How to Build Brand Awareness Campaigns

Discover the best ways to advertise a small business and promote a brand in a crowded marketplace.

According to common estimates, the average consumer sees up to 10,000 ads daily, and ad volumes are only expected to rise over the coming year. But how many of those ads do consumers actually notice?

If you’re running a small business, it’s more important than ever to find ways to stand out from the competition — and the advertising noise. One way to do that is by establishing a solid brand identity that will click and stick with your target audience. Then, you want to get your brand in front of as many of the right people as possible with a strategic brand awareness campaign.

Below, we review what brand awareness is, why it’s such an essential part of marketing a small business, and how you can create engaging brand awareness campaigns that ensure your company is top of mind when consumers are ready to buy.

What is brand awareness?

Brand awareness refers to how familiar people are with your brand and its products or services. A brand awareness campaign is any marketing campaign that aims to increase your company’s name recognition in your target market.

Brand awareness campaigns are considered top-of-funnel (ToFu) marketing because they target consumers early in the buyer’s journey, when they’re still learning about the problem(s) they wish to solve and considering different options.

As a result, brand awareness campaigns tend to cast a wide net and employ many different marketing channels and strategies, from eye-catching infographics and videos to tailored emails and social media posts.

What are the different levels of brand awareness?

There are three different levels of brand awareness a business can achieve:

• Aided brand awareness (or brand recognition) means consumers recognize a brand when provided with its name and/or logo.
• Unaided brand awareness (or brand recall) means consumers are able to name a brand independently when supplied with a given industry or product category.
• Top-of-mind brand awareness means a brand is the first (or even the only) brand a consumer lists in a given product or service category.

Why is brand awareness important?

At the most basic level, consumers won’t buy from your brand if they don’t know you exist.

But the benefits of brand awareness extend beyond just recognition. The more positive interactions and associations customers have with your brand, the higher your brand equity — or the brand value you can turn into increased sales and profits.

That’s why top brands like Nike and Coca-Cola have strong market share and customer loyalty — and why consumers are willing to pay more for their products.

How to develop an effective brand awareness strategy

There are many ways to market your small business and promote your brand. But if your goal is to boost brand awareness, there are a few essential steps you’ll need to take and elements you’ll want to infuse into your marketing strategy.

1. Fine-tune your target audience.

   Launching a great brand awareness campaign will mean little if it doesn’t reach the right people. By the “right people,” we mean the consumers who are most interested in your product or service, most likely to respond to your marketing efforts, and most likely to make a purchase.

   Think about who your potential customers are and what they care about. For example: What are some of their common traits? Where do they spend their time and get their information, and what do they prioritize in a shopping experience?

   Answering these questions upfront can help ensure that your campaign addresses the right themes and uses the right distribution channels and times.

2. Carve out a unique brand position.

   Take some time to analyze your competitive landscape. How do your closest competitors define their products and services, and what language do they use to describe the value they bring to customers?

   Once you’ve surveyed the market, you can identify what makes your brand special and the critical gaps and opportunities that only your brand can fill. These are known as your unique selling propositions (USPs) or differentiators.

   Once you know what sets you apart, you can articulate how you solve customers’ problems in new and exciting ways that resonate with your target audience. This is what helps you establish a clear market position, distinguish your brand from lookalikes, and build deeper customer relationships.

3. Create a memorable brand identity.

   Think of your brand as a human character with a distinctive look, style, and personality — and then keep those characteristics consistent across all internal and external communications. That goes for everything from your blog content to your social media accounts to your staff training materials.

   Ideally, your target audience should be able to recognize and connect with your brand even when telltale elements like your name and logo are missing.

   A dynamic brand identity goes beyond the basics of name and logo, spanning everything from your color scheme and the font you use to your company values and tone of voice.

   Consider industry giants like Amazon, Disney, and Starbucks, which infuse their brand personality into every output, down to the shape and color of their packaging. They’re designed so that every interaction generates meaningful and exclusive customer experiences that keep people coming back for more.

