What is Brand Awareness and How Do You Build It?

Brand awareness is how familiar people are with your business, products, or services. Awareness ensures your brand comes to mind first, especially when someone is choosing between you and a competitor. You want to meet potential customers before they are even aware they have the problem you can solve.

This article will explain the concept of brand awareness and its critical role in the sales funnel. We’ll explore why it’s essential for your company and how it can impact your success.

Brand awareness is when customers know what your brand is, what it sells, and what it stands for. For marketers, awareness comes before demand. When people know who you are and what you offer, they’re more likely to trust you, and that trust is what turns brand recognition today into sales tomorrow.

Strong brand awareness is essential; 81% of consumers require trust in a company before they consider buying from it.

Brand awareness is a long game. It isn’t about flashy campaigns or quick wins – it’s about building memory. The goal is to be the brand people think of first (without needing a reminder) when they’re ready to buy. That kind of familiarity doesn’t happen overnight; it’s built slowly by showing up consistently.

This is the first layer of your brand. It’s when someone sees your logo, a colour, a tagline, and instantly knows it’s you. Recognition builds through consistency. If someone can spot your brand in a crowd of competitors, you’re already ahead. Think of the hardware store with the sausage sizzles – they snagged the ‘most trusted brand’ title , their sixth consecutive quarterly victory. That’s powerful brand awareness.

A layer down is when someone thinks of your brand without seeing it, but just by thinking about the category. It means your brand has taken up space in their memory, like hearing ‘active-wear’ and immediately thinking of Nike or Lululemon.

This is the real brand battleground. It’s when your brand is the first one that comes to mind. That’s where the majority of purchase decisions happen. People tend to default to what is most mentally available. Think of wanting a smoothie and immediately picturing how far you are from your nearest Boost Juice.

This is the goal. You’ve become the automatic answer. Not just the first brand people think of, but the only one, like Google, Uber, or Zoom. In crowded markets, dominance comes from years of consistent, memorable brand building. It’s earned, long before someone clicks ‘buy’.

Brand recognition is when someone sees your logo or name and knows who you are. Brand awareness is a marketing practice focused on being present in your customer’s orbit before they’re even thinking about making a purchase.

Awareness builds memory and trust with your audience. Perhaps they took a course or read a helpful e-book you published. Now, when they are ready to buy, your brand is the one that comes to mind first. If you want to grow sustainable, future demand, awareness is what keeps your business growing long after your initial boom.

Brand awareness is what gets your brand in the room before the customer is even ready to buy. It matters because familiarity builds trust. Think of any typical food product: You’re likely to keep buying the same brand even if others appear with cheaper prices because you know what you’re getting and you like it.

If your brand comes to mind first, you’re in a strong position when the customer is finally ready to make the purchase. Brand awareness:

• Fosters a sense of trust and credibility: Customers who trust a business are more likely to do repeat business with them
• Starts building brand equity: Brand awareness increases perceived value and overall company valuation.
• Gives you a competitive advantage: In busy sectors, brand awareness and retained customers can make all the difference in getting the edge over your competitors
• Establishes a foundation for marketing: Brand awareness acts as a cornerstone for all other marketing efforts

Customers are more willing to take a chance on new product launches if they’ve had positive prior experience with your business. If you’re only chasing in-market buyers, you’ll eventually hit a ceiling. Awareness, coupled with long-term strategy building, is how you grow beyond this.

While brand awareness can sometimes take the form of big activations or viral moments, that’s not what building brand awareness is. You can’t build awareness overnight – it’s something that needs to be cultivated over time.

With that in mind, here are some practical ways to increase brand awareness.

• Become instantly recognisable
• Create campaigns people can’t help but share
• Show up where your customers already are
• Win trust with content marketing before selling
• Grow your reach with PR and partnerships

Make sure your visuals, tone, and messaging are aligned everywhere your brand shows up. You want customers to see the shape of your logo or your colours and know it’s you. When your brand is easier to recognise, it’s easier to remember.

This extends beyond your brand’s appearance and encompasses how you interact with your customers. For example, the popular employment marketplace SEEK started using Salesforce to consolidate its customer data. This has enabled their team to deliver a more consistent brand experience across their sales, marketing, and service channels.

The best brand campaigns don’t talk about their products or services. They make people feel something. A good campaign either tells a story, taps into a cultural moment (thoughtfully and appropriately), or gives people something they want to share.

