The Ultimate Guide to Brand Awareness

Whenever I think about brand awareness, I think of companies like Apple, Nike, and Trader Joe’s. Have you ever heard people refer to themselves as “Apple people,” “Nike people,” or “Trader Joe’s” people?

That’s what brand awareness does. It embeds itself into consumer lifestyles and purchase habits so that they don’t have to think twice before becoming a customer — time and time again.

This guide will give you a better understanding of brand awareness so you can establish it among your audience and build campaigns that allow it to continually grow and change with your business. Let’s dive in.

In a world where consumers rely on extensive research and others’ opinions before making a purchase, brand trust is everything. Once consumers bond with your brand, they’re likely to make repeat purchases with little to no forethought.

With this comes loyalty. Brand awareness establishes that this trust and trust creates loyalty.

When you put a proverbial face to your brand name, consumers can trust easier. Brand awareness efforts give your brand a personality and outlet to be sincere, receive feedback, and tell a story. These are ways that we, as humans, build trust with one another. The human/brand relationship isn’t any different.

Brand awareness creates associations.

When you’ve had a paper cut, I bet you’ve put on a Band-Aid. When you had a pressing question, I’m sure you’ve Googled it. When you needed to make a few copies, I’m guessing that you Xeroxed them. And when you’ve packed for a nice picnic, I’m willing to bet you grabbed a Coke to drink.

Am I correct? Most likely. But, do you notice how I capitalized the first letters of some words above? These are brands, not nouns or verbs.

In brand-less terms, Band-Aid is a bandage, Google is a search engine, and Xerox is a copier. But it’s more fun to refer to the brand itself, even if we aren’t using their specific product.

That’s what brand awareness does. It associates actions and products with particular brands, subconsciously encouraging us to replace common words with branded terms. And before you know it, simple paper cuts or picnics are doing the marketing for us.

Brand awareness builds brand equity.

Brand equity describes a brand’s value, which is determined by consumer experiences with and overall perception of the brand. Positive experiences and perception equal positive brand equity, and the same goes for negative notions.

Here are a few valuable things that come from positive brand equity:

• A higher stock price.
• Higher prices because of higher perceived value.
• Greater social impact because of brand name value.
• The ability to expand business through product or service line extensions.

How does a brand establish (and increase) brand equity? By building brand awareness and consistently promoting positive experiences with the brand. Brand awareness is the foundation of brand equity.

Once a consumer is aware of a brand, they recognize it without help, seek it out to make a purchase, prefer it over other similar brands, and establish a loyalty that spurs on other purchases and inspires recommendations to family and friends.

That is why brand awareness is so important. Brand awareness:

• Establishes trust with your customers.
• Creates positive associations.
• Builds invaluable brand equity.
• Helps your business to become a household name and consumer staple.

Pro tip: If your brand has lots of employees, your employees can help in molding how you want your audience to perceive your brand. Our 2024 State of Marketing Report shows 87{326198e71d5f7582f354f6f6ee7a089ba2f57e2fa39b69186a2948f78a2d5740} of marketers deem this practice, called social selling, effective. Dreamdata is one brand that executed this with only six employees.

2. Start socializing.

Introvert or extrovert, outgoing or quiet, all humans benefit from social contact and spending time with one another. It’s how we stay connected, learn new things, and become known by others. The same goes for your brand.

If you only attempt to connect with others when trying to make a sale or get support, you won’t be known as anything beyond a business with a singular intention (and the same goes for a person).

To raise awareness of your brand, get social. Post on social media about things unrelated to your product or services.

Interact with your audience by asking questions, commenting on posts, or retweeting or sharing content you like. Treat your social accounts as if you were a person trying to make friends, not a business trying to make money.

Pro tip: If you’re a founder, take charge of socializing. I often see founders shy away from social media because they are busy. However, those who make the time to get active raise lots of awareness about their brand.

Two examples are Dharmesh Shah, with over a million followers on just LinkedIn, and Chris Walker, with 150,000+ followers.

3. Tell a narrative.

Storytelling is a powerful marketing tactic for marketing products or promoting your brand. Why? Because it gives your audience something real to latch onto.

Crafting a narrative around your brand humanizes it and gives it depth. Weaving this narrative into your marketing helps to market your brand alongside your products or services.

What should your narrative be about? Anything, as long as it’s true. It can be the narrative of your founder, the tale of how your business had its first product idea, or the story of how your business made it in this big world.

