A brand's level of awareness can be increased systematically through a range of marketing activities. To increase brand awareness, you first need to make people aware of the brand in the first place. This is generally achieved through a marketing mix that may include digital and traditional advertising, social media, content marketing, PR and trade fairs or other events. The following sections explain which measures can help increase brand awareness and how to attract the attention of potential customers.
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How can you increase brand awareness? Choosing the right marketing mix
To attract potential customers and strengthen their trust in a brand, you first need to build and position the brand and develop a convincing brand identity. This means identifying the characteristics that distinguish the product or service from competitors, while also highlighting the value it offers the target audience and the brand's expertise. Even the best branded product will struggle to find customers if nobody knows it exists, so building awareness quickly is important. Companies therefore usually use a marketing mix that combines different measures according to how effectively each target group can be reached.
Before choosing which marketing channels to prioritise, consider where potential customers are easiest to reach online, how much reach each channel offers, what advertising budget is available and which internal resources can support the work. Some measures for increasing brand awareness can be relatively expensive but implemented quickly, such as search engine advertising and paid social ads. Others require more sustained effort but may involve lower direct costs, such as search engine optimisation and content marketing.
Customer experience and public perception are among the factors that help determine brand equity. Brand identity, brand awareness and brand image therefore have a significant influence on a brand's value.
Measure brand awareness: There are various ways to measure how well known a brand is. Find out which methods can be used to evaluate brand awareness here: Measure brand awareness
SEA: using search advertising to increase brand awareness
Search engine advertising can be used to increase brand awareness without a long lead time. Advertising on search engines such as Google or Bing does, however, require the company to have an online presence. After clicking a paid advert, users are taken to the company's website, where they should find content that matches their search query. Relevant, user-focused landing-page content therefore needs to be in place first.
SEA can be particularly useful when a website does not yet rank highly for relevant keywords in organic search results. Paid adverts displayed above or below organic results can draw attention to a brand and reach potential customers. As part of a brand-awareness strategy, paid ads can put the brand name in front of more people, increase reach and communicate the brand's distinguishing features and strengths.
SEA (Search Engine Advertising) is part of online marketing. Placing adverts on search engine results pages can help build a brand and increase brand awareness. In addition to these branding objectives, SEA can also be used to increase click-through rates and website traffic and to generate more conversions.
Attract attention through social media marketing
A presence on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok and others can also increase brand awareness significantly. Whether a company should use all available channels or focus on selected ones depends on its product or service and its target audiences. The first step is therefore to identify the social platforms on which the relevant audience can be reached. As with any other marketing activity, objectives should also be defined in advance. Is the aim to build the brand, increase brand awareness, strengthen the brand image, improve customer retention, support employer branding or achieve a combination of these goals?
The right content formats depend on these objectives and may include blog posts, photos, videos, surveys, competitions or infographics. Creative videos with emotional messages and memorable advertising slogans, for example, can help build brand awareness. Polls and surveys with a prize competition can require less effort while still attracting attention and can be shared easily on social media. Appealing competitions are often shared by users, which can increase brand visibility further.
Alongside organic posts, companies can also run paid campaigns on social media. Whether paid social advertising provides real value for increasing brand awareness should be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Even when audience targeting is available, adverts can still be shown to people outside the intended target group. Paid social campaigns should therefore define and narrow their audiences as precisely as possible.
SEO: building long-term visibility through search engine optimisation
Unlike search engine advertising, search engine optimisation is a marketing activity that requires sustained effort and ongoing work before it delivers results. The effort can be worthwhile because SEO does not require an additional media budget, while strong search rankings can provide substantial reach and long-term visibility. Alongside technical SEO factors, the quality, freshness and originality of content play a major role in achieving good search rankings. Companies that only publish occasional pieces of content are unlikely to perform consistently well in search results. Older SEO tactics such as maximising keyword density are also outdated and are not a measure of good content. Instead, companies should create reliable, useful and genuinely user-focused content.
Put simply, every search query comes from someone looking for an answer to a question or a solution to a problem. Search engines scan websites for relevant answers and solutions and try to present the most suitable content. The better a page matches the search query and answers the underlying question, the more likely it is to appear in search results. Content should therefore always be created with the user's search intent in mind.
Search engine optimisation does not mean creating content primarily for search engines. It means creating content for users. Helpful content that answers users' questions as comprehensively and accurately as possible generally provides the strongest basis for good search rankings.
What is LamaPoll?
LamaPoll is an online survey tool for creating employee surveys and measuring employee satisfaction. With us, you can create, conduct, and analyse all types of employee surveys.
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