Building a brand—whether a personal brand or one for a product or business—involves more than designing logos and crafting catchy slogans. You also need to increase brand awareness. Without it, it doesn’t matter how much time or effort you invest into creating your brand, because no one will see or consider it.
Awareness is about ensuring your target audience knows that your brand exists. It’s the final piece of the puzzle in putting your brand to work.
This guide explores what brand awareness is, why it’s vital, and steps you can take to boost visibility for yourself or your business.
What Is Brand Awareness (and Why It Matters)?
Brand awareness is a measure of how familiar and recognizable a brand is to a customer, client, or other target audience. While brand awareness is commonly associated with companies, products, or services, it can also apply to personal branding.
Sometimes referred to as brand recognition, awareness is an essential component of building brand equity, and is related to other branding concepts such as:
- Brand knowledge: A target audience’s thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and relationships regarding a brand
- Brand recall: How likely a target audience is to remember a brand without being prompted in some way; often called “unaided awareness”
- Brand consideration: A target audience’s willingness to consider a given brand as an option
“Through brand identity work, managers choose a name, design a logo, and create other unique features to represent the brand’s sensibility,” says Harvard Business School Professor Jill Avery, who teaches the online course Creating Brand Value. “The name, logo, and design are all markers of the brand intended to communicate its meaning. But, the brand does not yet have a relationship with consumers or a cultural history, so these markers are empty.”
Without awareness, your brand’s value is hidden. Similar to how a consumer can’t consider a product they don’t know exists, your target audience can’t contemplate your brand if they’re unaware of it.
How to Build Brand Awareness from the Ground Up
Are you ready to start building and growing brand awareness? The steps below guide you through initial brand conception to ways you can leverage social media and community engagement to bolster your reach and the repositioning most brands need.
1. Laying the Foundation: Know Your Brand Identity
Your brand must exist before you can build awareness. If you haven’t already, solidify your personal or business brand image. Ensure it’s informed by the mission, goals, and values you want it to embody—which ideally resonate with your target audience.
You should consider:
- What values, mission, and goals underlie your brand?
- Who are you trying to reach, and why? If you have multiple target audiences, how are they different?
- What’s your distinct value proposition?
- How are you uniquely positioned to help your audience overcome challenges or reach specific goals?
- What credentials, licenses, awards, or other proof points can you offer as evidence of differentiation?
Ensure your brand identity is clearly documented before moving on to the next step. After all, there’s no point in making your audience aware of your brand if you must overhaul it in a few weeks or months.
2. Embody Your Brand in All of Your Actions
Once you determine what matters most to your brand, embody those values in your actions. This includes everything from professional communications—like sending and answering emails, drafting social media or blog content, and designing a website—to interacting with others face-to-face.
“Enacting your personal brand in day-to-day interactions in a way that feels authentic and comfortable for you is important,” says Avery, who also teaches the online course Personal Branding. “Common social interactions offer opportunities to share and strengthen your brand. In a professional context and beyond, your actions and interests inform others about your personal brand and create a foundation for further interaction.”
Some everyday ways of embodying your personal brand can include:
- Swiftly and thoughtfully responding to emails to demonstrate that you value the sender
- Following through on tasks you promised to complete to affirm you’re reliable
- Engaging in friendly small talk with others to demonstrate you’re open to, and value, connection
“Think of every interaction as communicating something about who you are and what value you have to offer,” Avery says in Personal Branding. “Your personal brand accumulates over tens, hundreds, or even thousands of interactions with those who are important to your success, and every interaction has the potential to increase the value of your personal brand or degrade it.”
This consideration should also be taken for businesses. Some ways your organization might embody your brand include:
- Donating to causes or charities that align with its mission and goals
- Taking a public stand in favor of or against policies that contradict company values
- Promoting and providing inclusive leadership training to support your employees and enhance their psychological safety
3. Build a Consistent Presence with Content
Whether promoting your personal or a business brand, content can be a powerful tool to help you start building awareness. This can take the form of social media posts, podcast episodes or guest appearances, a blog on your personal or business website, and email—any form of content that aligns with your brand and audience.
Content allows you to spotlight different aspects of your brand, including your visual identity, personality, tone, and value. It can also offer opportunities to demonstrate thought leadership or engage in storytelling, which can further facilitate brand awareness.
Depending on your goals and how quickly you aim to build awareness, you might consider running paid media campaigns to increase the likelihood of your target audience surfacing your brand. In today’s digital world, it’s easier to get started with social media, display, or Google Search ads if you’re new to the space.