Focus on emotion, relevance, and simplicity. If your campaign feels human, relatable, and memorable, it’s more likely to stick in people’s minds and build the kind of memory that drives future buying decisions.

You can’t build awareness if your potential customers rarely see you. Make sure you’re active on the platforms your customers use. You can find this out by doing some customer interviews and asking them where they spend their digital time. You can also use analytics tools to gauge where your audience is predominantly coming from.

While on these platforms, be sure to reply to comments on your posts, reshare user content, and be part of the conversation without selling your product. The more often people see your brand story in a natural way, the more you become a friendly, familiar face. For example, L’Oreal Australia uses Salesforce Social Studio to jump into online beauty conversations and engage with the community in real-time, helping the brand to stay top-of-mind.

Content is all about being useful to your audience. Focus on creating simple, value-driven content consistently that helps solve problems for your audience. Consider quick guides, listicles, or in-depth reviews, depending on the type of product you sell and the type of audience you have.

The goal at this stage isn’t necessarily to sell. It’s to build credibility so that when someone does have a need, your brand is the one they trust and can turn to.

Positive media coverage and smart partnerships can help you reach audiences you might not otherwise connect with. The key is to choose partnerships and sponsorships that align with your brand voice and feel genuine.

It’s not about being everywhere – this can often have the opposite effect and make your brand feel overbearing. You want to be seen in the right places, in a way that builds trust and credibility with new audiences. For example, if you are selling to engineers, it might be beneficial to partner with a local association.

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If you’re looking to develop brand awareness, you should make sure your brand actually sticks in the minds of your customers and is not restricted to just receiving lots of impressions on social media.

Let’s take a look at some of the best tactics and methods for measuring brand awareness.

A sentiment analysis is something that businesses will use to gauge current perceptions of their business. It’s an emerging tool that’s reliant on AI techniques such as natural language processing to calculate sentiment across social media.

They are great for providing a big picture overview of insights into customer opinions and emotions. With this data, businesses will be in a position to tweak certain aspects of their marketing strategy.

Sometimes it’s best to keep it simple. You can simply ask your customers how they feel to measure awareness. There is a small risk with this, however. It’s more likely that people who take the time out to fill these surveys in will have a positive impression of the business, so it can skew the results a little.

You could also conduct a brand lift study to see the effectiveness of certain pieces of media. These are usually conducted by third parties to remove bias and will measure the opinions of a control group (people not exposed to your ads/posts) and a test group (people exposed to your ads/posts) to see the difference in levels of engagement.

Although likes and impressions aren’t everything, they still have a story to tell. When it comes to social media marketing, you should focus on qualitative data, such as comments or reviews, rather than quantitative data such as views. This data shows that your brand is not only being seen, but is also being talked about.

If more people are typing your brand name into a search engine or going straight to your site, that’s a sign that you’re building recognition.

You should pay particular attention to branded searches. These are search queries that mention your brand name specifically and are a much clearer indication that your business was what they were looking for.

Generic search terms, such as your sector or industry, might still yield website traffic. But this might be happening through a bit of fortune rather than direct actions by your business, so they’re less useful for measuring brand awareness.

You can use tools such as Google Trends or Google Keyword Research to see if more people are searching for your brand month after month. Tracking elements regularly will give a clearer picture of what’s working and what you might need to tweak to keep building momentum.

If you’re serious about long-term growth, brand awareness can’t be an afterthought. It needs to be part of your strategy from day one.

You’ll want to consider brand awareness when you’re launching something new, entering a new market, or repositioning yourself against your competitors. You can’t just rely on people to find you. You have to actively build recognition before customers are ready to buy.

If you’re seeing flat or declining sales, awareness is how you reach new audiences and stay in the game when the immediate demand dries up. It also plays a critical role when you’re rebranding, you’re not just changing the logo, you’re rebuilding trust from the ground up.

The businesses that win are the ones that stay memorable over time. If you want to grow future demand, protect your market share, or make sure customers think of you first, brand awareness is a step you can’t afford to skip.

While short-term tactics drive immediate sales, brand awareness lays the foundation for long-term growth. It’s about giving your future customers a reason to remember you, long before they’re ready to buy. If you want to keep growing future demand, you need to show up consistently, build trust early, and stay top-of-mind. It takes time, but it’s what sets growing brands apart from the ones that eventually stall.

If you’re ready to build a smarter, stronger brand across all your channels, Salesforce Marketing Cloud can help you show up even before your customers know they need you.