Not many business founders start off with the goal of creating a timeless brand that will outlive them for centuries. Instead, most have one goal in mind: Grow!
Once they achieve sufficient growth, increasing margins or market share or efficiency often comes next. But, no matter where your business resides in its lifecycle, to reach the next step, you’ll likely need to increase brand awareness. Unfortunately, “brand awareness” often turns into a buzzword to throw out in meetings with the C-Suite that leads to wasted spend on PR fluff with no increase in the bottom line, and ultimately costs many marketing heads their jobs.
We don’t want that. So let’s answer one key question: Where is the line between building a foundation of brand awareness and throwing money away?
What Is Brand Awareness?
First, a definition of brand awareness from our friends at the Oxford Dictionary, who have established quite the brand themselves: The extent to which consumers are familiar with the distinctive qualities or image of a particular brand of goods or services.
Brand awareness extends beyond a first impression to include every interaction with the consumer. Every touchpoint pours another drop into the brand’s custom cocktail. One bitter experience can turn that well-crafted drink into one a customer will pour down the drain – so any brand hoping to maintain and grow its customer base must aim to provide a positive experience in all customer touchpoints.
Brands develop their “personalities” through each interaction with a customer. Is it scholarly like the aforementioned Oxford Dictionary, tough like Harley-Davidson, energetic and quirky like Red Bull, or somewhat amusing like TaxAct with Adam Scott doing its voiceovers?
The Four Stages of Brand Awareness
Brand awareness starts with recognition, then moves to recall, takes another step toward reaching top of mind, and a last leap to preference.
- Brand recognition requires a customer to have been exposed to the brand and understand what the brand offers.
- Brand recall means that a potential customer can remember the brand, either when aided (“Whose logo is this?”) or unaided (“What are some good brands for sunglasses?”). Unaided brand recall for newer brands may hover in the low single digits, whereas aided brand recall for larger brands can easily top 60% or 70%.
- Registering as a top-of-mind brand means consumers think of the brand first when considering a good or service.
- Brand preference, the final step, comes when the brand has nurtured its relationship with consumers to the point that they would prefer it over any competitor – think of your favorite toilet paper or toothpaste, for example.
Only those that provide an exceptional experience to their customers reach that final stage, brand preference. This level of brand salience (the likelihood of a consumer thinking of a brand at purchase time) means customers will pay more for your product, even if a competitor technically offers more value for the price. Only top brands that nurture their customers along the brand awareness funnel reach this level of brand equity, where consumers equate value with the brand name more so than with the product or service (IKEA vs. Ethan Allen, rather than the comparable couch each business sells).
Apple has some of the world’s highest brand equity – it’s incredibly well recognized and trusted. So high, in fact, that people continue to shell out massive amounts of money for new versions of the iPhone that don’t always innovate. In fact, Android phones often serve as a testing ground for the iPhone, which simply reaches feature parity within a short enough sprint so as to leave no doubt in their customers’ eyes as to which product remains more valuable. For Apple, investing heavily in maintaining that brand equity continues to prove a no-brainer.
Is Your Business Right for a Brand Awareness Campaign?
Brand awareness is not a short-term investment like a conversion campaign on Google Ads. It’s a long-term investment that broadens the top of your funnel. You certainly want to target your Ideal Customer Profile, but you don’t necessarily want to exclude the junior associate who becomes the product buyer in two years, either.
So, how should you decide if – or how much – you should invest in brand awareness marketing?
1. Focus on Your Business Goals
If you need sales immediately or the power company will turn off the lights, investing a large amount of budget into broad brand awareness campaigns makes no sense.
On the other hand, a successful business in a saturated market with more runway may find that strong brand awareness provides a differentiator that increases sales in the long run.
The insurance industry serves as a good frame of reference. Other than the actual terms of your car or home insurance, do you care about the “product” you purchase? No. You care about the brand’s reputation. That’s why you can’t look at a screen without seeing Flo from Progressive, Jake from State Farm, the AFLAC Duck, or Martin, the GEICO Gecko.
2. Consider Your Industry and Competition
A large enterprise looking to launch a new product in a competitive market with budget to spare should use some of it on brand awareness, but a business in a niche market with no competition or selling brandless, inexpensive products needn’t do so.
When the Boston Beer Company (maker of Samuel Adams) launches a new beverage, it knows the brand identity it creates and promotes will do more selling than the taste of the drink. The limited-edition Derrick White Ale release showcases how brand awareness plays a key role in the business’s marketing efforts. Boston Beer Company aimed to further establish the brand in the hearts and minds of the New England region, where the business sprouted, by pairing with a beloved local athlete.
On the other hand, a business hawking cheap floss and toothbrushes exclusively on Amazon should rightly focus on keeping its prices low by avoiding unnecessary brand marketing campaigns.
3. Assess Your Target Audience
Does your target audience need your product or service but not know your business exists? If so, brand awareness can help connect you with your potential customers.
