10 Effective Brand Awareness Tactics to Try Out

Getting people aware of your brand is no easy task, so here are great ideas for your next brand awareness campaign.

Having good services and products is only one part of creating a successful brand. The other is building a positive brand image: getting people to recognize and love your brand and what it stands for.

Increasing brand awareness leads to brand loyalty, which is when people choose your brand over its competitors without thinking it over because they have formed a connection to your brand.

Of course, this is a process that takes a lot of time and planning, but if you’re already working on your brand awareness strategy, here are a few useful tactics that will help more people discover your brand.

Advertising tactics

Paid ads are perhaps the most important aspect of promoting your brand. They require a lot of thought and preparation, from market research to making informed decisions about ad design. Luckily, digital advertising offers to help you make the most out of your advertising efforts, as you’re able to target an exact demographic, or even pay only when people click on your ad.

Here are some of the most effective advertising tactics for brand awareness.

1. Retargeting campaigns

Retargeting campaigns basically allow you to show ads to people who have visited your site but haven’t completed a purchase. The reason why they are so important for building brand awareness is because people can land on your website for a multitude of reasons.

Maybe they’ve come across a useful blog piece and forgot to check out what your main service is. Or, they’ve gone as far as putting items in their shopping cart and haven’t completed the purchase. Retargeting allows you to remind them of your business and move them into the brand awareness or later stages in your sales funnel.

2. PPC campaigns

Pay-per-click or PPC advertising refers to ads that show up when people search for something in a search engine like Google. These ads are a great investment, since you only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad.

Viral Loops

Finally, always make sure that the requirement of the giveaway is to follow your social media profile or sign up for your newsletter. In the first instance, you need to build brand awareness, but beyond that you’ll want to create some leads that can be converted into sales.

Instagram

Cooler Nation

Portent

Google (and other search engines) determines which ads will show up based on a variety of factors such as the quality of the website the ad points to, the text of the ad, keywords and their relevance and the price the marketer is willing to pay.

When it comes to brand awareness, the great thing about PPC is that even if people don’t end up clicking on your ad, if they see it popping up on their search engine enough times, they will likely remember the name of your brand.

3. Keep your visuals and brand voice consistent

When it comes to advertising, a common rookie mistake is to favor experimentation and flashy design over consistent branding.

When you’re preparing a marketing campaign it may be tempting to go the unexpected route and create something that will catch anyone’s attention, whether it’s a bold design or controversial copy. But brand awareness building goes far beyond a single campaign.

Therefore, you should always try to stick to your brands’ visual guidelines and keep your brand messages consistent. It may seem dull and repetitive to you, but you need to make sure your marketing materials clearly explain what the brand is all about to someone who’s never heard of it before.

These social media ads from Slack are a great example. The simple, succinct copy explains their key value proposition and the fun, colorful ads in their signature colors help viewers remember this youthful and creative brand.

Make use of your social media channels

In 2020, over half of the world’s population was present on at least one social media platform. This means that if you want people to find out about your brand, there’s no way you can avoid this marketing channel. Here are some useful tactics to employ in social media marketing.

4. Run a brand awareness campaign

Social media marketing isn’t just great because there are so many people using these platforms. The thing that helps it stand out the most compared to other marketing channels is that it allows you to target a specific audience and interact with them directly.

Another helpful trick is that Facebook Ads Manager allows you to set the goal of your campaign so that ads are optimized for this purpose. For example, if you want people visiting your site, the ad will show up for a smaller number of people more likely to click. If you set brand awareness as the goal of your campaign, the ads will reach a wider audience.

These tools also allow you to measure your brand awareness campaigns, based on how many people have seen or clicked on your ad so that you can have an excellent understanding of what’s working and what needs improvement.

5. Host giveaways

Who doesn’t like a freebie, right? However, from the marketers’ standpoint, the point of a giveaway isn’t just to reach one lucky winner that will try your products or services. It’s to attract the attention of multiple potential customers with the promise of a gift or free sample.

Social media is a perfect place to host giveaways for a number of reasons. First of all, it’s where people interact with others the most these days. Next, we all spend a lot of time there—almost 2.5 hours daily. Finally, e-commerce on social media has also soared last year by 38% due to the pandemic and is predicted to reach $36.62 billion in the US by the end of 2021.