People like hearing stories about each other. Authenticity is impactful, and it can lead to an enormous boost in brand awareness.

Pro tip: When telling stories, ensure they pass the rotary 4-way test. Is your story truthful? Is it fair to all concerned? Will it build goodwill and make better friendships? Will it be beneficial to all concerned (your audience)?

4. Make sharing easy.

Whatever your industry, product offering, or marketing strategies, make it easy for your audience to share your content.

These could be blog posts, sponsored content, videos, social media posts, or product pages. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it’s shareable.

Word-of-mouth marketing is the most effective way to establish trust and familiarity among customers. If someone sees a product or service recommendation from friends or family, they’ll take notice of that product and brand.

Is this a brand worth exploring? Do they have other great products I can rely on? What are their social accounts like, and what do they talk about?

If you make it easy to post about your business, consumers will raise brand awareness for you by simply clicking “Share.”

Brand awareness is about impact. It’s about interacting with your audience in ways that are not pushy.

Imagine if you met a new person who wanted to be your friend. If they instantly asked for your loyalty or money, you’d probably laugh and walk away, right?

Not only is that a shallow approach to friendship, but it also leaves no lasting impact on you.

The same goes for establishing and building brand awareness among your audience.

Guest blogging is one of the best ways to increase brand awareness with minimal effort. You can take advantage of another website’s traffic to get more eyes on your brand while offering helpful and relevant content.

In other words, you’re not just pushing out your product on people who aren’t ready to buy, but writing in your brand voice and presenting yourself as human first, company second. Another great alternative to guest blogging is publishing sponsored content on niche websites.

2. Try co-marketing.

Co-marketing is an excellent way to build brand awareness — not only because you’d be taking advantage of another brand’s audience, but because it can highlight who you are and what you offer in the marketplace.

For instance, if your company sells dog leashes and toys, you might partner with a dog-walking app.

The campaign could work in ways like creating a shared offer (“download the app and get one free leash”) or hosting an Instagram live together. No matter what, partnering with another brand could help you increase your reach.

3. Advertise everywhere.

I know that advertising may not build brand awareness so much as it builds product awareness, but still — it’s one of the best tools for people to know about your brand in a low-touch, unobtrusive way.

Consider Grammarly. It feels like just a few years ago, no one knew about Grammarly. Now, it’s one of those brands that you automatically think of when you consider online proofreading software.

That’s because they’ve launched robust social, video, and display advertising campaigns that appear nearly everywhere.

You might consider starting with online advertising, which includes paid social media and PPC. If you’re interested in truly appearing everywhere and launching more sophisticated campaigns at a mass scale, you can launch programmatic advertising campaigns.

4. Hire a face or create a mascot for the company.

This may not be doable for smaller companies, but if you do have the budget, consider hiring an actor or spokesperson to represent the company.

What do you first think of when you think of Progressive? Flo, who’s even been termed “Progressive girl” for her fun and friendly personality.

This allows you to not only humanize your brand, as mentioned in the previous section, but give a sense of the friendly and knowledgeable service customers can expect to receive.

You don’t have to use a person, either. GEICO is a great example of this. The moment you see that friendly lizard, you know it’s GEICO. Creating an animated mascot may be a cost-efficient but effective way to give a face to your brand.

5. Choose an image or symbol that represents you.

Nike is not even Nike anymore. It’s a checkmark. The moment you see that check mark, you know it’s Nike. Or how about McDonald’s yellow “M”? Or Apple’s bitten apple?

These are not just logos. They transcended to become identities. So, when working with your branding team or a freelance graphic designer, aim to create a symbol that you ubiquitously use in your marketing, advertising, and organic campaigns.

You might also consider taking a note from Apple, McDonald’s, and Nike and incorporating the symbol into your product packaging and design.

6. Create a short, catchy slogan.

Extending the Nike example, you think of the brand immediately you hear “Just do it.” Creating a short motto or slogan is a cornerstone of a strong brand awareness strategy and is an easy way to increase brand awareness.

It’s definitely tough — imagine condensing everything you’re about in one short sentence. It must explain how you’re different, what you offer, and why customers should choose you.

Consider HubSpot’s tagline, “Grow better with HubSpot.” In four simple words, you understand why our product should be your choice when considering marketing automation tools.

Learn how to write an effective business slogan with this free guide.

Freemium is a business model that offers a basic product or product line for free, only charging for any products deemed premium or enterprise-level. It’s a popular pricing strategy for software companies, like HubSpot and Trello.

