How to increase brand awareness step by step

Whether your brand is new or rebranding, you will be looking for opportunities to reach new customers and create awareness of your business. Creating awareness is the foundation of building your clientele but it not something that can be easily measured or tracked. To build brand awareness long term you need a strategy or you are likely to confuse consumers with inconsistent messaging.

What is brand awareness?

Brand awareness indicates whether your target audience knows your brand exists, how much they know about it and recognise it, and how they feel about it or trust it. Brand awareness marketing aims to grow that audience and show them what you do, what you stand for and what tone and style you use to present that. The easiest way to do that is if you first define those aspects in a strategy.

Grow your business with a brand awareness strategy

I can help you to create a content strategy aimed to build your brand awareness and by writing content that works for that strategy. Building awareness is not something that happens overnight, it is a process that takes time but a good strategy will give you a head start. What steps should you take to increase your brand awareness and what aspects of a content strategy do you need for that?

1. Stay consistent

To start, you need a clear style guide, one that covers tone of voice as well brand styling such as colours, fonts and how to use them. This will help you to keep the content you publish and post to look and feel consistent and coherent. Which, in turn, will help people who see several of your content pieces to recognise your branding.

2. Be multifaceted

Yes, your content should promote your product or service but there is more to your business than just what you offer. You have to give people a reason to choose you over your competition, find a way for your brand to stand out. One way to do that is by highlighting your values and morals, which allow customers to identify with your brand over others.

3. Remember you are part of a community

No one exists in a vacuum, that includes your business. Do not be afraid to promote your community or to reach out to your community for partnerships. This can be either other local businesses, this works well in the travel industry, or brands with business adjacent to yours, which works well for the design and creative industries.

4. Make an impression

Consistency does not mean boring. You want your audience to remember you and what you stand for, striking content can do that. Your content strategy should allow you room to be bold and sometimes a little disruptive but do not go too far and become offensive. You want to leave a positive impression.

5. Address your audience

You want to make sure that your content reaches your audience, so you have to post it where they will see it. If you do your research about your target audience, you will know which platforms they are on and how to reach them. That will allow you to strategically publish your content, which should address your audience’s interests, needs and wants, and safe you time and effort.

How do you measure brand awareness?

Realistically there is only one way to truly measure brand awareness, and that is by asking people questions through a focus group, survey, questionnaire or poll. But those are not really options for most businesses, especially smaller and new ones that mostly operate online. Instead we use metrics to measure brand awareness based on a few different KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).

As there are different aspects of brand awareness, there are different metrics and indicators to track for each, such as mentions, impressions and reach. These metrics, for tracking online awareness, can be found in some well known places like Google Search Console and Analytics, Social Media insights, and SEO dashboards such as Semrush and Ahrefs. While I, as a content marketer, have some knowledge of brand awareness metrics, a performance marketer will be better suited to help you measure and track your brand awareness.

Brand awareness tips to remember

• If something does not work immediately, do not panic. Instead, give it time.

• Not every step works for every brand. Do what works for your brand.

• Offline marketing can be extremely powerful, though its success can be harder to measure.

• There is such a thing as bad publicity. You want to create positive brand associations so that people want to choose your business, not avoid it.