The importance of brand awareness

The absolute champion of brand awareness is Coca-Cola, with 94% of the world’s population recognizing their logo. But while it’s a great stat, that’s not brand awareness anymore. It’s fame.

Most businesses aren’t trying to be Coca-Cola, but they are trying to get to healthy brand awareness levels. If you’re a B2B software company, you don’t need an 8-year-old in Chile to recognize your brand. What you need is the right people – your target audience – to think of you first, remember you when it matters, and trust you enough to take action.

That’s what brand awareness really is, and how it should be measured. It’s not about blanket recognition across all demographics and countries. It’s about being known by the right audience, for the right things. 

It’s about mental availability – that low-key familiarity that builds over time and keeps your brand simmering in the back of someone’s mind, ready to rise to the surface when they’re shopping, comparing, or Googling. And in this article, we’ll show you just how important that is, and give you directions on how to get there.

The value of brand awareness can’t be overemphasised

We’ve explained the ROI of brand awareness before, but there are more benefits to brand tracking. More and more companies are realising brand awareness has been overlooked and undervalued. If you focus on this specifically, you’ll drive results all around your business — from your sales funnel to your content marketing.

Back to basics: this is brand awareness.

Before we dive into the benefits of having high brand awareness, let’s look at what it really is. Brand awareness is how familiar your target audience is with your brand, or even your specific products or services.

It’s layered, but we’ll come to that later. If people can recall information about your brand or even link emotion to it, they’re aware of your existence, and its relevance to them. It’s not to be confused with brand recognition, which sums up the ways in which people can recognise your brand.

Why is brand awareness important?

A third of consumers already have a brand in mind when they go shopping. If that’s yours, you’ll be able to grow your brand and improve your marketing messages drastically.

Brand awareness is the foundation all your marketing efforts have to rely on, from social media to SEO. It’s what helps you make people aware of your brand and what you have to offer, so you can gain their trust and influence their decision-making process, in order to get more sales, faster.

What are the advantages of brand awareness?

Let’s dive into some specific reasons, backed with stats, as to why you should be building brand awareness.

1. Brand awareness pays off in terms of market share

Brand awareness becomes visible in the Google search bar. If people already know and consider your brand, they won’t go looking for ”the most comfortable running shoes”. They’ll type in ‘Nike running shoes’. Good luck to your competitors trying to rank on that.

Brand awareness and share of search are closely intertwined. In 2020, Les Binet, a thought-leader in marketing effectiveness, tested this theory in three markets: automotive, energy and mobile phone handsets.

He found that share of search correlates with market share in all three categories. Share of search goes up? Market share follows a few months later. And yes, the same goes for share of search going down.

It’s a long-term prediction, but that also is a benefit: having a relatively low share of search is an early warning sign that there’s trouble ahead, and you need to change your marketing strategy.

Back to brand awareness: a brand awareness campaign that is focussed on getting your name out there and into the search bars of curious customers is a great way to prepare your brand for the future.

2. It helps you improve brand perception

Another important brand health metric is brand perception, and it’s not the same as brand awareness. It goes beyond how many people know you, but focusses on how they feel about you. It’s basically the next step: you can have a lot of people know you, but if none of them like you, that big crowd is useless.

You might think that before people form an opinion on you, they’d have to interact with your business multiple times. That would give you some time between building brand awareness and improving brand perception, right? Not exactly.

When building brand awareness, if you understand how to measure your brand, then you also understand you’re already working on brand perception. Simply because first impressions matter. So if you want to think ahead, create brand awareness campaigns with that in mind, and measure their success with brand awareness surveys and brand positioning surveys.

3. It’s crucial in building trust

The more people are aware of your brand, the easier it is to build trust. Not only because people don’t need to start from scratch getting to know your brand if you’re always front-of-mind, but also because they will ask their peers.

If friends, family, and colleagues are aware of your brand, it’ll be easier for people to have confidence in you.

4. It’s useful for lead building at the top of the funnel

Don’t get me wrong: building brand awareness is not the same as generating leads. But if you are actively generating leads and want to step things up a notch, look at brand awareness.

Reeling in high-quality leads becomes a lot easier if they have heard from you before and you don’t pop up out of nowhere, having to introduce your company, products or services, values and great offers all at once.

5. It drives traffic to your website

Strong brand awareness campaigns will help you generate organic website traffic. Branded search is one of the key players in metrics for measuring brand awareness.

