Building Brand Awareness: Make Your Business Unforgettable
- Colin Wilcoxson
- 5 days ago
- 8 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
A customer needs your product or service, and without hesitation, they think of YOUR brand first. That instant recognition doesn't happen by accident, it's the result of strategic brand awareness building. For small businesses, this isn't just marketing strategy fluff; it's the difference between blending in and standing out.
Table of Contents
(our quick-guide)
What Is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness represents how familiar a group of people is with your brand and how easily they can remember it when showing purchase intent. But, it's deeper than simple recognition, it's about being in the fore front of your customers' minds when you need it most. For example, you're thirsty and want a soda. What brand came to mind? Pepsi? Coke?
Keys to strong brand awareness:
Visual Recognition: Can a potential customer identify your logo, colors, or packaging quickly?
Most people can identify major brands logo's with or without text. Everyone knows the Pepsi logo without even having the brand name.
Verbal Recall: Do they remember your brand when wanting to make purchase decisions?
You can see perfect examples of this with Kleenex. Did you know Kleenex is the brand itself and not the product?
Emotional Connection: Does your brand evoke any feelings or associations?
A great example is Red Bull. Everyone knows Red Bull as the crazy adrenaline junky uncle willing to do any stunt. I've even heard people say, "That should be on Red Bull" when seeing someone perform an impressive stunt.
Example: When people say "I'll just Google it," they're demonstrating Google's complete dominance in search, the ultimate brand recognition win.
The Mere-Exposure Effect
The mere-exposure effect shows that people tend to develop preferences and attraction for things or people simply because they know them. As Amie M. Gordon (a social psychologist) mentions in her blog post, The Role of Familiarity in Attraction, on Psychology Today; "The mere exposure effect works with people as well: We tend to like people more as they become more familiar to us."
If this is true with people, wouldn't it also be for businesses? After all, businesses are built around people, for people. You can read more about the Mere-Exposure effect on Amie's post.
The 3 Stages of Brand Awareness
Just like many, many, (seriously) many other parts of marketing, brand awareness has it's own 'funnel'.
Unknown
0% brand awareness. This is where most new businesses will start but businesses in highly competitive markets will usually spend more time here. Your target market doesn't really know about you yet.
Aided (Somewhat) Awareness
This stage is when customers can recognize your brand with some sort of aid, like some part of iconography.
Top Awareness
This is the final (goal) stage of your brand awareness journey. Here you are the top of the mind, first business someone thinks of. For example, "Where should we eat for dinner?", "Let's eat at Chili's!"
Actionable Step:
You can survey current customers to determine your current brand awareness.
Ask things that are relevant to the awareness level you're trying to identify like:
"What brands come to mind when you think of [your industry]?" (Top of mind)
"Have you heard of [Your Business] before?" (Aided Awareness)
To run survey's like these, Google Forms offers a great way to make forms. You can even track analytics, making it super easy to setup and start running ASAP. Link these surveys with a CRM and an email delivery service, and you'll be on your way in no time.
How To Build Brand Awareness
Increasing brand awareness can be done so many times, it's honestly insane. Here are some examples of brand awareness strategies.
Content Marketing
Content marketing can be a great marketing method overall. With content marketing, you're using the creative (or text) to push most if not all of your material. Use content marketing along with standard video-based marketing frameworks (like Google's ABCD framework) to maximize impact.
Publish a guide like blog that solves real problems
A plumbing company creating a branded "Emergency Home Repair Checklists" post.
Repurpose content across multiple formats (blogs, videos, infographics).
This makes sure you're getting the most out of your content.
Social Media
We all know how powerful social media can be for brand awareness. Especially with most platforms being 100% free, they're great cheap brand building opportunities.
First, I'd recommend seeing where your target audience spends their time online. If your target audience is men aged 18-25, interested in Motorsports, you're likely to thrive on platforms like TikTok & Instagram. However, target audiences of women aged 45-65+ interested in gardening may likely thrive on Facebook.
Next, you'll want to make sure your profiles are properly optimized, then create content calendars & social strategies. Does this part of social media sound confusing or overwhelming? You're not alone. That's why we offer 100% organic social media management. With this service, you don't need to run any advertising. HopSeed will take care of optimizing your profile, creating posting strategies, content pillars, content calendars and so much more. Get a quote for organic social media management now!
Content Partnerships
Partnerships with businesses relevant to yours can help brand awareness by A LOT. Co-hosting business events can help draw in consumers that are likely similar to your current customer base. This highly relevant audience combined with the business partnership can help create connections with your branding. Remember my mention of the Mere-Exposure effect?
This method doesn't need to be co-hosting events either. A ton of businesses will guest post blogs onto each others websites, supply a business with something and a lot more.
SEO
As we all know, SEO is super important, especially for smaller businesses. Optimizing your Google My Business profile's is an absolute must. There's no reason not to. You can earn quality brand awareness by signing up with the local chamber of commerce and news sites. This gets you put right in front of your community and starts building familiar relationships ASAP.