So, people are already looking for things to buy on social media and are interacting with their friends and family. You can see why a giveaway asking them to tag or tell people about your brand can be quite an enticing idea. Another useful tactic is to create your branded hashtag, as it will help you monitor engagement with your campaign.

There are numerous ways to make a giveaway more successful. Be sure to time it right (e.g. Christmas giveaways are always a big hit, since people are already spending a lot of money and the prospect of a freebie sounds great. Next, you can make the participation more creative. For example, instead of just sharing or tagging people, you can invite them to leave a creative comment like the example below.

6. Influencer marketing

“Influencer” is a very broad term these days which encompasses anyone from Kim Kardashian to a micro influencer with a following of a couple thousand people. The upside of this leniency with the term “influencer” is that pretty much any brand can afford to partner with some kind of influencer.

When looking for the right influencer, the most important things is to try and find someone who is genuinely interested in your brand and shares the same values. Not only will this probably affect the level of care and attention they put into creating sponsored posts (we’re all aware of celebrity fails when it comes to copy pasting email content onto their sponsored posts), but it will also mean that their target audience is more similar to your target audience.

Use your customers to build brand awareness

The point of brand awareness campaigns is to get new clients interested in your business. Incidentally, however, one of the most powerful weapons you have are your existing clients. These people might already be brand loyalists who choose your brand above all else and will be happy to spread the word to someone else.

For others that aren’t yet at that level of connection with your brand, you can offer incentives.

7. Referral programs

Few things are as effective as word of mouth marketing and one way you can fully use it to your advantage are referral programs. If people are already your customers, it’s fair to assume they like the service and would recommend it. Of course, if they get something in return.

The key to a great referral program is to strike the right balance between what you give and what you ask people to do. If the prospect of getting a reward requires too much effort, people will unlikely refer their friends and family.

Probably the most cited success story in this area is Dropbox, which managed to grow its customer base by 3900% with a simple referral program. Not only was the offer enticing: 500 MB of extra storage space for each referral, the referral process was also very smooth and simple. With just one click, people could invite contacts from their email or copy a link that they could send through, for example, social media.

8. Offer great customer service

Not all of your one-time customers will have a positive experience with your brand. However, while it’s impossible to please everyone, it’s much more important to address the customer grievances in the right way.

A 2017 Microsoft study found that 96% of customers in the US claim customer service to be an important factor in determining their brand loyalty, while 89% switched to a competitor after a bad customer service experience.

On another hand, 80% will forgive a bad experience with a brand if the customer service is rated as very good, and they will share a positive experience with an average of 11 other people.

In other words, great customer service doesn’t just help you retain customers and build brand loyalty: it can also lead to greater awareness of your brand.

Content marketing & SEO

All of the above tactics focus on reaching out to a specific audience, often with a specific offer. But there is a reason why brand awareness is at the top of your marketing funnel. When it comes to boosting brand awareness, it’s much better to reach out to as many people as possible, so that you can eventually filter out those who are truly interested in what you're offering.

In that respect, getting people to know about your company through organic reach like content marketing and SEO is a great and inexpensive way to get your name out there.

9. Search engine optimization

SEO means adapting your website so that search engines like Google rank it higher in the search results. And why is that important, again?

Well, while the first place in search results has an average click-through rate of 25% the tenth already has a discouraging 2.5%.In addition to that only 1 quarter of searchers venture out to the 2nd page of results, while three quarters stay on the first one.

10. Guest blogging

Using your own website and SEO to get people acquainted with your brand is absolutely necessary, but another useful tactic is to be present on other websites as well.

Though these may not attract your exact target audience (it’s probably unlikely your direct competitors will accept guest blog posts and backlinks to your site), you never know who or how might become interested in your business.

Ideally, you'd manage to place guest blogs in a similar industry; for example, as a design service, we find marketing agencies or freelancer websites to be ideal guest blogging sites.

If you have a lot of established competitors, chances are that ranking for your main keywords (i.e. the names of your services or products) is going to be hard at first. So, you need to give people an opportunity to discover you in a different way, namely through useful content.