Some brands are better known than others. For example, most people would probably recognize that Puma is a brand of athletic shoe, but if someone were to ask you to name one type of sneaker, chances are that Puma would not be the first to leap to mind. On the other hand, there are brands like Coca-Cola, which are not only universally recognizable but are also likely to be the first thing that people think of when they think of a soft drink. Basically, there are three tiers of brand awareness, ranked here in increasing levels of awareness:
Brand Recognition
At the most basic level, brand recognition refers to customers’ ability to identify a brand based on visual or auditory cues, like a logo, color scheme, or tagline. They may not know much about the brand’s offerings, but they recognize it when they see or hear it.
Brand Recall
Moving a step further, brand recall means consumers can think of your brand unprompted when presented with a product category. For instance, when asked to name a fast casual restaurant, if a person says “Chipotle,” it shows that Chipotle has strong brand recall.
Top-of-Mind Awareness
This is the pinnacle of brand awareness. If your brand is the very first that comes to mind within its category, you enjoy top-of-mind awareness. When people think of a need (e.g., “I need a new smartphone”), if they instantly think of your brand, you’ve achieved top-of-mind status.
The Advantages of Brand Awareness
Beyond the reasons listed above, there are many benefits to improving brand awareness and investing in awareness strategies to boost your business and diversify your marketing operation.
Let’s take a look:
Increase Market Share and Sales
Brand awareness is often the first step to driving performance-marketing goals, such as leads and sales. Make people more aware of your brand — especially by targeting relevant, high-quality audiences — and you increase your chances of generating conversions and dominating your market.
Here are three brand awareness examples to illustrate how brand awareness affects sales.
- Shoes of Prey Increases Sales by 300%
Women’s shoe company Shoes of Prey wanted to build brand awareness and reach new audiences. The retailer tapped YouTube influencer and beauty vlogger Blair Fowler to host a giveaway on her channel and help spread the word.
The video generated 750,000 views, 15,000 comments, and coverage from publications such as The Wall Street Journal and Business Insider. Crucially, thanks to this influencer partnership, Shoes of Prey increased its sales by 300%.
- Boxed.com Drives Over 1,400 Sales
After receiving media coverage on The Today Show, e-commerce site Boxed.com wanted to ride this wave of attention and increase brand awareness online. Boxed worked with Taboola Performance Marketing platform to promote its TV clip through native advertising. As a result, the brand drove over 1,400 sales and saw a 3.18% increase in conversions, just from that one piece of content.
As this brand awareness case study shows, if Boxed hadn’t taken this opportunity to invest in brand awareness, it risked limiting its reach and missing out on a big pool of new customers.
- Ralph Lauren Increases Sales by 18%
Fashion brand Ralph Lauren wanted to build brand awareness among global millennial audiences for its 50th anniversary collections. The brand worked with Instagram and Facebook to launch in-feed video ads and Instagram Stories showcasing its products.
Not only did Ralph Lauren drive brand awareness in markets across the world, but the brand also increased online sales by 18% and saw a 7.1-fold return on ad spend.
Explore more successful brand awareness case studies here.
Scale in New Places
You can use brand awareness campaigns with the crafted to scale your content and messaging across new channels—reaching new audiences and feeding the top of the funnel from a variety of platforms. You can do this either organically, or through paid channel with a branded content strategy.
Say you’re active on social media. You might try supplementing your social outreach with search advertising and SEO. Or, you might try launching sponsored social posts that promote your products and messaging to target audiences. Twitter, for example, provides an ‘awareness campaign’ template you can use to target your preferred audience.
Alternatively, if you’ve hit a wall with the Facebook/Google duopoly and are looking to reach new audiences, you can use native advertising to find millions of readers and video viewers on the open web. You can also reach entirely new audiences by using strategies such as influencer marketing and guest posting. These strategies allow you to tap into someone else’s owned audience in exchange for content that you create, payments, or free products.
