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The Ultimate Guide for a Successful Brand Awareness Campaign

Branding is essential for creating real, long-lasting growth within any company. In this blog post, we will help you better understand brand awareness, so you run campaigns that enable your business to stand out and thrive.

10 min read

Tatiana Ogurtsovskaia

Tatiana Ogurtsovskaia

Jul 06, 2021

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The Ultimate Guide for a Successful Brand Awareness Campaign

A crucial part of any marketing strategy, brand awareness promotes long-term growth by building trust and loyalty with existing customers while simultaneously enabling the brand to access and appeal to a broader audience.

When done well, brand awareness can embed a brand into a consumer’s lifestyle, influencing their purchasing habits to the point where they don’t even think twice before returning to your product. A brand awareness campaign, when done well, can result in brand recognition, transforming your business from an unknown to a key market player.

Brand awareness is a powerful marketing tool; let’s look at how you can harness the power of brand recognition to create a solid campaign to help your brand stand out.

What Is Brand Awareness?

Brand awareness is the first step in a customer journey; it is how familiar your target audience is with your brand and the extent that it is recognized. When creating a brand awareness campaign marketers will often focus on a prospect or customer’s emotional response to a brand and how the brand can use that to build long-term relationships and, in turn, long-term growth.

Brand awareness can take many forms, for example:

  • The brand can be known within an industry for being on-trend and popular; therefore, customers choose them regardless of price; for example, Nike and Adidas are known for their high-quality running apparel;
  • A brand can be known for consistently producing educational content on a particular subject; for example, Whole Foods supermarket is known for its healthy and organic approach to food, educating its consumers to lead a healthier life;
  • A brand can be identified by its logo, its color, or an aspect of its product as a trusted brand, for example, the color it red identifiable as Coca-Cola or the yellow arches for McDonald’s;
  • The brand can replace the name of the actual product; for example, instead of saying you are going to do a web search, you will say you are going to ‘Google’ something.

Benefits of Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is one of the most effective ways to gain validation within the market. High levels of it can increase the value of your product or service, build a competitive advantage and ultimately play a key role in the growth and success of your business. Here are four benefits of bringing awareness to your brands:

Build Trust

In today’s market, trust is everything. Consumers will often rely on the validation of a brand’s reputation through research and other consumers’ opinions before buying a product. The first step towards customer loyalty gaining trust is once a consumer has gained trust in your brand, they are more likely to become a repeat customer and recommend your product or service to others.

Create a Brand Voice

Brand awareness allows you to create an identity behind the brand, known as your brand voice. Your brand voice is the way that you connect to your customers, defined by your brands’ style of communication. Giving your brand a voice and identity enable you to tell the story behind the brand and more relatable. It also allows you to humanize the brand, showing personality, demonstrating values, and offering opinions.

Create Association

The world is ripe with competition between brands; an association allows your brand to stand out and gives it an incredible advantage. People tend to gravitate towards familiarity; therefore, once a brand has been associated with an action or product, it subconsciously encourages them to choose your product or service over others. Association can take many forms- it can be the color, typography, logo, or name, but once a customer has identified your brand, they are more likely to choose the familiar over a competitor.

Build Brand Equity

Brand equity is the brand’s value. The brand’s value will be determined by the consumer experience, and ultimately the perception of the brand. A positive experience results in a positive perception; this will mean that the brand’s equity rises. A negative experience that results in negative perceptions will lower the brand’s equity.

Positive brand equity is important because it allows a brand to increase its pricing, have a higher stock value, and gives the brand the opportunity to expand into new markets. In order to increase a brand’s equity, a brand must obtain high brand awareness and establish itself as a brand that gives the consumer positive experiences.

Attract Talented Employees

Building brand awareness doesn’t only establish you as a desirable company with customers; it can also establish your company as an ideal place to work, helping you gain talented employees. Brand awareness can demonstrate personality and an image that resonates with talented industry professionals who are looking to work for a brand with great company culture. The best thing about attracting top talent with your brand awareness is that they will have the creativity to keep your brand at the top of its game.

How to Create a Brand Awareness Campaign

Brand awareness campaigns are often more complicated than digital marketing or an advertising campaign. Brand awareness does not happen overnight; it takes time to build and is the result of multiple different efforts that go beyond simply getting a customer to purchase a product or service. In order to raise awareness for your brand, you need to go beyond the initial sale and focus on building long-term relationships.

As with all campaigns, in order to create a successful brand awareness campaign, you need first to set goals for what you want to learn and why. Therefore, before you can create a brand awareness campaign, you need first to set the below foundations.

Know Your Audience

Your audience is who you will be directing your campaigns at and who you will be speaking to. Identifying the key attributes of your audience is important as it will help define your messaging, tone of voice, and brand style so that you can effectively capture their attention.