Freemium options allow customers to get a taste of your brand and product before making a purchase. It’s a try-before-you-buy opportunity that can, technically, last forever (as opposed to a free trial period that some companies choose).

It’s common to offer a freemium option with the condition that the brand’s watermark will show on any public-facing parts of the product or service. This makes freemium a win-win situation: the consumer gets the product for free, and the brand gets free advertising when consumers use it.

Typeform is another great example of this. Typeform offers a freemium option of its survey software, but customers must include a thank-you page that features the Typeform logo and message.

Image Source

Depending on your type of business and product offer, Freemium may be the best way to raise awareness of your brand among your audience.

2. Create free content.

Nowadays, creating content is easier than ever … which is a good thing because today’s consumers turn to the internet for all questions, concerns, and DIY projects.

Content is a fun way to raise awareness of your brand because it’s the easiest way to show personality and share opinions and positioning on issues — two major components that personify and humanize your brand.

Content doesn’t have to be in written form, either. You can create videos, infographics, podcasts (which we’ll cover below), and more. Sure, written content like blogs and downloadable guides are arguably the easiest, but they’re definitely not the only option.

Content doesn’t have to live on just your website. Guest posting and sponsored content provide opportunities to get in front of new audiences and diversify the type of content you create.

If your brand isn’t creating content, you might miss out on some major brand awareness opportunities. Content provides an amazing way to authentically connect with your audience while getting your brand name in front of people.

3. Sponsor events.

How many festivals, concerts, fairs, and exhibitions have you attended? These types of events are typically not possible without the help of brand sponsorships.

(Look at a t-shirt, koozie, or string backpack you likely grabbed from the event. See any brand names?)

Sponsoring events is a surefire way to get your brand in front of hundreds, thousands, or millions of people who likely fall into your target audience. From banners to flyers to water bottles, your brand name will be everywhere if you sponsor an event.

Sponsoring an event also allows you to pin your brand name on an event that matches your personality, interests, and passions, meaning consumers will associate your brand with that event, its aesthetic, and character.

It can also help your company build brand awareness among highly specialized and qualified audiences. Professionals don’t attend events just for fun. They attend to learn the latest developments in the industry.

It’s more than just being a booth in a sea of booths. By being a consistent event sponsor, you’ll cement yourself in attendees’ minds as a leader in the field. The key is to be consistent in your sponsorship.

Consider Red Bull. Red Bull is an energy drink, and with no brand awareness efforts, we’d simply consider it an energy drink. But, thankfully, Red Bull took their marketing to the extreme — literally — by consistently sponsoring extreme sporting events like cliff diving and motocross. They also sponsor athletes.

Now, we inherently associate Red Bull with daring and adventurous … and believe that, if we drink it, we can be the same.

Image Source

4. Give your brand a personality.

Treating your brand as a person and defining your narrative are the first steps to giving your brand a personality. The next step is infusing this personality into your marketing efforts.

When you market your products and services with personality, you can’t help but boost your brand awareness because your brand will shine right through. Sure, your consumers will note the pants or pasta you’re marketing, but they’ll also experience your personality through your advertising.

This is a brilliant strategy when mixing your traditional marketing campaigns with brand awareness campaigns.

Consider Old Spice. (Did you just picture the man on the horse? I did.) Their advertisements for their hygiene products are overflowing with personality and humor, and they still mention their products throughout.

The advertisement not only impacts its viewers, but a mere mention of the “Old Spice man” also sends consumers back to YouTube to watch the commercial … and to the store to buy some deodorant.

The commercial below is old, but still generates comments about the effectiveness of the campaign on YouTube to this day.

5. Produce a podcast.

Half of Americans aged 12-34 listen to podcasts regularly — yes, that’s 1 in every 2 people. There’s no doubt podcasts play an important role in our lives… and marketing efforts.

Podcasts used to be a complicated process, only created by those with a studio and fancy microphone. Now, it’s easier than ever to create and release a podcast, and doing so can do wonders for your brand awareness efforts.

Why? Because podcasts, like written or visual content, provide a way to connect with your audience authentically.

Instead of blatantly promoting your product or service (which we’ve agreed isn’t the best way to go about boosting brand awareness), podcasts give you the opportunity to educate, inform, entertain, or advise your audience and build trust by doing so.

Here are some examples of great podcasts produced by brands I know and love:

See how these brands have chosen podcast topics that relate to their 1) overall brand message and 2) products or services? Doing this helps them relate the podcast back to their brand and continue to raise awareness, too.