4. Craft powerful brand messaging.

   A brand messaging framework brings all of the key messages you want to impart to your target audience together into one clear, easy-to-follow playbook.

   Your brand messaging framework should serve as a north star for your brand awareness initiatives, ensuring every ad, post, and campaign ladders up to the same central ideas.

   A basic brand messaging framework should include your company’s mission and positioning statement, a core message or tagline, and a style guide that lays out your brand voice and tone. It can also include your brand’s story, value propositions and differentiators, and key messages tailored to specific audience segments, use cases, and product lines.

5. Shape your distribution plan.

   With a brand awareness campaign, your goal is to spread awareness of your brand far and wide and to draw as much attention as possible to your products and services.

   In a perfect world, your brand awareness campaign would land anywhere your target audience spends any time. That’s why many marketers adopt an omnichannel strategy that spans a range of distribution channels, from webinars and blog posts to emails and social media posts.

   In reality, marketing resources are limited, and you typically have to pick and choose where to focus your efforts. You can make the most of your budget by conducting market research and prioritizing channels that attract a significant cross-section of your customer base.

6. Assess (and learn from) your performance.

   As with any marketing strategy, it helps to set concrete objectives at the outset of a brand awareness campaign. You can also establish some key performance indicators (KPIs) that will measure your campaign’s progress toward a specific set of business goals.

   You should aim not only to track qualitative and quantitative results but also to adapt your campaign accordingly to maximize its chance of success.

   Later in this guide, we list some relevant, trackable metrics you can use to measure brand awareness and evaluate the impact of your brand awareness campaigns.

What forms do brand awareness campaigns take?

Studies have shown that it takes five to seven total impressions for a buyer to become aware of a given brand.

With that in mind, it’s a good idea to diversify your brand awareness efforts across various formats and channels that make sense for your target audience. These could potentially include:

• Social media marketing, including regular posts on social media platforms like Meta, X, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Nextdoor to generate an organic following
• Email marketing, including brand-building material like newsletters and “behind-the-scenes” stories that share your company’s activities and allow its personality to shine through
• Content marketing, including blog posts, ebooks, and industry reports on topics related to your products and services — or guest-written articles and thought leadership pieces in publications your customers read
• Audiovisual materials, including short videos and appearances on podcasts that your target audience regularly listens to
• Paid advertising, including display ads and pay-per-click (PPC) ads in online channels your audience frequent, like Nextdoor Ads
• Free live events, including webinars and Q&As that tackle common questions in your market space
• Promotional giveaways, including creative contests that highlight your products, drum up interest through friendly competition, and give target audience members a taste of what you have to offer
• Sponsorships, including contributions to events and organizations your target audience cares about
• Collaborative (co-)marketing, including partnerships with complementary businesses or influencers who can name-drop your brand in their own content
• Conferences and trade shows, including physical and virtual expos and conventions that attract audiences specific to your industry

