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What is Brand Awareness? How to Build, Track, and Measure Success

How do you build brand awareness, trust, and likeability in a crowded global marketplace?


Learn more about what brand awareness is, the different stages of brand awareness, and how to influence a customer's intent to purchase one brand over the competition.

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Brand awareness definition

Brand awareness is a marketing strategy that aims to distinguish and measure a brand’s reputation, familiarity, and favorability. Essentially, it’s about making sure target customers know that a brand exists and understand why they should choose it over a competitor.


“Brand” however, is not limited to logos, copy, or ads but is about creating a unique identity through various touchpoints and consistently communicating its unique and trustworthy qualities.

The ultimate goal is to grow market share with a wider audience by ensuring the target customer recognizes and remembers the brand when they are ready to buy.

Brand recognition, however, is just one way of measuring overall awareness, which is a multifaceted strategy involving everything from aided awareness to brand recall, familiarity, favorability, and purchase intent.

Marketers may conduct separate studies during ad campaigns to measure customer recognition and recall to determine if overall awareness has increased.

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Illustration of two construction workers stacking building blocks that spells out "Brand".

Why is brand awareness important?

The buyer’s journey is complex, and B2B buying does not play out in any kind of predictable, linear order.


The chart below illustrates how B2B buyers simultaneously loop around between various brand and sales touchpoints before making a purchase decision.

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Being present at every buyer touchpoint is vital for building consumer trust in a brand as the right choice to help them achieve their personal or business goals.

Ideally, a B2B buyer will come across the ad, social media post, or ebook they need at the exact moment they need it to begin the trust building process. However, brands should aim to create positive and memorable impressions any time a target customer interacts with their ad or content, so they are top of mind when purchase decisions are made.

Stages of brand awareness and examples

Let’s take a closer look at what each brand awareness stage looks like for B2B buyers.

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Stage 1: Brand discovery

At this stage, customers go from having no awareness of a brand to discovering its products or services via an initial touchpoint, such as:

 

  • An online or offline ad that sends them to a branded website

 

  • A blog post or media partner article

 

  • A direct online or offline mail campaign

 

  • An ebook or whitepaper

 

  • An infographic

 

  • An in-person or online event or webinar

 

  • A shared online video or post on a social media platform

 

  • Referrals from an existing customer

 

 

This hypothetical in-feed ad shows the company value proposition and speaks to the target audience.

Illustration of a promoted post on LinkedIn.

Stage 2: Brand recognition and recall

After discovering a brand and its core offerings, marketers can retarget prospects who interacted with the first touchpoint to guarantee exposure to additional materials.


For example, customers may receive targeted emails if they opted into downloading an ebook or whitepaper, after clicking the ad above. Here is an example of a Lead Gen Form where a prospect can enter their information after clicking or tapping on the ad.

Over time, the target market becomes more familiar with the brand and seeks further information about its products or services. At this stage, prospects are looking to decide why a product or service might be the right solution.

Sticking with the example from earlier, a prospect may then start following the brand on LinkedIn and watch a helpful video or other organic updates.

Illustration of a lead gen form on LinkedIn.

Stage 3: Brand purchase consideration and favorability

Once potential customers can recall a brand name and its key benefits, it’s time to build their confidence that the products and services they consider are the best fit.


Studies have shown that information quality increases the likelihood of winning a high-quality, low-regret deals, so it’s crucial for B2B brands to create highly informative websites, blogs, ebooks, and other marketing materials to boost consumer trust and brand favorability.

Mckinsey reports that, “two thirds of the touchpoints during the evaluation phase include consumer-driven activities such as reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations.” That’s why B2B brands must also cultivate positive business ratings, reviews, referrals and positive customer testimonials that increase brand awareness and favorability.

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Stage 4: Intent to purchase a brand

After prospects have finished their research, they reach the purchase intent stage, where they shortlist the brands they’d like to buy from.


Their final stage in the brand awareness journey is often to reach out to a sales representative to compare pricing, services, or features.

To close a sale, brands should make it easy to reach a real person via multiple “contact us” touchpoints, such as phone numbers and email addresses. Providing access to 24/7 customer service and FAQs is equally helpful.

Slow response time, pricing issues, poor technical or product knowledge, lack of face-to-face or phone interaction, lack of online capabilities, and poor comparison capabilities are some of the key factors that might impact a deal at this stage.

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Stage 5: Brand loyalty and referrals

Achieving this final stage with a customer means brands now have ambassadors who can help move more prospective customers from the first stages of awareness to the consideration and purchase intent phase.


