How To Build a Brand Awareness Campaign

Instantly recognizable brands like Amazon, Shopify, and Slack know the importance of brand awareness in B2B marketing. They know that increasing brand awareness helps make their brands more recognizable to prospective clients and stakeholders. When their target audiences need a particular product or solution, they’ll remember to choose Amazon, Shopify, or Slack.

So, how do these major brands build B2B brand awareness? The answer: a brand awareness campaign.

Brand awareness helps promote your brand’s unique selling point (USP) to other businesses, making your brand stand out from the competition. It also helps build trust with your target audience, which creates customer loyalty.

Whether you’re launching a new brand or rebranding an existing brand, an effective brand awareness campaign can help you achieve those key brand awareness objectives.

In this article, we’re going to explain how to increase (and measure) brand awareness plus share a few brand awareness campaign ideas.

How To Increase Brand Awareness

Launching a successful brand awareness campaign is one approach to effectively increase brand awareness. Here are three steps to help you build and implement an effective brand awareness campaign.

Step 1. Create Brand Awareness

Before you can increase brand awareness, first, you need to create brand awareness.

How to create brand awareness requires using both traditional (e.g., billboards and television commercials) and digital marketing strategies (e.g., social media campaigns and collaborating with influencers). Did you know social marketers’ top goal when using social media is to help increase brand awareness? They understand being where their buyers are helps with brand recall and brand awareness. These strategies will help get your brand viewed by your target audience (and hopefully committed to memory).

Source: Qualtrics

In addition, your branding (voice, logo, and other visual elements) must also be consistent to create a cohesive, recognizable brand identity with your target audience.

Step 2. Increase Brand Awareness

After you create brand awareness, the next step is to increase it. If you’re wondering how to increase brand awareness through digital marketing, look no further.

Here are five ways to increase brand awareness:

1. Content Marketing. Creating (and sharing) content that is valuable and engaging will not only help your customers, but also establish you as an industry thought leader.

2. Influencer Collaborations. Partnering with the right influencers, particularly micro-influencers, can help expand your audience reach.

3. Social Media Campaigns. The impact of social media on brand awareness is impressive. It can truly take your company’s brand awareness to the next level. So, be sure to allocate time and resources to establishing a presence on relevant social media platforms and engaging with your audience.

4. Referral Programs. Utilize the power of social media marketing and word-of-mouth advertising by offering referral programs. By encouraging your existing customers to refer your brand to their audiences (e.g., share an Instagram post and win a gift card), you’ll be extending your brand’s reach.
   

5. Event Sponsorships. Directly interact with your audience by hosting a workshop, sponsoring an event, or participating in a trade show. These are great opportunities to boost engagement and grow your audience, too.

After you’ve boosted your brand awareness, the final step is to see how your brand awareness campaign is performing.

Step 3. Use Brand Awareness Tracking

Brand awareness tracking helps you see how your consumers view your brand so that you can modify and optimize your campaign(s) effectively.

There are brand awareness key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that you need to measure, which brings us to…

How To Measure Brand Awareness

Knowing how to measure brand awareness is critical. Without knowing the exact impact of your brand awareness campaigns, it would be impossible to adjust and optimize them.

To measure brand awareness, here are a few brand awareness metrics and key performance indicators that you should be tracking.

• Brand Impressions. This brand awareness KPI measures the number of times your digital ads are shown to customers within a specific time period.
• Click-Through Rate (CTR). Another brand awareness measurement is the click-through rate. CTR is the percentage ratio of the number of people who see a hyperlink to the number of individuals who click on it. By tracking CTR, you’ll be able to measure how often customers are engaging with your brand.
• Website Traffic. Monitoring the number of visitors to your website, specifically new ones, will give you a quantifiable indication of how your brand awareness campaign is performing. Using a tool like Google Analytics can help you see where your website traffic is coming from.
• Brand Search Volume. The search volume of your brand name and mentions of your brand name on social media is important. Google Search Console or a social listening/monitoring tool can help you keep tabs on how often your brand is being searched or talked about.
• Social Media Engagement. To measure your audience’s interaction with your content on social media, you’ll want to track metrics like reach, likes, shares, follows, and comments. You’ll be able to access these brand awareness metrics on your social media platform’s analytics tab.

Companies like Brand24 make it easy to visually see your

brand awareness metrics and KPIs on a dashboard like this.

In addition, customer surveys can offer remarkable insights as part of your brand awareness measurement strategy. Questions about how consumers discovered your brand, their initial impressions, and whether they'd recommend your brand to others can reveal a great deal about your brand awareness campaign's effectiveness.

However, no matter which brand awareness metrics or KPIs you choose, it is crucial to revisit and reassess them periodically. This helps ensure they continue to align with your evolving business goals and brand awareness objectives.

Brand Awareness Campaign Ideas

Now that you know how to increase and measure brand awareness, it’s time to work on your brand awareness strategy. We’re going to show you some creative brand awareness campaign ideas that you (and other B2B organizations) can use for inspiration.

Here are four of our favorite B2B brand awareness campaign examples:

1. Apple Events 

When you think of a tech event, it’s likely that Apple immediately comes to mind. Apple has perfected the art of turning product releases into a highly anticipated event. The hype before, during, and after the event builds a tremendous amount of brand awareness for the company.

Here’s why: an Apple Event spurs Apple’s audience to create (and share) a variety of content including blogs, videos, posts, and hashtags related to the new product releases. This user-generated content is then shared (and reshared) with a large audience.

It’s a brilliant strategy for not only B2B, but B2C brands, too, to emulate.

Source: Apple

2. Dropbox Referral Program

Referral programs are a great brand awareness strategy because of the power of word-of-mouth advertising. Dropbox takes their brand awareness strategy a step further by making it a combination of a referral program and freemium.

We consider that a winning combination that your brand should try, too.

Source: Dropbox

3. Apple Pay

Partnering with complementary brands is another solid brand awareness strategy. A great example is Apple and Mastercard’s co-branding partnership that produced Apple Pay.

Mastercard was the first credit card company to allow its users to store their credit and debit cards on Apple Pay. This brought a huge audience to Apple and vice versa. Apple product users who might not have had a Mastercard, previously, definitely now had one.

Source: Apple

4. Spotify Wrapped

If you’re looking for a viral marketing tool, take a cue from Spotify’s annual Spotify Wrapped campaign. Since 2016, Spotify Wrapped has been showing its users their musical year in review. The individualized listening recaps include your top artists, a playlist of your top 100 songs, and how many hours you’ve spent listening.

Spotify users love sharing their personalized soundtracks with their friends and family on social media, and their audiences love analyzing the song artists and titles. It’s also a great way to get people to sign up for the platform. Wrapped is only for people with a Spotify account, but if you sign up for free now, you can get it next year. Brilliant marketing strategy.

So, if creating a year-in-review recap makes sense for your brand, definitely follow in Spotify’s footsteps.

Source: Spotify Wrapped

These four examples are just a few of the brand awareness campaigns that Spotify, Apple, and Dropbox have launched over the years. If you aren’t already, we recommend following these brands on their social media platforms for more great brand awareness initiative examples.  

Final Thoughts

An effective brand awareness campaign has many benefits. By implementing the five ways of increasing brand awareness, measuring metrics, and drawing inspiration from these campaign ideas, you’ll be setting your brand up for success. (For even more great ideas, check out our complete brand awareness marketing strategy for 2024, too.)

Want to take your brand awareness to the next level? Consider optimizing and streamlining your employee advocacy program with an employee advocacy tool like GaggleAMP. To see how GaggleAMP can help, schedule a demo today.