Ultimately, you’ll need to move on from awareness and have people actually consider buying from you. If you’re the first name that comes to mind when they have to buy something in your product category, they’ll head over to your website to check you out. That’s the moment you show your charm and can start converting.

6. It speeds up and increases sales.

Now that’s a great pie. Consumers aren’t risk-takers, ladies and gentlemen. Research has shown that for most shoppers, brand awareness is a dominant choice tactic. They tend to have a preference for high-awareness brands, despite any quality or price differences. We like to call that power of familiarity ‘brand equity‘, and it’s a must for marketers.

So, if you want to sell more and faster, make the decision-making process easier for your customers. One way of doing that, is by helping them know who to pick from (you) – and why (because you’re awesome). It’s important they are not just aware of your existence, but of what you have to offer on a deeper level.

That’s why it’s crucial to be aware of the three levels of brand awareness, and build on them all.

• Awareness of your brand name
• Awareness of your product offering 
• Awareness of your brand attributes (i.e. what distinguishes you from competitors)

7. You can create better content and products

Brand awareness is a two-way street, and it will lead you to creating better marketing campaigns.

While more people in your target market get to know your business, you get access to more people as well, and you can gather more data on your audience by asking the right brand awareness questions. This will help you tailor your marketing efforts, content, products or services exactly to their needs.

8. Brand awareness can spread like wildfire

Nobody’s as good as marketing as a customer who is aware of your brand and likes what they see. Even those who haven’t bought from you (yet!) can be great brand advocates and help you raise awareness for your brand.

That’s done with a brand management tool as old as time: word of mouth marketing. Or something more recent: unintentionally recommending you to others simply by liking your social media page. Keeping in mind that 38% of mums are more likely to purchase products and services from brands other women ‘Like’ on Facebook, you can see brand awareness really starts paying off.

How do you measure brand awareness?

Brand awareness isn’t one clear-cut number or metric. That doesn’t mean measuring is impossible or relevant. There are plenty of reliable signals that show whether people are starting to know, recall, and consider your brand.

Below is a breakdown of the most common (and useful) metrics to track if you want to focus on brand awareness. You don’t need to follow them all, but choose a mix that matches your channels and goals.

Metric	What it tells you	Where to look / how to track it
Branded search volume	Are more people searching for you by name?	Google Search Console, SEO tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush
Direct traffic	Are people typing your URL straight into the browser?	Google Analytics
Social listening volume	Are people mentioning your brand organically?	Tools like Brandwatch, Mention, Sprout Social
Share of voice	How often are you being talked about compared to competitors?	PR/media monitoring or paid tools like Meltwater
Unaided brand recall	Can people name your brand without being prompted?	Attest, surveys
Aided brand awareness	Do people recognize your brand when they see it?	Brand tracking surveys (like the ones you can run with Attest)
Engagement on paid campaigns	Are your awareness ads getting traction?	Ad platform analytics (Meta, Google, LinkedIn etc.)
Referral traffic	Are you being talked about and linked to elsewhere?	Google Analytics

Check out our dedicated guide on the best ways to measure brand awareness here.

How do you boost brand awareness?

Brand awareness isn’t built on your own Instagram page. That might sound harsh and like all hope is lost, but it’s true, and not all hope is lost. 

If someone is already following you or regularly engaging with your content, they’re not becoming aware of your brand — they already are. Social media channels are great for nurturing existing audiences, not building new ones from scratch.

Using social media to target new people is a different story. If you’re running paid campaigns to reach people who’ve never heard of you but fit your target audience, that’s great brand awareness work. But your organic posts to your followers? Not so much.

The same goes for all awareness activity: if you’re not getting in front of new eyes, you’re not building awareness. So, how do you do that?

You look outside your own bubble. Billboards. Podcasts. Sponsored content. Partnerships. Influencer campaigns. Press. Smart targeting on search or YouTube. Anything that gets your name in front of the right people before they come looking.

And always keep in mind: you’re not just aiming for a one-time “boost.” Brand awareness is built over time, by consistently showing up in the right places with the right messaging. That is what will compound and eventually lead to increased brand awareness amongst the relevant groups.

Need help building and measuring brand awareness?

If you’re a marketer looking who is ready to make building awareness a standard part of their marketing strategies, we’ve got you covered. Check out this article with 16 ways to increase brand awareness.