Or, do people know your brand but have a less-than-stellar perception of it? Investing in brand awareness campaigns can help by showing the brand’s personality and the good it does in the world – think of the commercials you see that tout a brand’s foundation.
4. Study Your Current Brand Recognition
Where does your business reside on the brand awareness funnel explained in The Four Stages of Brand Awareness above? How far are you from reaching the next step, and what type of expected increase in revenue would that next step produce?
You won’t be able to produce an algorithm that will generate the ROAS on that next step down to the cent, but you can create a framework with which to plan. For instance, create a hypothesis such as: an increase in sales of 5% would prove worthy of an investment of $X in brand awareness.
Then, set up a plan to run paid brand awareness campaigns on at least two marketing channels, and track brand searches, direct traffic, social media mentions, and other key brand awareness metrics (that we’ll discuss later on).
If your hypothesis proves correct, consider upping your brand marketing budget to see if success scales; conversely, if your test results in very little uptick in those key areas, go back to the drawing board and try different channels or return your focus to ROI until future revenue growth provides another opportunity to work on brand awareness.
How Paid Media Brand Awareness Campaigns Work
For our purposes, let’s discuss your brand awareness campaign strategy from a paid media perspective. While organic methods like SEO and content marketing remain essential for long-term growth, paid campaigns offer the advantage of immediate visibility and scalability. Most businesses will want to put their largest direct investment into paid advertising, rather than into sponsorship naming rights or PR, to avoid throwing away money on investments that sit more on the theoretical side of the scale than the practical, actionable side.
For a fraction of the cost, you can reach more potential customers on Meta or YouTube than you can in a Super Bowl ad on a primetime broadcast. Not only that, your target audience may even pay more attention to your ad than one running during the big game. Also, you can iterate on paid ads extremely quickly, as opposed to releasing one video in the middle of a massive cultural moment and hoping it goes well.
Businesses can test out their brand awareness campaign ideas and strategies on various paid platforms, including:
- Social media advertising (Meta, YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok, etc.)
- Programmatic advertising (Google, Adobe, Pubmatic, etc.)
- Paid search (PPC) campaigns (Google, Bing, Amazon, etc.)
- Sponsored content and influencer partnerships (Taboola, Meta, TikTok, etc.)
- In-game advertising (StackAdapt, AdMaven, InMobi, etc.)
How to Create a Brand Awareness Campaign
To build a successful brand awareness campaign, follow these steps:
- Define Clear Objectives – Establish what you want to achieve, such as increased website traffic, higher brand recall, or boosted social media engagement.
- Identify Target Audiences – Research the demographics, behaviors, and preferences of your ideal customers, based on the data you already have from existing customers.
- Choose the Right Platforms – Select the most effective channels to reach your audience, such as social media, programmatic, or influencer marketing.
- Develop Engaging Content – Create compelling visuals, videos, and storytelling elements to capture attention. Remember, you want to bring your brand to life with your creatives.
- Implement Paid Advertising – Run brand awareness campaigns on Meta and YouTube, programmatic platforms, PPC, and possibly in-game placements to expand your reach. Start off with one or two platforms at a time, depending on your experience, and then iterate on new platforms over time with the learnings you’ve gathered.
- Measure Brand Awareness – Track key brand awareness campaign metrics, such as social engagement, website visits (direct traffic), and brand mentions. We’ll dive in further on this subject in the “How to Measure the Success and Efficacy of Brand Awareness Campaigns” section.
- Optimize and Scale – Continuously analyze performance and refine your strategy based on insights and data. Don’t think you’ll set a brand awareness campaign and forget about it; it’ll require continual updates to improve results.
For many, Meta can serve as a good testing ground for your first awareness campaign.
Creating a Meta campaign for brand awareness doesn’t require a lot of time or effort. Just create a campaign, select “Awareness” as your objective, and go from there. You can choose from several options for your performance goal, including maximizing reach, impressions, or showing your ads to people likely to remember seeing them.
From there, choose your target audience, set your budget, make sure the Meta pixel works properly in your account, set up a variety of creatives to cycle through (Meta highly recommends video ads play a part), and let it rip.
You’ll also want to build similar brand awareness campaigns on other platforms to increase your reach. If you’re newer to paid campaigns, try out one or two platforms first, then take the learnings you gather and repurpose them on additional platforms. You can also try out incrementality testing by turning off one platform at a time to measure the effect on the brand awareness KPIs you designate as essential in advance.
What Are Some Examples of Brand Awareness Campaigns?
Let’s take a look at two examples of successful brand awareness campaigns from a pair of gigantic brands.
Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign, where the company replaced its logo with people’s names, produced incredible results by encouraging consumers to find and share bottles with friends and family. The campaign helped spur over a million more teens in the US to try a Coke than had the year before. Coke used technological trends to its advantage, making the #ShareaCoke hashtag a key part of its effort to reach a younger audience on social media in the 2011-2014 range, as social media continued its ascent to cultural prevalence.
Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign provides us with another extremely well-known and successful brand awareness campaign. The initiative combined inspirational storytelling with endorsements from top athletes, reinforcing Nike’s brand identity while creating a powerful emotional connection with its audience. The concept has proved so integral to the brand’s identity that though it first popped up in 1987, the line still occupies key real estate in Nike’s current awareness efforts.
The Importance of Brand Value Alignment
Not all brand awareness campaigns produce incredible results like the two referenced above. A number of factors influence whether a campaign works out or not, but some of the biggest failures stem from a lack of brand value alignment.
Brand value alignment constitutes the integration of a brand’s identity and principles with the messaging and values demonstrated in its marketing strategies, especially in terms of partnerships and endorsements. In a hyper-polarized political climate, leaning toward one side of the aisle or choosing the wrong brand or celebrity partner can prove disastrous.
Bud Light’s pairing with Dylan Mulvaney serves as an infamous example of brand alignment gone wrong.
In April 2023, Mulvaney posted to Instagram about a March Madness contest that offered a chance to win $15K. Mulvaney, a transgender social media star, delivered a light-hearted monologue about the contest and pretended not to know what March Madness meant. The backlash that ensued cost Bud Light dearly in sales, as anti-trans actors called for a boycott and negative responses flooded social media.
The issue with the Mulvaney campaign had nothing to do with right and wrong or trans rights. Instead, it stemmed from Bud Light not recognizing its target audience’s cultural leanings. Bud Light surely aimed to reach a demographic outside of its traditional purview to increase long-term sales, but the effort actually diminished its standing within its core cohort.
Focus on Fit
Say you own an assisted living chain and want to attract seniors looking for a vibrant community with lots of activities and none of the headaches of home ownership. Your target audience will make the choice for themselves, rather than caregivers, so you need to reach people in their 50s and 60s directly.
Does it make sense to try in-game advertising?
No. There are likely over 3 BILLION video game users in the world, but this group consists generally of people under the age of 40.
This gamer cohort definitely wants to find gaming gear, though. If you sell premium video game headsets, like the top brands identified by ChatGPT below, running an in-game video or display ad campaign fits like a glove.
How to Measure the Success and Efficacy of Brand Awareness Campaigns
Brand awareness campaigns don’t focus on immediate conversions, and this can prove disorienting for marketers used to pointing to ROAS or CAC to determine whether their efforts bore fruit. But, just because you can’t attribute an immediate conversion to a campaign doesn’t mean it generates no value.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) can serve as an easy way to frame this concept. As internet users have begun seeing more and more AI Overviews from Google and Bing and have shifted their searches to answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity, about 58% of all searches lead to no click.
We need different metrics to measure success for brand awareness campaigns. Check out our suggestions:
1. Brand Search Volume
An increase in branded searches on Google, Bing, and elsewhere indicates heightened brand recognition. Track your baseline number of searches before the start of a brand awareness campaign and measure the growth that comes after the campaign’s launch.
2. Social Media Engagement
Make sure to monitor:
- Followers gained
- Shares, video views, comments, and reactions
- Mentions and branded hashtag usage
Should all these metrics take leaps without other specific campaigns designed to boost them, you can attribute at least a portion of that success to your brand awareness campaigns.
3. Website Traffic and Referral Sources
Direct traffic, in particular, can serve as a proxy for the success or lack thereof of branded awareness campaigns. If your direct traffic soars after the implementation of your campaign, that’s a great sign. If you don’t see meaningful pick-up in that regard, the campaign may have missed the mark.
4. Customer Surveys and Brand Recall Tests
Compare your aided and unaided brand recall from surveys before and after the launch of your brand awareness campaign.
Brands Awareness Never Ends
Ever heard of Blue Ribbon Sports? Probably not, but you likely own some of its apparel, just under the company’s later name: Nike. Despite already boasting one of the most recognizable brands in the world, the company continues to invest heavily in brand awareness campaigns year after year.
Nike sponsors top athletes and franchises across the spectrum to stay top of mind when it comes time to make a purchase. From Michael Jordan to Kobe Bryant, Tiger Woods, Serena Williams, Cristiano Ronaldo, LeBron James, and younger stars like Jayson Tatum and Caitlin Clark, Nike constantly invests in its brand. Nike has no plans to fade from memory any time soon, and remains willing to use its massive marketing budget to keep showing you its logo.
And it must, because just like in your industry, the competition remains fierce. While Nike partnered with baseball superstars Ken Griffey Jr. and Derek Jeter in the past, New Balance swooped in and signed Shohei Ohtani, perhaps the greatest player of all time, currently playing in the massive market of Los Angeles in his prime years. Ohtani’s unparalleled impact (he serves as an unmatched icon in baseball-crazy Japan and a global icon) shows how efforts to improve or maintain brand awareness can never stop.
Investing in brand awareness marketing campaigns remains critical to long-term success, but only if done strategically. Align your brand awareness strategy with your company’s growth stage, industry landscape, and business objectives, and success will follow.