Referral Programs
Referral programs are great, but be very careful to not come off as 'spammy'. Any small business knows how effective and important referrals are. Many of you reading this post have significant results from referrals without even realizing, or meaning to.
A good example of a referral program would be handing each customer a business card with a trackable referral url. The business card reads "For each successful referral, you get $10 off." You can see this work really well with games, apps and credit cards. When was the last time someone offered to have you use their referral code when signing up?
Consistent Branding
This seems pretty obvious, but you'd be surprised how easy it is to break this. Consistent visual branding is a must when creating (pretty much any) creatives. Imagine if Spirit Halloween's next pop up had bright white, green and red color palettes. Would you even think it's a Spirit Halloween? What about a Christmas themed Hallmark popup?
Email Marketing
Similarly to Referral Programs, email marketing is a thin tricky line. No one wants spam emails. We all know that. It's time we face that. You want to make sure your email brings some form of value to the reader right away. Coupons, upcoming discounts, loyalty programs and more are great ways to effectively provide marketing value. A win/win situation for all involved.
Remarketing
Remarketing is another way to increase your bottom line and your brand awareness. Remarketing is pretty straight forward. Market to people you've already marketed to. Usually, previous or current customers. Remarketing can be extremely effective on Meta platforms (Facebook and Instagram), as you can dynamically display ad content relevant to the exact product the person was viewing a day or so earlier.
User-Generated Content
UGC (User-generated content) is exploding in popularity in 2025. Companies are fueling ad campaigns, social media and more with user generated 'organic' feeling content. Pharmaceutical & skincare companies are showcasing customer stories in short-form video formats regularly.
A branded hashtag or asking your audience to tag you on their posts can help generate UGC pretty easily. With a community that's emotionally connected enough, you may even be able to 'super charge' your social campaigns.
Tools to Track Brand Awareness
So now you're familiar with what brand awareness is. You may be asking yourself, how do I track my brand awareness? To be honest, it's a little more complex then you would think. Tracking business mentions across the web, using brand lift studies and other tracking methods are very time and energy consuming. Luckily, there's tools to make this process 10x easier for us!
Price: Free
Tracks and notifies you when new content around the web is created relevant to your business
Price: $41+ (Minimum package)
Monitors and tracks social media and the web to gain insights immediately. Mention searches over 1 billion sources for mentions.
Price: Varies depending on package
Gives you the ability to track branded search volume, competitors, keywords and a lot more
Price: Varies depending on package
Offers social media monitoring & listening tools
Price: Varies depending on package
Custom build listening queries to monitor exactly what you’re looking for.
Measuring Brand Awareness
Brand awareness has always been somewhat difficult to track. I mean, how exactly do you track if someone remembers a brand name? Don't worry though, there's actually quite a few ways to reliably track your businesses brand awareness.
Important Metrics
Direct Traffic: People coming to your website through manually typing in your URL
Branded Search Volume: How many searches include your brand name
Social Mentions: Organic mentions across social platforms like Facebook or IG
Share of Voice: Your brand mentions vs competitors
Brand Recall Rate: Survey results on recognition based questions
Est. How Often To Measure:
Monthly for social metrics
Quarterly for surveys
Continuously for google analytics
Common Brand Awareness Mistakes
Branding is waaay more important than most small business owners realize. Most small businesses think word of mouth is enough. (Don't get me wrong, word of mouth is great) As I mentioned earlier, connecting your business with your customers is crucial. People are more likely to buy from a company they know and are familiar with.
Inconsistent Branding
Changing your branding elements like logos, colors, or messaging too much can confuse your customers. There's a reason why corporations don't change they're branding very much, even after a 'rebrand'.
Sales Like Content
Businesses that only strictly push sales like content are going to struggle more on the brand awareness side of things. Nobody likes to be sold 24/7 and creating content that engages your customers helps build valuable connections. Look at Duolingo. A few years ago, no one really talked about them....ever. One smart Social Media Manager later, and everyone knows the quirky, relatable green bird.
Vanity Metrics
Vanity metric's have always been(and will always be) a problem in all marketing efforts. Especially in brand awareness metrics. Focusing on the wrong metrics can have "less than optimal" effects on marketing. Followers on social media can be a decent indicator on brand awareness, but it's hard to determine if those followers are active and engaged. A page may have 100,000 followers with only 5,000 of them may be real, engaged people. Instead of looking at follower counts, look at actual brand awareness tools like I mentioned above.
Grow Your Brand Awareness
Let's be honest, you're here because you know your business needs to be more well known but you're not sure how to do that. That's exactly why I'm here. Let's get on a phone call meeting to discuss actionable, tailored brand awareness strategies for your business. Whether you're wanting to use social media, paid advertising or you just aren't sure where to start, we're here to help. Schedule a meeting with us on the bottom of our Homepage.
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