Remember also to keep your eye out for new channels that you can tap into early on. Five years ago, for example, podcasting burst onto the scene, and major brands, such as GE, Marriott, and IBM, quickly launched their own branded series. Right now, technologies like virtual reality and augmented reality are still gaining traction among brands and audiences, and providing opportunities for experimentation with awareness campaigns.
Ultimately, investing in brand awareness will open doors for your business that you never knew existed. And, it can expose you to channels and audiences with the power to re-energize your marketing operation.
Improve Brand Perception
Brand awareness campaigns don’t just help more people know about your business; they can also change how people think about your business — contributing to overall brand affinity and brand loyalty.
Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, for example, wanted to build brand awareness and improve brand perception among global business leaders outside of Japan. To this end, the company launched a LinkedIn campaign of content. This drove a 12% increase in brand familiarity among Hong Kong and Singapore audiences, and a 7% increase in familiarity among US audiences.
Similarly, the Dominican Republic Ministry of Tourism wanted to improve brand favorability among U.S. travelers. So the brand partnered with Taboola to launch a promotional video campaign across its publisher network. The result was an 18.9% increase in brand favorability—17.7 points higher than the industry average.
Acquire Audience Data
By casting a wide net with a brand-awareness campaign, you can collect a valuable set of data about your audience and potential buyers. With these insights at your fingertips, you can create unique audience segments, devise retargeting strategies, and optimize for future campaigns.
According to a study by Accenture, 91% of consumers are more likely to buy from brands that offer personalized recommendations. A study from Segment also found that 49% of customers made spontaneous purchases after receiving personalized recommendations. Brands can provide these personalized, targeted experiences with data they gather from brand-awareness campaigns. Amazon, for example, famously uses customer data to provide relevant and customized product recommendations to online shoppers.
Brand awareness data is also critical for launching retargeting campaigns. Celebrity Cruises, for example, launched a brand-awareness video campaign on Facebook to promote the redesign of its ships. The cruise line then retargeted only people who watched the video with a new campaign directing them to the company’s landing page. As a result of this optimization, Celebrity Cruises saw a 23-fold return on ad spend.
With a lack of brand awareness data, you could miss out on crucial audience interests and behaviors. And you risk wasting your budget on inefficient strategies and misguided brand awareness objectives.
Effective Brand Awareness Strategies
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:
Make Marketing a Key Player in Brand Strategy
In today’s retail landscape, your content marketing strategy can be as important as your products. Publishing high-quality, value-driven content—blog posts, videos, podcasts, or infographics—helps showcase your brand’s expertise. Consumers who learn from your content are more likely to remember and trust you.
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.
Not only can referral programs help you reach new customers, they can also build affinity and nurture relationships with your existing, most valuable customers by 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.
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. Focus on keywords with high potential engagement and low competition among other brands in your industry.
- Build high-quality content around those keywords: 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 pages accordingly.
The Role of Social Media in Building Brand Awareness
Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok can significantly amplify your brand’s reach. They allow you to:
- Engage directly with your audience.
- Share engaging content.
- Run targeted campaigns.
- Collaborate with influencers.
When done effectively, social media activity can significantly boost your visibility, drive traffic to your website, and help potential customers recall your brand more easily. Here are some concrete steps you can take to boost your social media influence.
Run Facebook and Instagram Ads
Beyond the posts you make to Facebook and Instagram, ad placements on these platforms allow you to target specific audiences based on their preferences, which helps them discover your products that match what they 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.
Partner with Influencers
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. For example, if you run a cosmetics brand, you might tap influencers to review your newest face cream and invite their followers to make a purchase with a custom discount link.
Incentivize Client Reviews
Highlight customer reviews and success stories by placing them on your landing pages and even in your ads.
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.
Measuring the Impact of Brand Awareness
While brand awareness can be somewhat intangible, there are several key performance indicators (KPIs) and methods you can use to gauge its impact:
Branded Search Volume
Branded search volume refers to the number of times a brand name is searched for over a specific period of time.