People expect to see more than an advertising campaign saying ‘buy this’; they want to be engaged, entertained, and captivated by the message you are presenting. Knowing your audience also helps you spend time focusing on prospects who are likely to connect with your brand, rather than wasting time, money, and resources on people who are unlikely to relate.

Define Your Channels

A brand awareness campaign should be omnichannel and executed across a number of different mediums. The platforms that you choose will play a key role in the success of your campaign, as every target market will have specific channels that they use. It can be a waste of time using them all, therefore pay attention to where your audience spends their time and where your campaign will create the most impact.

Be Consistent

As the key to building long-lasting brand awareness is consistency, it is important to create brand guidelines. Brand awareness is closely linked to brand recognition; therefore, if you keep changing your color scheme, fonts, and aesthetic, you put yourself at risk of not being recognized. Another key aspect to keep consistent is the messaging and tone of voice. Consumers engage with your brand as it resonates with them and is familiar; if you keep changing the message, they will get confused and find a consistent brand that they feel they can trust.

Set Your Goals

Your goals should be defined by where you are and where you would like to be. When determining your goals, in order to be realistic and achievable, they should, therefore, reflect your current status, budget, messaging, competition, and target audience. Every company is different; therefore, the goals should be specific to you; for example, are you trying to attract a new demographic, or are you after new leads? Along with setting goals, be sure to set metrics that relate to your goals so that you can measure your success.

How to Create a Brand Awareness Campaign

There isn’t a one size fits all way of increasing awareness for your brand. When creating your brand awareness strategy, you need to tailor your campaigns to fit your unique identity.

However, there are some tricks of the trade that you can take inspiration from to help you create a successful campaign. Here are four ways to establish a solid brand awareness campaign that makes a lasting impact on your target audience.

Provide Free Content

When it comes to promoting a brand and generating brand awareness, content is king. The internet has become the source of answers to all our questions, queries, and general interests; therefore, if you create content that adds value, you are likely to engage with your potential customers and build brand awareness. Along with adding value, content can also show personality, share opinions, and humanize the brand, which helps you to connect and relate to your audience.

Content can come in many shapes and sizes; it can be blog posts, e-books, infographics, videos, or podcasts. The key is to create content that is educational, engaging, and designed to add value; a great example of a brand that used content marketing to grow its brand awareness is Ted Talks. Ted Talks is a global conference that became known as the leader in thought-provoking seminars; they established this through their free online content on YouTube and their podcast.

Partnerships

Aligning yourself with a respected brand or organization that shares your values, views, or vision is a great way to build brand awareness and improve the reputation of that brand. Co-branding with another organization enables you to access new audiences and generate a buzz as two brands bring together to create a ‘special’ product, offer, or service.

Partnerships with other brands and organizations can be done via marketing channels such as social media, social networks, or blog posts, or it can be done via physical events, sponsoring events, supporting local sports teams, or donating to charities. A great example of brand awareness through partnerships and sponsorship is Redbull; the energy drink would not be the brand it is today without its sponsorship of extreme sports.

Tell a Story

Storytelling is an incredibly powerful marketing tool and allows people to connect to your brand on a personal level. We are naturally drawn to stories; it is captivating, adds value, and humanizes the brand. Creating a narrative behind the brand adds an extra layer of depth, explaining the mission, the vision, and the people behind these aspects.

The story could be about the founder, the tale of the first product, or the mission to create social impact; however, when writing your story, remember authenticity is key. A great example of a brand using storytelling to promote awareness is Airbnb who launched its campaign ‘Belong Anywhere’. The campaign used imagery and videos to look at the hosts you may stay with on your journey, humanizing the brand and making it relatable.

Let Your Customer’s Try Before They Buy

Everyone loves a freebie! Every company can offer something free to entice a customer and get them to try your product. You may offer a free test drive, a freemium service, or in some cases a money-back guarantee. Freemium is a business model that offers the basic product or service for free, only charging the customer if they choose to upgrade or add additional services onto the basic product. Offering a free test drive or freemium service allows customers to try out your brand before they commit to making a purchase.

Freemium provides a great opportunity for brands to build brand awareness and get their name out there, demonstrating that they are willing to give away a valuable product to engage with their audience. A great example of the try-before-you-buy service is Slack, whose freemium service impressed consumers enough to convince 30% of them to buy the full premium service.

By following these techniques for building awareness, you’ll be well on your way to building a brand that stands out from your competitors and is easily recognized and respected by your audience.

Conclusion

A solid brand awareness campaign can help your brand to stand out and become unforgettable. People like to buy from brands they know and trust. Therefore, once your business is on the map, it can drive return purchases, contribute to brand equity, and influence the consumer decision-making process.

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