Building brand awareness for enterprise businesses: 5 strategies

Getting your company’s message noticed is a good start, but making it stick is where the real magic happens. This is where building brand awareness for enterprise businesses can make all the difference.

Brand awareness is what keeps your enterprise in the thoughts and conversations of your audience, even when you’re not actively marketing to them. The importance of having strong brand awareness cannot be overstated; it’s the difference between a one-time purchase and a lifelong customer. It’s the foundation upon which trust is built, and loyalty is fostered, ensuring that your brand is the go-to choice in a sea of options.

Explore how you can build brand awareness and the basics you need to get right.

4 pillars behind building brand awareness for enterprise businesses

You get the picture.

— McDonald’s UK (@McDonaldsUK) February 19, 2020

A few years ago, McDonald’s ran an ad campaign that showcased nothing but the ingredients of its famous burger—no logo, no brand name, and not even an image? That minimalist approach, devoid of any explicit branding, was a bold testament to McDonald’s unparalleled brand awareness cultivated over decades.

To start building your own strong brand visibility, focus on these fundamental elements.

1. Brand purpose and values

Your brand’s core purpose and values are the foundation of its identity. Ask yourself: Why does my brand exist beyond making a profit? What principles guide my brand’s actions and my customer’s purchase decisions?

Clearly communicating these purposes and values helps establish an emotional connection with your target customers and differentiates you from competitors.

2. Brand positioning and unique value proposition

Understanding your brand’s positioning in the market is critical to success. To do this, you’ll need to:

• Identify your target customers: Who are they, and what are their needs, preferences, and pain points?
• Analyze your competitors: What are their strengths and weaknesses, and how can you differentiate your brand?
• Develop a unique value proposition (UVP): What specific benefits and value does your brand offer customers, and how does it solve their pain points or meet their needs better than alternative solutions?

Even established brands will need to refine their positioning and UVP to stay relevant and competitive. You should regularly conduct surveys and analyze data to reassess your brand’s core values, mission, and unique selling points. Reposition yourself as needed to suit your consumers’ changing preferences.

3. Brand identity

You should have a consistent brand identity across all channels and materials—from your website and social media profiles to your sales and customer service interactions.

To create comprehensive brand guidelines, you’ll need to consider:

• Visual identity: Outline the proper usage and application of your logo, color palette, typography, and imagery.
• Brand messaging: Define your brand’s tone of voice and messaging, and provide clear instructions for how to communicate your brand’s values and unique value proposition.
• Brand hierarchy: Outline the relationship between your parent brand, sub-brands, and product brands, and provide clear instructions for using each brand within the hierarchy.

While it’s important to make occasional tweaks, avoid changing your brand guidelines too often. Consistency is key to building brand recognition and avoiding customer confusion. Frequent changes can dilute your brand’s impact and make it harder for customers to connect with your identity. So make sure to do extensive research before you change any part of your brand identity.

4. Brand tracking

To quantify the impact of your brand advertising efforts and identify areas for optimization, rigorous brand tracking is essential.

Establish clear KPIs and tracking mechanisms to measure the level of brand awareness, perception, equity, and ROI over time. Invest in advanced brand tracking technologies, such as brand lift studies, sentiment analysis tools, web traffic analysis, and search trend monitoring. Leverage the insights from this data to iteratively refine your brand advertising strategies, driving maximum effectiveness.

5 key strategies to build brand awareness

Brand awareness is the starting line in the race to customer loyalty. When people are aware of your brand, they’re more likely to choose it, talk about it, and recommend it to others. In a world where word of mouth can make or break a business, brand awareness is your best ally. Here are five important strategies for building brand awareness for enterprise businesses.

1. Craft a distinctive and consistent brand voice

Simply having a great product or service is no longer enough to capture consumer attention and build lasting brand awareness. Companies must cultivate a distinct and memorable brand voice that resonates with the target customers to boost brand awareness.

A brand’s voice encompasses not just the words and messaging it uses but also the personality, tone, and overall experience it conveys across all touchpoints. It’s the unique expression of a brand’s values, personality, and story—making it instantly recognizable and fostering an emotional connection with customers.

One company that has mastered the art of creating a unique brand voice is Who Gives a Crap. The brand has achieved remarkable awareness by injecting humor and purpose into the traditionally mundane toilet paper industry.