Building strong relationships with new customers is crucial as it increases the likelihood of them promoting the brand to their peers.

The factors that keep B2B buyer relationships strong include building trust and personal relationships, as well as being responsive when customers have questions.

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REASON BUYERS GIVE FOR VENDOR RELATIONSHIPS GETTING STRONGER

Illustration of a list of reasons vendor relationships get stronger given by buyers.

REASONS BUYERS GIVE FOR VENDOR RELATIONSHIPS GETTING WEAKER

Illustration of a list of reasons vendor relationships get weaker given by buyers.

For more insights into the B2B brand awareness journey, watch “The Five Rules of Brand:”

Strategies to increase brand awareness

As the B2B buying journey becomes more complex, businesses must develop a multi-pronged brand awareness ad campaign strategy to stand out from competitors. Below are four key elements of that strategy.

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1. Develop a unique brand identity

A strong identity and presence can assist any brand in becoming top of mind for customers. Before developing that identity, businesses need to:

Understand the target customer

This includes researching their demographics (income, location, job title) and psychographics (lifestyle, personal interests, attitudes and opinions, core values).


To gain further insight into customer needs, interviews or surveys can be used to learn about their pain points and how a business's product/service can help address them.

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Learn how to emotionally connect with those customers

It’s crucial to understand what brand messages resonate with B2B buyers before developing product or service offerings.


B2B buyers choose brands that:

 

 

  • Are honest and transparent

 

  • Create an emotional connection

 

  • Strive to educate instead of sell

 

  • Clearly showcase their values

 

  • Provide original content

 

B2B brands should incorporate those practices into overall brand identity and communication strategies.

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Know where to reach them online

Discovering where a brand's target audience spends their time online during the B2B research process is crucial.


There are multiple tools that will reveal website and social media platform rankings by demographics.

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2. Leverage digital and social media platforms

A recent Demandbase study found B2B buyers choose vendors who “demonstrated a stronger knowledge of their company and its needs (68%), along with those who demonstrated a stronger knowledge of the solution area and the business landscape (59%).”

Showcasing industry knowledge via a target customer’s preferred digital channels is, therefore, a critical way for B2B brands to highlight their unique brand identity.

Distributing higher-quality content online is crucial in the decision-making process for B2B buyers, but first, it's essential to understand where to target that content.

When choosing channels to demonstrate a brand’s values, personality, and industry knowledge or expertise, businesses must first:

Select appropriate brand awareness objectives

With brand awareness ads, these objectives can include:

 

 

 

  • Expanded reach: Building brand awareness with as many target customers as possible throughout an online campaign, such as native advertising, sponsored messages, and retargeting
  • Increased follower count: On social media channels to build long-term customer relationships
  • Deeper engagement: Getting target customers to interact with and share B2B branded content to increase its visibility and trustworthiness

 

 

 

Once the brand awareness ad campaign goals have been identified, determine how to track and measure success using key performance indicators (KPIs) like impressions, new followers, shares, likes, and comments.

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Choose digital channels and formats

Brands can achieve their awareness ad campaign objectives using both organic and paid content, along with sophisticated targeting.


Many ad and social networks provide back-end user demographic data – ranging from age and geolocation to job title and company size – to help brands build awareness with as many target customers as possible.

Watch the video to learn how LinkedIn website demographics works:

Paid channels: Involves paying to promote branded content or ads with online platforms such as publisher websites and social media networks.

For example, LinkedIn offers Sponsored Content, Sponsored Messaging, Dynamic Ads, and Retargeting via various ad formats to help B2B brands build brand awareness online. These formats allow marketers to reach their desired target audience however they interact with the LinkedIn platform on mobile and desktop platforms.

Organic channels: Include thought leadership blogs, ebooks, and reports created by and hosted on a brand’s website. They can also involve creating content for third-party sites and posting and sharing branded content on social media channels.

3. Use influencer marketing

In addition to utilizing paid and organic digital marketing channels to communicate a brand's values and industry knowledge, businesses can leverage social media influencers or brand advocates to increase brand awareness.


In the B2B space, these influencers are often loyal customers, business partners, and employees who promote the brand to their networks.

To implement influencer marketing, identify highly influential individuals within your target audience and create shareable content to share with them. Consider offering incentives for those who drive the most traffic and leads to your website or blog.

For tips and ideas on how to use influencer marketing to build brand awareness, read “The Rise of Influencer Marketing for B2B Brands.”