Building and growing brand awareness is a never-ending process, just as maintaining a friendship or relationship never really ends.

Boosting your brand awareness through campaigns gives you a chance to dabble in marketing and advertising opportunities you’d otherwise not invest in — meaning new, powerful ways to connect with your audience.

Engagement can refer to followers, likes, retweets, comments, and more. It’s a reflection of how many people are aware of your brand and socialize with it, as well as how impactful your content is. For instance, sites like Sparktoro can give you a specific score for your Twitter impact.

Qualitative Brand Awareness Measures

This step is where your brand awareness “score” gets a little murky. But, these tactics can still help you gauge who and how many people are aware of your brand. To measure qualitatively, try:

1. Searching Google and Setting Up Google Alerts

Doing this gets you up to speed with how your brand is being talked about online. It will alert you to any news or mentions by third-party press. As your brand grows, its internet real estate will expand beyond your website, so monitor that.

Pro tip: When Google Alerts shows mentions of your brand name, check the sources and be sure they link to your website. This is a great way to get free press and improve your online authority.

2. Social Listening

Social listening is monitoring social media management tools for organic mentions and engagement. Who’s tagging your brand, mentioning it in comments, or using your hashtag in their posts?

These tools can help you discover that. And the more your audience is discussing your brand on social media, the more they’re aware of it.

3. Running Brand Awareness Surveys

This process involves getting direct feedback from your customers and audience and can be incredibly helpful with not only understanding who knows of your brand but also what they think of it.

You can release surveys through SurveyMonkey or Typeform and share them on social media or directly with your customers. This guide will help you create and promote them.

These quantitative and qualitative metrics will help you understand your brand awareness among your audience and the general public. It’ll never be a perfect number, but keeping your pulse on this measure will help influence campaigns and stay connected to your audience.

Regardless of how you gauge brand awareness for your company, avoid these common mistakes when measuring brand awareness.

1. HubFans

HubFans is a brand awareness campaign that rewards avid and knowledgeable HubSpot users for spreading their knowledge about the CRM platform.

It’s a brilliant campaign because the HubSpot brand is not building the awareness, but HubSpot customers are. That automatically makes the brand seem more approachable and human.

In the same way, you can get your customers to advocate for you by rewarding them if they share knowledge about your product.

This will make it easier to build an army of brand evangelists who will effortlessly scale your brand awareness efforts.

What I like: I like how this example gets customers involved. This results in better word-of-mouth marketing, better odds of selling, and a slew of rewarded customers who will stay loyal to the brand.

2. Apple Events

Image Source

We all know of companies that release new gadgets and features to keep their product lines up-to-date. But none come to Apple’s level of fame, and that’s because Apple hosts an entire event dedicated to announcing its new releases.

What I like: Though the updates to the actual products are minimal, I like how Apple always “hypes up” the event to such a degree that you know automatically to watch for the brand’s new developments. That keeps the brand at the forefront of customers’ minds when they’re considering a new tech gadget.

3. Duolingo

Language-learning app Duolingo pulled a memorable stunt for the 2023 April Fools’ Day. They partnered with Peacock, a video streaming service, to promote a fake reality TV show called Love Language.

The storyline involved putting ten hot singles in a luxurious house who hope to find true love. Here’s the kicker: none of the contestants spoke the same language.

To sell the story and build excitement, they launched an official trailer on YouTube and the Peacock app. They also published behind-the-scenes and meet-the-cast videos on YouTube and other social media accounts.

The trailer featured Francesca Farago, a famous influencer who has repeatedly appeared on Netflix reality dating shows like Love Is Blind and Too Hot to Handle.

Viewers eventually discovered it was a joke via the funny FAQ section on the show’s landing page.

On YouTube, one of the trailer videos got over 2.9 million views, with many viewers commenting and petitioning that they wanted the show to be real.

What I like: I like how Duolingo and Peacock tied the prank to their business goals—they offered visitors 50{326198e71d5f7582f354f6f6ee7a089ba2f57e2fa39b69186a2948f78a2d5740} off three months of Peacock Premium and a one-month free trial of Duolingo’s premium subscription.

Though the campaign’s impact on the bottom line is undisclosed, an unlisted YouTube video by Duolingo shows Love Language got 70M+ social impressions and became Duolingo’s #1 most successful social campaign.