The brand’s quirky and eye-catching packaging immediately sets the tone. It features playful illustrations and tongue-in-cheek messaging that grabs attention on store shelves. This playful approach extends to their social media marketing strategies too, where they engage with followers using the same witty and irreverent voice.

However, it’s not just about being funny—Who Gives a Crap weaves its commitment to making a social and environmental impact into every brand interaction. Their packaging proudly displays the company’s mission to donate 50% of its profits to help build toilets in developing countries.

So while their brand voice is humorous, it also showcases their purpose-driven and sustainable side, demonstrating how a brand voice can convey multiple facets of a brand’s identity. This demonstrates how a well-crafted brand voice can go beyond tone to create meaningful connections and drive brand loyalty.

Key takeaways

• Adopt a unique tone across all touchpoints: Develop and maintain a unique tone that your target audience can immediately identify, and make sure that your brand’s personality shines through every ad, social media post, and customer service interaction.
• Inject personality: When it fits, don’t be afraid to add humor and personality into your branding, even in traditionally serious or commoditized industries.
• Make your brand synonymous with your narrative: Consistently communicate your brand story and values across all touchpoints—from packaging to social media posts and customer service—so that your company name becomes synonymous with your product.

2. Amplify brand exposure through strategic partnerships

By forging alliances with esteemed brands, influential figures, and digital trendsetters, your brand can access diverse, new audiences. This strategy is not merely about visibility—it’s about aligning with entities that bring added value and trust to your brand’s reputation.

Co-branding initiatives, where you jointly develop and promote new offerings with a complementary brand, can yield dividends. These initiatives could entail featuring your products or services on the menus or in the marketing efforts of established industry leaders.

You can also leverage influencer marketing by collaborating with celebrities and influencers who represent your brand’s ethos and can open doors to their loyal followers, providing direct access to your target demographic. These partnerships should be thoughtfully curated to ensure alignment with your brand’s core values and mission, to create genuine connections and improve the awareness of your brand.

TurboTax, for example, partnered with Abbey Romeo from the reality show “Love on the Spectrum” during tax preparation season. While Abbey is known from a reality dating show, she also runs her own hat-making business, so the partnership made strategic sense. Plus Abbey has a very passionate following who view her as an authentic, relatable personality. By collaborating with her, TurboTax could build trust and connections with Abbey’s fanbase.

The collaboration allowed TurboTax to raise awareness of its tax products and services through Abbey’s influential social platforms. Her videos demonstrated using TurboTax’s solutions in a relatable way, exposing the brand to a new audience segment.

For TurboTax, partnering with Abbey showed its commitment to making financial products accessible and inclusive for all types of filers. These non-traditional influencer collaborations can authentically build credibility with often-overlooked communities.

Key takeaways

• Pursue branded partners: Identify and partner with leading brands in your industry to co-create and promote new products or services that can introduce your brand to a broader customer base and boost its perceived credibility.
• Cultivate authentic influencer relationships: Leverage the existing fan bases and brand influence of celebrities and social media influencers whose ethos aligns with your brand to ensure genuine advocacy. These partnerships can help you expand your brand’s reach and appeal to new target markets.
• Leverage collaborative content: Create compelling, co-branded content that tells a story and educates your audience. This content should highlight the partnership’s unique value proposition and engage consumers with a blend of information and entertainment.

3. Engage with your community (online and offline)

Engaging with your community is another way for enterprise businesses to build brand awareness. The key is to do this both online and offline.

Your online community can be found in places like your website and social media. Interact with this community by responding to feedback and facilitating opportunities for customers to interact with each other and the brand. Host exclusive virtual events, solicit user-generated content, and foster discussions on social media. This sense of belonging can breed advocacy and loyalty.

Your offline community is found in the towns, cities, and regions where your business has physical locations—particularly if you’re a multi-location enterprise. When you show up and become a part of the communities where you do business, you will boost brand awareness and recognizability. You can also instill feelings of goodwill by having a positive local impact.

The localized nature of a multi-location company provides a unique opportunity to embed your business as a valued community partner at a grassroots level. Having actual employees volunteering their time and talents allows brands to quite literally put boots on the ground in local neighborhoods.

For example, Wegmans empowers its staff across locations to give back through volunteering initiatives, donation drives, and partnerships with organizations like the United Way. Wegmans also donates food daily to 48 Feeding America food banks, provides tuition assistance and mentorship opportunities for youth, and partners with local non-profits to promote economic mobility.

