How to Increase Brand Awareness: 5 Proven Strategies That Work

New customers can only buy from your business if they’re aware of your business. No matter how great your products or services are, or how impressive your customer service is, customers need to know about your business to make a purchase. That’s why brand awareness is fundamental to business growth. 

When you boost brand awareness, you drive higher customer trust, engagement, and sales. However, that first step toward raising brand awareness is often the most difficult. Where do you start? 

In this guide, discover five proven strategies to improve brand awareness — including social media, partnerships, community engagement, content marketing, and review generation. You’ll learn how to get your business noticed and measure the impact of your efforts.

Why Brand Awareness Matters for Your Business

Simply put, brand awareness is how familiar customers are with your business and the products or services you offer. When more people know that your brand exists, recognize it, and have a general impression of it, you have increased brand awareness. 

Brand awareness is the first step in the buyer’s journey. Once customers recognize your brand, they can start to develop trust in it and engage. This customer engagement lays the foundation for purchases, repeat business, and eventually referrals. 

Measuring brand awareness can sometimes be challenging. Focus on outcomes like:

• Increased searches for your brand in search engines.
• More brand mentions on social media.
• More social media engagement.
• A higher share of voice (how present your brand is in online conversations vs. your competitors).
• Increased direct traffic to your website.

Tracking metrics like these over time will help you understand if your efforts to increase brand recognition are working.

5 Proven Strategies to Increase Brand Awareness

Building brand presence is an active process that requires actionable approaches with measurable results. Focus on strategies that work, like building social media brand awareness, engaging your community, and sharing valuable content. 

1. Leverage Social Media for Visibility

Social media marketing is an invaluable tool for connecting with your target audience and reaching new customers. Consider posting social media content to popular platforms like:

• Facebook: The most popular social media platform in the world, ideal for reaching wide audiences and building community. 
• Instagram: A visual platform with a slightly younger user base where you can share photos, videos, and possibly influencer partnerships.
• LinkedIn: A professional platform that’s great for networking and marketing to other businesses.
• TikTok: A short-form video platform that’s popular with younger demographics, ideal for sharing trending content and getting high engagement. 

You don’t have to share content on all of these sites. Just pick one or two platforms with user bases that align with your target audience, and tailor your approach to what works best on each. 

Create a strategy that outlines the types of content you’ll post and when to post them to maximize your reach. Add around five highly relevant hashtags to each post to help users who aren’t familiar with your brand discover your social media content. 

Social media algorithms and user preferences are always evolving, so track the metrics on each of your posts to understand what’s working and what’s not. Monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) like:

• Impressions: The number of times your content appeared on users’ screens.
• Engagement rate: The percentage of people who saw your post and interacted with it by liking, sharing, or commenting on it. 
• Follower growth: How many new followers you gain over a set period.

2. Build Partnerships and Collaborations

One way to get your brand in front of potential customers is to partner or collaborate with someone who already has an audience you want to tap into. 

Consider influencer partnerships and affiliate marketing, for example. In influencer marketing, you work with someone who has developed a significant audience on social media. They promote your business to that audience of people who trust their recommendations, and, in return, you pay them. 

Similarly, you can collaborate with other complementary brands to improve visibility for both of your businesses. Nike’s collaboration with Apple is one example of this kind of co-branding. Nike partners with Apple so Apple Watch users can access Nike Run Club from their watches. The result is a better customer experience from both brands. 

When you’re using partnerships and collaborations to boost brand visibility, keep an eye on KPIs like:

• Referral traffic: Visitors to your website who clicked on links from your partners or collaborators.
• Co-branded content reach: How many people see your pictures, videos, or other content marketing posts about your brand collaboration.
• Engagement metrics: How many likes, shares, and comments you get on the posts from your partners or collaborators about your brand.

3. Engage With Your Community

Engaging with your community (both local and digital) is another excellent way to expand your reach. You’re getting your brand name out there and forming positive impressions with customers. 

Consider community engagement efforts like:

• Creating referral programs that reward customers for getting their friends or family to buy something from your business.
• Running contests, such as social media giveaways that require users to like, share, and comment on posts to enter.
• Running or entering local events, with local digital marketing to go along with them.
• Getting involved in online communities, like connecting with other local businesses on social media or joining town forums.

For community engagement, track KPIs like the number of shares, mentions, and new user-generated posts referencing your brand online. 

4. Create Consistent, Valuable Content

Content marketing is key to improving brand awareness. Focus on creating valuable content that answers questions your target audience might have or provides practical solutions to their problems, such as:

• Blogs
• Videos
• Infographics
• Educational guides
• E-books

For website content, improve visibility through search engine optimization (SEO). Incorporating keywords and internal links to other pages on your website can make a big difference. 

Monitor KPIs like organic traffic, page views, and average time on page.

5. Encourage and Showcase Reviews

Reviews are the No. 1 way potential customers decide whether they can trust your business. Accumulating more positive reviews helps you build credibility by showing that your customers have had good experiences. 

Focus on encouraging customers to leave reviews on your website, Google Business Profile, and other review sites. Using automated request tools that prompt customers to leave a review after they make a purchase can help.

Monitor your progress with KPIs such as review volume, average ratings, and social proof mentions.

How to Measure Brand Awareness Success

After you put these strategies into place, you’ll want to know how well they’re working. Measure your overall success across strategies with metrics like:

• Branded search volume: The number of searches for your brand by name.
• Social mentions: Content or comments about your brand on social media.
• Impressions: How many times your content appears in users’ feeds.
• Engagement: How many likes, shares, and comments you get on your content.

Adjust your approach based on the results you see. For example, if you notice your influencer partnership posts are driving high web traffic and social mentions, consider expanding into more partnerships. 

Take Your Brand to the Next Level Today

Growing your business starts with building better brand awareness. If you want to improve brand awareness but implementing all of these strategies would add too much to your plate, consider working with a marketing agency.

At Optimize Digital Marketing, our team is here to support your brand with services ranging from reputation management to social media content. Contact us today to get started.