4. IKEA Norway

IKEA ads usually display their products in idealized, beautifully curated home settings, but life is often messy. In 2023, IKEA Norway ran a controversial ad that portrayed the messy realities of everyday life more accurately.

One ad featured a mother puking while her child tried to play with her. After wiping the vomit off her mouth, she negligently rubbed her hand on the sofa. The ad then highlighted that the couch is machine washable, emphasizing that IKEA products endure life’s challenges.

Despite the ads’ gross and unpleasant scenes, several consumers took to social media to express their love for the ad. Some even said they’d adopt the ad’s tagline — Life is not an IKEA Catalogue — as a life quote.

What I like: I like that IKEA explicitly pushed its products by highlighting them in the video and displaying prices in a non-intrusive way. The campaign made headlines and featured on sites such as Ad Age, Adweek, AccessWire, and Fast Company.

IKEA’s continued success as a global furniture retailer is, in part, thanks to cute marketing concepts like this.

5. HP’s Little Moments

HP‘s “Little Moments” commercial tells a familiar story in a refreshing and sentimental manner. It’s the story of a father whose heart ached because he and his sweetheart daughter were growing apart.

Now a sixth-grader, the daughter began displaying the characteristic dismissiveness that adolescents often show. She wasn‘t expressive when they took a picture together, and she wasn’t fully present at the breakfast table.

She didn‘t respond to her dad’s “bye” as she left for school and was indifferent when her dad returned from work.

When she found the Sprocket photo of her and her dad in her lunchbox, she quickly hid it from her friends.

Later, the father is delighted to see that his daughter has decorated the underside of her bed with Sprocket photos they’ve taken over the years.

What I like: According to the agency behind the commercial, this ad got about 23M Facebook impressions, 6.5M views, and a click rate of up to 13{326198e71d5f7582f354f6f6ee7a089ba2f57e2fa39b69186a2948f78a2d5740}.

Though HP did not explicitly promote its product, the commercial significantly impacted sales of the Sprocket; they reported many retailers sold out their Sprocket printers rapidly.

6. H&M Home’ Fall in Love

“Fall in Love” is a playful campaign that shows people absorbed by H&M Home’s interior design pieces, but oblivious to more important events around them.

We see a man go down on one knee while holding a lady, but it turns out he’s just interested in feeling the H&M rug, not proposing. Similarly, a toddler excitedly runs to greet his mom, who is completely absorbed in admiring an H&M vase and doesn’t notice her child.

The video‘s YouTube view count is modest. However, according to H&M, the ad featured on the company’s site, Meta (formerly Facebook), and television in select markets. As a result, it‘s difficult to gauge the ad’s overall popularity.

Still, this campaign is a fine example of building brand awareness without directly promoting the product.

What I like: The campaign is not salesy but focuses on connecting with the audience.

7. Mood

Mood is a legal, cannabis-infused gummy. Its creators reportedly analyzed lab tests from every cannabis strain to create gummies that let you decide how you want to feel. There’s a Mood for feeling energized, getting relaxed, and getting turned on.

Cannabis gummies are still relatively unpopular, but Mood’s product awareness videos do a great job of familiarizing you with the product and persuading you to try it.

After watching the ad, I was ready to pull out my credit card and buy a Mood.

Good content gets recognition. In 2024, people nominated this campaign in two categories of The Webby Awards: best writing video and best video campaign.

If The Webby Awards considers the campaign good, chances are it’ll resonate with Mood’s target audience.

What I like: The campaign is simple and considers the audience, which includes people from several age brackets.

8. Volvo

Volvo’s “Little Things” ad starts with a daughter asking her dad, “What means a lot to you?” The ad then shows several brief clips revealing his response, set to Bettye Swann’s rendition of the classic song “Little Things Mean A Lot.”

We see the dad listening with interest to his little girl‘s bedtime stories, showing up to her dance practice, and sharing a hug with her on a difficult day. We also see several other beautiful moments of parenthood. We then learn that Dad drives the EX30, which is Volvo’s smallest-ever SUV.

What I like: This pun (little things vs. Volvo‘s smallest SUV) and the ad’s emotional effect make it appealing. The official YouTube post has over 295,000 views and 250 comments, with many viewers expressing their love for the ad and their newfound desire to buy a Volvo.

One commenter said, “I always dreamed of a Mini Cooper, but this ad might make me buy a Volvo.” Another said, “Good job, Volvo. You made me want to buy a Volvo car now.” It’s safe to say that this campaign not only raised brand awareness but likely generated thousands to millions of dollars in revenue.