When it opened a new store in Reston, Virginia, Wegmans engaged with various community organizations and leaders to understand the local needs and explore ways to make a positive impact. The store team sponsored and participated in several community events and held a meeting with representatives from non-profits, schools, and associations to discuss how Wegmans could support the area through donations, events, and other initiatives.

There are so many additional ways multi-location enterprises can engage with their local communities, including:

• Set up buzzworthy pop-up activities like mobile sampling trucks, interactive demos, or local “surprise-and-delight” product launches to forge memorable brand connections.
• Host free community events like workout classes, skills workshops, or contest challenges to further drive engagement.
• Sponsor local youth sports teams, support local charity events like walks/runs, setup booths or host giveaways at community events and festivals, or have a float in a local parade.

By prioritizing authentic community engagement both online and offline, brands can build strong emotional connections with customers and position themselves as committed community partners, not just another company. This drives valuable advocacy, loyalty, and long-term business success in ways that no marketing campaign can replicate.

 Key takeaways

• Nurture online communities: Cultivate a vibrant online community by engaging with followers. Respond to feedback and encourage user contributions to foster a sense of belonging and co-ownership. These fans will help to spread the word and increase brand awareness.
• Engage offline in local communities: Become a valued member of the local community in the places where your business is located. Being visible in the community will bring more visibility and awareness to your brand.
• Tailor your approach to your specific communities: Find out what your online and offline communities need, and fulfill those needs to make your engagement initiatives more powerful.

4. Employ innovative technologies to elevate brand experiences

In the ever-evolving landscape of brand marketing, you must continuously push boundaries and embrace cutting-edge technologies to create truly captivating and memorable experiences for your audiences. By seamlessly integrating innovative solutions into your brand initiatives, you can move beyond traditional product showcases and forge deeper emotional connections with consumers.

For example, Nike utilizes technology to enhance product launches. Its Air Jordan line is a prime example of how a brand can employ augmented reality (AR) to captivate an audience. AR technology integrates digital elements with the real world, providing an interactive shopping experience for customers.

For the pre-release of the Air Jordan III “Tinker” shoes, Nike used AR to allow customers to view and buy its sneakers through a Snap code. This integration of technology created an exclusive and efficient shopping experience, leading to a rapid sell-out of the Air Jordan III “Tinker” sneakers within just 23 minutes.

 

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Similarly, Nike released the SB Dunk High “Momofuku,” where customers had to visit a Momofuku restaurant, point the camera at a menu or a Nike poster, get a 3D rendition of the shoes, and purchase them.

In another instance, Nike created an interactive basketball game, enabling fans to compete to win a pair of Jordan trainers. By seamlessly integrating the iconic Air Jordan Jumpman logo as a QR code trigger, the experience allowed participants to engage in a real-time AR basketball game directly from their smartphones.

By seamlessly integrating cutting-edge technologies like AR and Snap codes, Nike has not only generated excitement and a sense of exclusivity but also elevated brand awareness and cultivated a devoted following among sneaker enthusiasts and basketball fans alike.

Not to mention, the buzz and word-of-mouth generated by these unique initiatives have helped keep the Air Jordan sneakers top-of-mind for consumers, reinforcing its desirability.

Key takeaways

• Embrace innovation: Leverage emerging technologies to create immersive and multi-sensory brand experiences that captivate and engage your audience.
• Include interactive elements: Incorporate interactive and gamified elements into your product launches and brand activations, fostering a sense of exclusivity, competition, and active participation among your consumers.
• Collaborate with tech experts: Partner with technology specialists, designers, and artists to push the boundaries of what’s possible and create truly unique and memorable brand experiences.
• Stay ahead of the curve: Continuously explore and experiment with new technologies and innovative approaches to maintain your brand’s position as a leader in immersive experiences.

5. Connect with diverse audiences through microtargeting

Traditional mass-marketing approaches often fall short of capturing the nuances and preferences of niche demographics, this is where the focused and personalized approach of microtargeting makes sense.

Microtargeting involves segmenting audiences into highly specific groups based on various demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and contextual factors. By leveraging advanced data analytics and audience insights, you can craft tailored messages, offers, and experiences that speak directly to the unique needs and interests of each microsegment.

