What is a brand awareness campaign?
A brand awareness campaign is a strategy that is put in place to help improve awareness of your brand.
Brand awareness refers to how well your target market knows and understands your brand. Brands with a high level of awareness are typically known as “popular” and “on-trend”. This buzz has built up using brand campaigns which yield rewards through marketing promotions, product sales, and popularity.
The concept of brand awareness is slightly vague. It’s hard to measure its success, and it is difficult to determine the exact value of running a successful campaign. That being said, a successful brand awareness campaign could have immense potential for your business if executed correctly.
Why run an awareness campaign?
To gain trust with your audiences
Trust is essential for almost any business, company, or brand. Consumers today have more research-led purchasing habits, so a high level of trust is crucial to new and returning customers. An excellent example of this is Greenwashing.
More and more companies are going green. But with such a flood of eco-friendly companies, how many of them are actually as green? High levels of awareness demonstrating your credentials can gain trust and help you stand out from the rest.
Humans connect to personalities, typically matching personalities with the type they think would best fill that role in their purchasing habits. Showing off your brands archetype is crucial within your brand awareness campaign.
To engage and build association
Building a successful campaign can help you engage with your audience. Open up your brand dialogue through the art of marketing. Good marketing communication can help build the association of your brand over certain generic goods and services.
Your brand name could be something everyone associates with a specific product or service. If so, your brand awareness campaign has been incredibly successful. One example is hoovering: hoover is the brand, but the product itself is called a vacuum cleaner.
Association builds trust, which in turn…
To increase popularity
A well-planned and executed awareness campaign builds popularity and creates a positive perception of your brand. There are many benefits to being a popular or on-trend brand:
- Increase price through perceived product or service value
- Popular in the stock exchange (if you’re a PLC)
- Easier to expand into new markets or products
- Higher sales through association and trust
Being popular also means you’re likely to benefit from return customers and ongoing consumer loyalty. Having loyal consumers not only increases the return each customer brings but also provides the most success. This success comes in the form of marketing and word of mouth. Your happy customer is likely to tell their friends about the great product or service, who then tell their friends.
How to run a brand awareness campaign
Brand awareness doesn’t come quickly or easily. You can’t simply release a promotional video or start a new marketing campaign. Strong brand awareness comes from a multi-headed approach through multiple marketing channels.
Think of your brand as a person
Companies can struggle with communicating as a brand, because their brand personality isn’t personable. Think of your brand as you would a friend—sometimes contradictory or flawed—but always unique and memorable. You wouldn’t describe someone as ‘customer-centric’, so consider if your brand could be ‘caring’ or ‘driven’. Thinking of your brand in this way will lead to more compelling and relatable communications.
Create a social escape
Every person seeks connection in some format. Your brand needs to engage and facilitate connection and communication. This shouldn’t be just for sales or to get support; you should be there to benefit your audiences.
Social media is the best place for this, but make sure you avoid hard sales or marketing speak. Consider what content is useful to your audiences, and don’t just push what you want to say.
Tell a compelling story
Awareness travels much faster through the words of someone related to your brand. A strong, powerful or emotional story helps grow the enigma of a brand.
What should your story be? Well, anything, as long as it’s interesting and true. It could be about the sourcing of your materials or the history of the brand’s founder. Having a story humanises the brand and gives consumers something interesting to identify with.
A great example of this is M-24. M-24 is a bag company that makes all of their bags out of recycled lorry canvas skirts. A story like this hits all the marks. It’s short, easy to tell a friend about, and paints the brand as an eco-focused company. A company concerned with reducing the impact on the environment.
Meet the maker of M-24 Here.
Enjoy popularity
Make it easy for your brand popularity to grow. Produce content, products, or services that can be easily shared, commented on and engaged with.
Word of mouth is very powerful. A trusted recommendation for a product or service can be more valuable than any other credential. People often forget to share or recommend their purchases, so make it easier for the consumer to do this.
Advertising campaigns, social media posts, content, and sponsorships are all easily shareable. Don’t forget post-sale experiences and leave a lasting impression that can be revisited easily.
Brand awareness campaign strategy
1. Be a guest
The traditional style of being a guest was primarily as a guest blogger. Featuring a blog post on another website to drive traffic and spread awareness of your brand. In 2022, this is no longer as common.
Now, you would be more successful by featuring in a video for a high-profile YouTube Channel, TikTok or Instagram.
2. Have a face
Have someone or something that represents the company. Within video-based content, there needs to be a face or personality that informs the consumer. This humanises your brand and is what consumers will latch onto when describing your brand to others.
There are so many great examples of this. For us here in the UK, you can’t switch on the TV without meeting Aleksandr Orlov. The Meerkat from Compare the Market.
3. Combine forces
Marketing can be a significant investment, but there are ways of being highly-effective without spending all your budget. Try partnering with complementary brands (not competitors) and splitting the cost of the marketing plan.
One of the most obvious examples, especially for the adrenaline junkies among us, is GoPro and Red Bull. Both sell very different products but sit within the same market as complementary goods.
4. Advertise to feature everywhere
Being seen and heard is essential when looking to grow your brand awareness. But this can take a lot of time and effort organically. Another option is to advertise more, as advertising alone can change a consumer’s perception.
Advertising doesn’t have to be TV ads or billboards—the majority of advertising budgets today are focused on digital. PPC, Display Ads, and Social Media Advertising are great tools to promote on a smaller budget. Once your budget grows towards a mass scale, you’ll find building awareness much easier.
5. Work on your brand message
Many brands are shifting towards being socially-conscious as a reflection of consumer concerns and demands. Consider what your brand message is and what is right for you. We have produced an article about developing your brand message which you can find here.
If your brand message is catchy and shows your brand’s ethos enough, the message can do the heavy lifting. But you can’t rely solely on this—you need to perform the other points to get your message out there.
One of the most memorable and catchy messages comes from Nike, Just Do It .
6. Digital marketing
Similar to featuring on other businesses’ content, you should also produce your own content. This content should be in the form of high-quality blogs, video content, and social media posts.
Adding this to your strategy will help create brand awareness through being prominent in organic locations. By organic, we mean on search engines, YouTube featured videos, and social media recommendations. All of the above will increase brand awareness and improve conversions from more calls to increased sales.
Increase your brand awareness
If you’re looking to improve or create a brand awareness strategy, we hope we’ve given you more insight. This insight should provide information on how to do this successfully. Make your marketing efforts worthwhile and invest your budget in an area that will bring you long-term and stable growth. If you want to speak to someone about increasing your brand’s awareness you can contact us via the form below.