How to Measure Branded Search Volume: Google Analytics 4 is one of the most commonly-used brand awareness tools to measure search volume, providing valuable insights into user behaviors and website engagement. Additionally, advertisers can use other keyword research tools like Google Trends, Google Keyword Planner, Moz Keyword Explorer, and SEMrush to identify search volume trends and keyword performance.
Share of Voice
Share of voice measures how much a brand is being discussed as compared to its competitors, expressed as a percentage. You calculate it by dividing the number of mentions or impressions of your brand by the total number of mentions or impressions for all competing brands within a specific time period. You will want to do an apples-to-apples comparison by searching how your brand measures up within specific segments, such as social media mentions, backlinks to your product page, or search volume. For example, if 37% of all Instagram hashtag mentions of lipstick brands within a 12-month period refer specifically to Revlon, then Revlon’s share of voice for those parameters (mentions as a percentage of all brands mentioned over a 12-month period) is 37%.
Content marketing products such as Semrush, Sprout Social, Hootsuite and Ahrefs allow you to calculate share of voice within particular segments.
Earned Media Value
Earned media value (EMV) is the estimated monetary value of exposure a brand receives from organic mentions or shares on third-party sites, social media, or traditional media. “Exposure” is a broad term, so this is usually segmented to make it easier to track and compare.
The formula for EMV is as follows:
EMV = Impressions in terms of 1000s x CPM
For example, let’s say you received 20,000 impressions from a campaign and your CPM (“cost per mille,” or cost per thousand impressions) is $5. Then your total EMV for that campaign is 20,000/1000×5=$100.
As with Share of Voice, there is no single set of data that is universally agreed upon as the definitive EMV. But you can track it based on your own parameters from data gathered from such products as Semrush, Sprout Social, Hootsuite and Ahrefs.
Brand Awareness Examples
Coca-Cola
Known for its iconic red can design and memorable campaigns, Coca-Cola has maintained strong global brand awareness through consistent messaging and emotional storytelling. One of its most famous brand awareness initiatives was the “Share a Coke” campaign, launched in 2011, wherein the company printed common first names printed on the label (John, Betty, etc.), the idea being that it would be a nice social gesture to give people Coke with their own name on it.
Nike
Its trademarked “Just Do It” slogan, coined in 1988, and the swoosh logo are recognized worldwide. Nike uses celebrity endorsements, social media campaigns, and consistent brand visuals to stay top-of-mind.
Airbnb
Through its “Belong Anywhere” campaign, user-generated content, and community-driven branding, Airbnb has effectively increased global awareness, even among travelers who have never used the platform.
Harnessing the Power of Brand Awareness
Brand awareness serves several functions in helping a business succeed and grow, including increasing recognition and trust, giving your brand a competitive advantage, and improving long-term business growth. Be sure to know what you’re measuring: KPIs include search volume, Earned Media Value (EMV), and voice share. It’s also important to remember that when you are devising a social media strategy to increase brand awareness, you shouldn’t limit yourself to posts. Consider running ads on Facebook and Instagram, partnering with influencers, and incorporating customer reviews into your marketing.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):
How is brand awareness different from brand recognition or brand recall?
Brand awareness encompasses how familiar people are with your brand’s identity and offerings. Brand recognition means customers can identify the brand when presented with visual or auditory cues—like a logo or jingle. Brand recall, on the other hand, means customers can name the brand unprompted when asked about a product or service category.
What is aided vs. unaided brand awareness?
- Aided Brand Awareness: This is when respondents are given prompts or cues (like showing them a list of brand names or logos) to identify which they recognize.
- Unaided Brand Awareness: This is when respondents are asked about a category, and they spontaneously name brands without being given any hints or options.
What is the point of building brand awareness?
Building brand awareness helps your business stand out in a crowded marketplace. When consumers are aware of your brand, they’re more likely to choose it over competitors, recommend it to others, and remain loyal over time. A strong brand awareness strategy fosters trust, credibility, and emotional connections — factors that ultimately lead to sustained growth and profitability.