8 Quick tips to optimize your brand awareness efforts

1. Be consistent. If you want to build a brand (instead of just a business), it’s essential to keep your look and feel steady across all marketing and sales assets. That way, your audience will always feel a sense of familiarity and connection when they see your content.
2. Promote more than just your product. New research reveals that consumers are increasingly voting with their wallets. They’re buying from brands that share their values around equity, inclusivity, and sustainability and punishing those that don’t. Making your brand’s values clear — and putting them into action — will help you win their allegiance and their business.
3. Aim for high-quality (over high-quantity) content. You may think you need to generate abundant content to elevate your web domain authority. However, that’s only true if the content is thoughtful, authentic, and genuinely valuable to your target audience. Luring people to your website with content that’s poorly written or unrelated to your core product will only lead to high bounce rates and drive away potential customers.
4. Reuse, recycle. Similarly, one good piece of content can go a long way. If a long-form text like a blog post or ebook is performing well, repurpose it into several shorter pieces in alternative formats — like infographics, social media posts, or videos. That will maximize your brand’s impact while minimizing workloads.
5. Prioritize search engine optimization (SEO). Doing keyword research and planning content around commonly searched terms and themes can work wonders for your organic web traffic. You can also incorporate strategic hashtags into your social media posts to capitalize on emerging trends and ongoing discussions in your market sphere.
6. Build a community. Consumers today are four times more likely to buy from a brand when referred by someone they know and trust. It’s why advertising on social media platforms like Nextdoor — with their built-in, real-life connections — is so effective. Encourage word-of-mouth marketing and inspire user-generated content by starting a rewards program that incentivizes referrals and social sharing. You can also reach out to influencers in your space and forge partnerships with respected industry icons who may be able to plug your brand on their platform or feature you in an interview.
7. Leverage new technologies. Innovative tech like customer relationship management (CRM) software, e-commerce platforms, email marketing tools, and more are making it easier than ever to automate and organize your brand awareness campaigns. Specific advertising channels like Google, Meta, and Nextdoor even have dedicated ad managing software that helps you plan and optimize campaigns generated through their platform.
8. Don’t forget to nurture new leads. Finally, don’t let your brand awareness efforts go to waste. Once you’ve captured a new lead’s attention, ensure you’re following up with strong content that will move them further down the sales funnel. For example: If someone submits their email address on your website, send them a welcome message immediately (and regular emails after that) with promotions and product recommendations that hit them when they’re most interested and engaged.

How to measure brand awareness and evaluate your campaign performance

Admittedly, measuring the success of your brand awareness efforts can be difficult. Unlike sales and marketing efforts further down the funnel — like special offers on specific products — you can’t tell how well a brand awareness campaign is performing just by tracking sales or conversion numbers. That’s because there will likely be many touchpoints between a customer’s first impression of your brand and an eventual purchase, making direct attribution a challenge.

That said, you can track some specific metrics and KPIs to gauge how strong brand awareness is and understand whether (and to what extent) your brand awareness strategies are contributing to your company’s growth. These include:

• Web traffic: How many new and returning visitors land on your website? How many views does each of your web pages get — and how much time, on average, do visitors spend on each page? How many viewers remain on your website to check out further content? How many backlinks and referral links are leading visitors from other channels to your website?
• Sign-ups: How many new leads are signing up for your mailing list or submitting their contact information to download your gated content?
• Brand mentions: How often has your brand been named or tagged in other online channels? What is your share of voice (SOV) — that is, the proportion of mentions you’re seeing compared to competitors?
• Social media engagement: How has your total number of followers evolved on each social media platform? How many impressions, likes, comments, and shares has each post received? Which post types are performing well — and which ones aren’t?
• Search engine results: How does your brand rank organically for important keywords? What is your website’s domain authority score? How many branded searches — or searches that contain your company’s name — are being carried out?
• Customer feedback: How many positive and negative reviews are you receiving on platforms like Google and Yelp? What is your average star rating? How has your net promoter score (NPS) evolved over time?

These metrics can be quantified using performance monitoring platforms — like Google Trends and Google Analytics and other brand management tools — so you can calculate the ROI of your brand awareness campaigns. You can also track these numbers over time to determine what in your brand awareness campaigns is working (and what’s not) so you can adapt your approach and root out areas for improvement.

Don’t forget: You can always ask current and potential customers to share their thoughts and impressions of your brand directly through detailed surveys and focus groups, giving you upfront insights into your target audience.

Take the next step with Nextdoor

Want more advice on building an effective brand awareness campaign? The Nextdoor Business Center offers accessible resources and insider insights that can help you take your marketing strategies to the next level.

Or, if you’re looking for ways to optimize your ads for Nextdoor’s community of high-intent, high-value audiences, sign up for a free account on Nextdoor Ads Manager — and get tailored recommendations to help your business succeed.