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Building a brand—whether a personal brand or one for a product or business—involves more than designing logos and crafting catchy slogans. You must also raise people’s awareness of your brand. Without it, it doesn’t matter how much time or effort you invest into creating your brand, because no one will see or consider it.
Awareness is about ensuring your target audience knows that your brand exists. It’s the final piece of the puzzle in putting your brand to work.
This guide explores what brand awareness is, why it’s vital, and steps you can take to boost visibility for yourself or your business.
Contents
What Is Brand Awareness (and Why It Matters)?
Brand awareness is a measure of how familiar and recognizable a brand is to a customer, client, or other target audience. Brand awareness can also apply to personal branding, despite the fact that it is typically associated with businesses, goods, or services. Awareness, which is sometimes referred to as “brand recognition,” is an important part of building brand equity and is related to other branding ideas like: Brand knowledge: A target audience’s thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and relationships regarding a brand
Brand recall: How likely a target audience is to remember a brand without being prompted in some way; often called “unaided awareness”
The willingness of a target audience to consider a particular brand as an option is known as brand consideration. Professor Jill Avery, who teaches the online course Creating Brand Value, states, “Through brand identity work, managers choose a name, design a logo, and create other unique features to represent the brand’s sensibility.” “The name, logo, and design are all markers of the brand intended to communicate its meaning. However, since the brand does not yet have a cultural history or a relationship with customers, these indicators are meaningless. Without awareness, your brand’s value is hidden. Similar to how a consumer can’t consider a product they don’t know exists, your target audience can’t contemplate your brand if they’re unaware of it.
How to Build Brand Awareness from the Ground Up
Are you ready to start building and growing brand awareness? The steps below guide you through initial brand conception to ways you can leverage social media and community engagement to bolster your reach and the repositioning most brands need.
1. Laying the Foundation: Know Your Brand Identity
Your brand must exist before you can build awareness. If you haven’t already, solidify your personal or business brand image. Ensure it’s informed by the mission, goals, and values you want it to embody—which ideally resonate with your target audience.
You should consider:
- What values, mission, and goals underlie your brand?
- Who are you trying to reach, and why?
- If you have multiple target audiences, how are they different?
- What makes you stand out from the competition?
- How are you uniquely positioned to help your audience overcome challenges or reach specific goals?
- What credentials, licenses, awards, or other proof points can you offer as evidence of differentiation?
Ensure your brand identity is clearly documented before moving on to the next step. After all, there’s no point in making your audience aware of your brand if you must overhaul it in a few weeks or months.
2. Embody Your Brand in All of Your Actions
After deciding what is most important to your brand, act in accordance with those values. This includes everything from professional communications—like sending and answering emails, drafting social media or blog content, and designing a website—to interacting with others face-to-face.
According to Avery, who also teaches the online course Personal Branding, “Enacting your personal brand in day-to-day interactions in a way that feels authentic and comfortable for you is important.” “The opportunities to share and strengthen your brand are provided by common social interactions. In a professional context and beyond, your actions and interests inform others about your personal brand and create a foundation for further interaction.”
Some everyday ways of embodying your personal brand can include:
Swiftly and thoughtfully responding to emails to demonstrate that you value the sender
Following through on tasks you promised to complete to affirm you’re reliable
Making friendly small talk with other people to show that you are open to connection and value it “Think of every interaction as communicating something about who you are and what value you have to offer,” Avery says in Personal Branding. “Your personal brand accumulates over tens, hundreds, or even thousands of interactions with those who are important to your success, and every interaction has the potential to increase the value of your personal brand or degrade it.”
This consideration should also be taken for businesses.
Some ways your organization might embody your brand include:
Donating to causes or charities that align with its mission and goals
Taking a public stand in favor of or against policies that contradict company values
Promoting and providing inclusive leadership training to support your employees and enhance their psychological safety
3. Utilize Content to Establish a Consistent Presence
Whether promoting your personal or a business brand, content can be a powerful tool to help you start building awareness. This can take the form of social media posts, podcast episodes or guest appearances, a blog on your personal or business website, and email—any form of content that aligns with your brand and audience.
Content allows you to spotlight different aspects of your brand, including your visual identity, personality, tone, and value. It may also provide opportunities for thought leadership and storytelling, both of which can help spread brand awareness. Depending on your goals and how quickly you aim to build awareness, you might consider running paid media campaigns to increase the likelihood of your target audience surfacing your brand. In today’s digital world, it’s easier to get started with social media, display, or Google Search ads if you’re new to the space.
It is essential to maintain consistency across all channels, regardless of the kind of content you create or how you use advertising. Leveraging cohesive language, tone, and visual branding makes it more likely your audience will remember your brand over time.
4. Leverage Social Proof and Community Engagement
Most Americans spend time on at least one social media platform. A Pew Research Center study shows that the top four platforms by usage in the United States are:
YouTube, used by 85 percent of adults
Facebook, used by 70 percent of adults
Instagram, used by 50 percent of adults
TikTok, used by 33 percent of adults
This ubiquity is why social media can be a powerful branding tool.
Social media offers a venue to broadcast content from and about your brand, and provides your audience with channels to interact. They can respond to your posts, leave comments, share your content with other people who might find it interesting or useful, or even remix it to create something new. All of these interactions amplify your brand awareness.
Whenever possible, find ways to encourage this amplification. This can include:
Requesting reviews or testimonials
Encouraging user-generated content, such as comments, re-posts, and remixes
Engaging directly with users by replying to comments or sending direct messages
Making your audience more than just customers into an active community “Remember, a brand is a meaning-based asset,” Avery says in Personal Branding. It must have a social underpinning to its meaning in order to be powerful. Managing the brand involves shepherding its meaning in the minds of consumers, both individually and collectively. It also involves encouraging consumers to forge relationships with the brand, join the community of other brand users, and advocate on the brand’s behalf.”
5. Work together and co-brand
Increasing brand awareness can be difficult, especially if you’re going it alone. By collaborating with others in your space or co-branding with like-minded companies or peers, you can get your brand out there more quickly.
Avery calls this process socializing, which she defines in Personal Branding as the process of enlisting others to help disseminate your brand. That way, you aren’t building awareness independently—you’re leveraging an army of advocates to boost it for you.
You might think about the following in relation to your personal brand:
Partnering with others in your industry to cross-promote each other
Guest posting on a friend’s website or social media profile Conducting joint webinars, discussions, or podcast episodes
“Don’t forget that socializing is reciprocal,” Avery says in Personal Branding. “You strengthen and expand your own personal brand the more you can advance the personal brands of others.” Be generous with what you give, and you’ll be pleasantly surprised with how others will be eager to help you.”
The same ideas hold for corporate brands. You might try:
Partnering with influencers as part of a product launch or marketing campaign
Identifying complementary businesses for cross-promotion where no competition exists
Participating in a joint panel discussion or industry presentation
6. Monitor and Reposition as Needed
As you work toward building brand visibility, it’s beneficial to periodically analyze your efforts and ensure your awareness is positive instead of negative.
“Just like our annual checkups with our doctor, brand managers must periodically do a checkup of their brand’s health,” Avery says in Creating Brand Value. “Measuring brand health is important for companies to understand how well their branding and marketing strategies are working over time.”
To monitor your progress, choose key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with your branding goals and note your benchmark or starting point. Customer or third-party surveys, as well as internal or external analytics, can all be used to establish this benchmark.