One of the key advantages of microtargeting is that it lets you move beyond broad generalizations and connect with your audience on a deeper, more meaningful level. Additionally, microtargeting can help you optimize your advertising spend by targeting the most relevant and receptive audiences, and yield maximum returns.

Yelp Spotlight is a powerful tool for microtargeting specific customers with localized content and timely promotions. With regional, segment-specific content displayed on the homepages of the audiences, you can reach 10 million impressions in just 28 days—which can do wonders to improve your brand recognition.

One company that has mastered the art of microtargeting is Airbnb. The home-sharing platform’s success is rooted in its ability to adapt to local cultures, customs, preferences, and needs, offering a truly localized user experience that resonates deeply with travelers worldwide.

From tailoring its platform’s user interface to match regional preferences to launching market-specific partnership programs, Airbnb has demonstrated a deep commitment to localization. They have also created SEO-worthy pages filled with local info to target people planning to visit these places. For example, if you’re searching for things to do when you visit Miami, Airbnb has a separate page dedicated to it with different activities and things to see across Miami.

Such microtargeted advertising efforts have played a crucial role in amplifying brand awareness and driving customer acquisition. By serving personalized ads that highlight nearby hidden gems, cultural experiences, and unique accommodations, the company not only piques interest but also reinforces its brand promise of enabling travelers to truly belong anywhere.

Key takeaways

• Segment with precision: Leverage advanced data analytics to segment audiences into highly specific microsegments based on demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and contextual factors.
• Localize for relevance: Adapt your products, services, user experiences, and marketing campaigns to align with local cultures, customs, and preferences when expanding into new markets.
• Optimize targeting: Precisely target the most relevant and receptive microsegments to optimize advertising spend and maximize the ROI from marketing efforts.

How can you measure brand awareness?

Measuring your brand awareness efforts is essential for understanding the effectiveness of your branding attempts and making data-driven decisions. Here are some technical methods for monitoring and quantifying your brand awareness campaign.

Brand lift studies

You can measure the impact of your advertising campaigns on key brand metrics—such as ad recall, brand awareness, brand image, consideration, and purchase intent—through brand lift studies on selected platforms. For example, you can use Yelp’s brand lift partner solutions to measure the impact of your Yelp Ads. By surveying control and exposed groups, you can gain insights into the incremental lift in brand awareness generated by your campaigns.

Social listening and sentiment analysis

Utilize advanced social listening tools—like Brandwatch, Sprout Social, or Hootsuite Insights—to monitor brand mentions, sentiment, and sharing of voice across social media platforms, blogs, forums, and news sites. These tools provide detailed insights into brand awareness, perception, and sentiment.

Brand tracking surveys

Implement ongoing brand tracking surveys—using platforms like Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey, or Attest—to measure key brand metrics, such as unaided and aided brand awareness, recall, associations, and loyalty over time. By conducting regular brand awareness surveys among your target audience, you can track such changes in brand awareness and identify areas for improvement.

Web analytics

Use web analytics tools like Adobe Analytics to track and analyze your website traffic sources and user behavior. Pay close attention to metrics such as direct traffic, branded search traffic, and referral traffic from brand mentions on other websites. Over time, an increase in these metrics can indicate growing brand awareness and recognition.

Brand equity valuation

Assess your brand’s financial value using brand equity valuation methods like Interbrand or Brand Finance. These methods consider factors like brand awareness, loyalty, and associations to determine your brand’s financial value and strength relative to competitors. An increase in brand equity over time indicates growing awareness.

By leveraging these in-depth, technical methods for measuring your brand awareness strategy, you can gather valuable insights into the effectiveness of your branding efforts and make data-driven decisions to optimize your strategies. Remember to choose the methods that best align with your business goals, potential customers, and industry and to regularly monitor and analyze your brand awareness metrics to identify trends and opportunities for improvement.

Brand awareness: the first step to loyalty

Building brand awareness for enterprise businesses starts with establishing a consistent narrative through all interactions. Companies that invest in such a cohesive brand strategy are more likely to develop a strong and memorable presence in the minds of their target audience and build a loyal customer base that lasts for decades. Measuring your lift in brand awareness will also help you fine tune your strategy and focus on the areas resulting in the type and volume of recognition you’re earning.

For more on other types of metrics you should be monitoring, check out this cheat sheet for tracking analytics in multi-location marketing.