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4. Create helpful content to engage customers

To develop effective content for brand awareness, businesses should focus on educating, engaging, and helping target customers make informed decisions throughout the buying process.

High-quality, insightful, and authoritative content is more likely to be trusted and shared by B2B buyers.

According to Gartner research, “customers who perceived the information they received from suppliers to be helpful in advancing across their buying jobs were 2.8 times more likely to experience a high degree of purchase ease, and three times more likely to buy a bigger deal with less regret.”

Create content for each brand awareness strategy stage

To grow brand awareness and move customers through the buying process, businesses should focus on providing relevant and informative content at every stage.


Research indicates that customers who receive helpful information are more likely to make a purchase and less likely to regret their decision.

Additionally, providing valuable content after a sale is closed can help to build customer loyalty and increase the likelihood of repeat business.

To effectively distribute content, brands can use paid and organic digital marketing channels, work with social media influencers or brand advocates, and create different types of content such as guest posts, blogs, videos, ebooks, reports, webinars, or whitepapers.

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Match stories and tone to the brand’s personality

The tone and narrative of branded content should match its company values and culture. For example, if a company sells CRM solutions to the ecommerce providers, its branded content tone and personality will be significantly more serious than that of a company selling social media software to Gen Z entrepreneurs.


Other content creation best practices include:

  • Treating each post as a one-on-one conversation with target customers

 

  • Diversifying content between blogs, videos, and downloadable assets

 

  • Creating unique content for different platforms – varying length and stories based on audience interests and preferences

 

  • Looking at web analytics data to identify trends in stories that customers are finding on a branded website or blog via search engine keywords

 

Read “A Content Creator’s Guide for LinkedIn” for more ideas on how to get started with B2B content creation.

 

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How to measure brand awareness ROI

Measuring brand awareness can take time and requires upfront planning to track the right KPIs and find the return on investment (ROI). Below are two ways to track ad campaign performance metrics relevant to brand awareness KPIs.

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Leverage online analytics tools and campaign performance data

Brands can use campaign reporting and analytics data to track brand awareness metrics such as:

 

  • Engagement: Including shares, likes, and comments on branded ads and content

 

  • Pageviews: How many people visited the branded content page, company page, or website

 

  • Site visits: To the branded content page, company page, or website

 

  • Time spent: On a branded content page, company page, or watching a video ad

 

  • Bounce rate: How quickly people left the branded content page or website after landing on it

 

  • Referrals: Sent to the branded content page or website from other sources (e.g., influencer social media posts, shares, and emails)

 

  • Impressions: How many times the branded ad was seen

 

  • Leads generated: From branded content downloads and event signups

 

  • Click-through rate (CTR): How many people clicked on the branded ad unit(s)

 

 

With the knowledge of target customer's needs and preferences, businesses can develop and distribute tailored content that aligns with each stage of the purchase decision-making process.

Then, increase brand awareness by retargeting the same target audience based on their meaningful behaviors, such as the pages they visit on a branded website, blog, or social network and how they engaged with branded ads.

LinkedIn’s online course helps businesses learn how best to create, track, and measure B2B brand awareness.

 

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Conduct brand lift surveys

Many ad and social networks offer ways for marketers to measure the brand lift (or increased awareness) from an ad campaign by surveying users before, during, and afterwards.


Some key brand lift metrics include:

 

 

  • Ad recall: Measures if surveyed test group members recalled seeing your ad in the past seven days

 

  • Aided awareness: Measures how aware members are of a brand or product

 

  • Product consideration: Measures how likely members are to consider a brand or product for their next purchase

 

  • Recommendation: Measures how likely members are to recommend a brand or product for their next purchase

 

  • Brand familiarity: Measures how familiar members are with a brand or product

 

  • Brand favorability: Measures how favorably members view a brand or product

 

 

To learn how to conduct a brand lift study, refer to this post.

 

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Brand awareness is an iterative process

In conclusion, building brand awareness in the B2B space involves understanding target customers, identifying where they spend their time online, and developing high-quality content that helps them make informed decisions throughout the buying process.


Using influencer marketing and retargeting campaigns, as well as continually updating and improving existing content, can help increase audience engagement and awareness. It's important to track and measure the success of these efforts through metrics and brand lift studies to iterate and improve future campaigns.

LinkedIn helps brands achieve awareness campaign objectives using organic and paid content, and offers sophisticated targeting and campaign performance tools to ensure businesses reach the right buyers while measuring and maximizing the campaign’s ROI.

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