No matter the type of content you produce or whether you leverage advertising, it’s critical to remain consistent across channels. Leveraging cohesive language, tone, and visual branding makes it more likely your audience will remember your brand over time.
4. Leverage Social Proof and Community Engagement
Most Americans spend time on at least one social media platform. A Pew Research Center study shows that the top four platforms by usage in the United States are:
- YouTube, used by 85 percent of adults
- Facebook, used by 70 percent of adults
- Instagram, used by 50 percent of adults
- TikTok, used by 33 percent of adults
This ubiquity is why social media can be a powerful branding tool.
Social media offers a venue to broadcast content from and about your brand, and provides your audience with channels to interact. They can react to or leave comments on your posts, share your content with others who might find it interesting or helpful, or even remix it to make something of their own. All of these interactions amplify your brand awareness.
Whenever possible, find ways to encourage this amplification. This can include:
- Requesting reviews or testimonials
- Encouraging user-generated content, such as comments, re-posts, and remixes
- Engaging directly with users by replying to comments or sending direct messages
- Transforming your audience from passive consumers into an engaged community
“Remember, a brand is a meaning-based asset,” Avery says in Personal Branding. “For it to be powerful, its meaning must be inherently social. Managing the brand involves shepherding its meaning in the minds of consumers, both individually and collectively. It also involves encouraging consumers to forge relationships with the brand, join the community of other brand users, and advocate on the brand’s behalf.”
5. Collaborate and Co-Brand
Increasing brand awareness can be difficult, especially if you’re going it alone. By collaborating with others in your space or co-branding with like-minded companies or peers, you can get your brand out there more quickly.
Avery calls this process socializing, which she defines in Personal Branding as the process of enlisting others to help disseminate your brand. That way, you aren’t building awareness independently—you’re leveraging an army of advocates to boost it for you.
In relation to your personal brand, you might consider:
- Partnering with others in your industry to cross-promote each other
- Guest posting on a peer’s social media profile or website
- Conducting joint webinars, discussions, or podcast episodes
“Don’t forget that socializing is reciprocal,” Avery says in Personal Branding. “The more you’re able to advance the personal brands of others, the more you strengthen and extend your own. Be generous with what you give, and you’ll be pleasantly surprised with how others will be eager to help you.”
The same ideas hold for corporate brands. You might try:
- Partnering with influencers as part of a product launch or marketing campaign
- Identifying complementary businesses for cross-promotion where no competition exists
- Participating in a joint panel discussion or industry presentation
6. Monitor and Reposition as Needed
As you work toward building brand visibility, it’s beneficial to periodically analyze your efforts and ensure your awareness is positive instead of negative.
“Just like our annual checkups with our doctor, brand managers must periodically do a checkup of their brand’s health,” Avery says in Creating Brand Value. “Measuring brand health is important for companies to understand how well their branding and marketing strategies are working over time.”
To monitor your progress, choose key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with your branding goals and note your benchmark or starting point. This benchmark can come from various sources, including customer or third-party surveys and internal or external analytics. For example, establishing Google Alerts for branded mentions is one way to start.
Then, regularly analyze how those KPIs are trending against your baseline—perhaps quarterly or annually. If you’re experiencing momentum, you may double down on the efforts that are working. If trending in a negative direction or stagnant, you may want to revise your strategy.
When it comes to measuring your brand awareness strategy’s success, consider KPIs like:
- Social media engagement: Evaluate metrics like reach and impressions, follower growth, mentions, and engagement rates
- Branded search volume: Determine how frequently people look for your name, business, product, or service in search engines
- Website traffic: Monitor direct traffic to your personal or business website
- Brand recall and recognition studies: Conduct studies to identify whether individuals can recall and recognize your brand
“A healthy brand is one that customers recognize, have positive associations with, prefer over competitors, and purchase and use differentially in ways that are beneficial to the firm,” Avery says in Creating Brand Value.
A Key Component of Branding
Whether you’re dealing with a personal or business brand, you must invest in building awareness. If no one can recall your brand or the value it offers, no amount of time or energy you invest matters. For your brand to be effective, your target audience must know of it.
While it’s possible to succeed through trial and error, you could supercharge your efforts by developing must-have skills before building your brand. Personal Branding and Creating Brand Value—two courses offered by HBS Online—can help you do exactly that. Taught by a top branding expert, these courses offer interactive activities and real-world examples of how companies and individuals have grown and elevated their brands.
Are you ready to boost your brand awareness? Explore the online courses Personal Branding and Creating Brand Value—two of HBS Online’s marketing courses—designed to help you define what sets your brand apart and clearly articulate its value. Download our free course flowchart to explore which is best suited to your goals.
