Brand awareness refers to the extent to which a consumer recognizes or thinks of your brand.
It is, as the name suggests, the awareness of your brand’s existence. And the advantage of high brand awareness is almost self-evident:
The more your brand is top-of-mind, the more often it sells.
Increasing your company’s brand awareness is therefore an important task – and a necessary task if you want to be the brand that consumers automatically choose within your product category.
Approximately 7.1 billion people can recognize the Coca-Cola logo.
That’s approximately 94% of the world’s population – and the strongest example of brand awareness ever.
How brand awareness works
In a dense digital market, brand awareness is simply alpha and omega. There are many competitors, both near and far, so it’s all about standing out from the crowd. And for that purpose, your brand is your strongest tool.
Brand awareness is typically divided into two components: brand recognition and brand recall.
Brand recognition
is consumers’ ability to recognize your brand based on your brand assets: name, logo, colors and more. Anything that aims to represent your brand. The higher the brand recognition, the greater the chance that consumers will choose your brand when the “menu is presented”, so to speak.
Brand recall
is a more difficult discipline to score points in. It is consumers’ ability to remember your brand when presented with as little as possible, e.g. an industry or product category. If consumers think your brand based on minimal input, it is called unaided recall – and that is precisely what all companies ultimately strive for. This means that they are top-of-mind within their product or service category.
7 tips on how to strengthen your brand awareness
1. Build an identifiable brand
The obvious first step towards brand awareness is a good brand. So, get to your desk and ask the important questions: what does your brand look like? How does it communicate? What does it represent?
There are plenty of tools you can use to build your brand, including your brand personality, brand DNA, brand values and of course the visual elements. All of this helps to make your brand easily recognizable in – and outside – the digital universe.
2. Use strategic content marketing
A brand that publishes exciting, entertaining, and relevant content is a brand that is remembered. Therefore, content marketing is your best friend when your brand awareness needs to be strengthened. But it’s not just about creating as much content as possible – it has to be done strategically.
Look carefully at your company’s target audience(s) and their age, behavior, and interests, and optimize the content according to them, so that the content is ultimately tailored to the people you want to read/see/hear it.
3. Understand the SoMe algorithm
The algorithms are determining. That’s the ugly online truth. And they not only determine how much of your content your followers see – but also whether users who don’t yet follow your business see your content.
In other words: if you can create content that works with the algorithms on social media, you increase the chance of expanding awareness of your company and your brand.
4. Optimize your visibility on Google
The world’s largest website = the world’s largest potential for brand visibility. But, as you know, that visibility does not come by itself. Google has the tools to achieve it, including SEO and Google Ads, so it’s a matter of familiarizing yourself with them.
By focusing on high Google visibility, you increase the chance of being top-of-mind among existing as well as potential customers when they are looking for something in your industry.
5. Remember your e-mail marketing
In an age where SoMe dominates and VR glasses seem less and less science fiction, it’s easy to forget email marketing. But you must remember it – because it still works.
E-mail marketing is probably still one of the best ways to keep your company top-of-mind with users who, for example, are existing customers or have signed up for your newsletter. And if you weave your brand identity into your emails, you have a powerful tool for brand awareness.
6. Publish photos, videos, and live streams
Visual content is still king of the internet. Therefore, good photos and videos are a necessity if you want your brand to be remembered. Whether it’s office photos, reels from everyday life or a big brand film: in the end it’s the content people remember.
If the content is also interactive, as with live streams, you don’t just give users something to read or watch, but something they can experience. And experiences are remembered.
7. Run an awareness campaign
A tip like this sounds almost a little too easy, but awareness campaigns are worth considering. If the focus is solely on brand awareness, this is the ad format, where you get the most out of your money.
The social media know that brand awareness is essential for companies, so the awareness campaign is designed to show your ads to users who are most likely to remember your company. Awareness campaigns can be found on both Meta’s platforms and LinkedIn.
Plan, measure and optimize your brand awareness
If you want to be seen, it is not enough just to be present.
In other words: you can’t just follow the 7 tips above and then sit back. The digital market is densely populated in almost every industry imaginable, so it takes more than visibility to stand out from the crowd.
Strengthening your company’s brand awareness is a continuous process that requires a plan – and follow through on it. It is therefore important to measure the effectiveness of the initiatives you have initiated to increase awareness of your company as a brand, so that you can continuously optimize and ensure that you do not waste your time.
You can e.g., measure your company’s brand awareness through
1. New followers on social media
2. Direct traffic to website
3. Google Trends
4. Content marketing performance
5. Earned media performance
6. Brand Awareness surveys
Get seen with a digital strategy
Brand awareness does not come from doing digital marketing from day to day. Digital marketing in 2023 requires coordination. Interplay. Strategy.
A digital strategy is the way if you want to go from just being present and “hoping for the best” to being aware of every step – current, past, and future – in your digital marketing.