- What are brand awareness objectives & goals? The objectives of brand awareness include increasing recognition and familiarity among the target audience, building customer trust and loyalty, and ultimately boosting sales. These goals help distinguish a brand, encourage word-of-mouth marketing, and enhance marketing campaign effectiveness.
- How to write brand awareness goals in a SMART format? Write brand awareness goals using the SMART criteria: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. For example, “Increase social media followers by 10% in the next quarter” is a clear, measurable, and time-bound goal.
In an increasingly competitive marketing landscape, establishing strong brand awareness is not just an option; it’s a necessity. In fact, building brand awareness often serves as the first step of a long customer journey — leading to future customer relationships and enhanced loyalty. That’s why, for advertisers, marketers, and small business owners, understanding how to boost brand awareness and familiarity is crucial for long-term success.
The first step to achieving this success is, of course, determining your brand awareness goals. Key objectives of brand awareness include increasing brand recall, reach, and visibility. With these goals to guide you, you can start to build creative and effective brand awareness campaigns that engage and attract your target audiences and establish lasting connections.
That’s where this guide comes in.
Here, we’ll explore how to craft and execute a powerful brand awareness strategy that aligns with your business objectives, setting a solid foundation for your marketing efforts.
Understanding Brand Awareness Objectives & Goals
First, advertisers must understand the importance of brand awareness. For many marketers, brand awareness objectives can form the cornerstone of their content marketing strategy. After all, these goals can help introduce your brand to new customers, expand your reach across the web, and start building familiarity among your target audiences.
Consider that well-designed brand awareness strategies have the power to:
- Distinguish your brand in a crowded market. Stand out among competitors and remain top of mind among your customers, laying the groundwork to build recognition, trust, and loyalty.
- Lead to word-of-mouth marketing. This is one of the most valuable and cost-efficient marketing strategies available to you. When customers have a positive association with a brand, they’re more likely to recommend it to others, helping to organically expand its reach and influence.
- Impact other advertising efforts. When consumers are familiar with a brand, they can be more receptive to its messages, resulting in higher campaign engagement rates, improved conversion rates, and enhanced ROI.
Once you’re able to raise awareness, you can start to move customers through the funnel and begin planning how to achieve your performance marketing goals — such as building customer loyalty, lowering your customer acquisition cost, and eventually generating sales.
Setting Clear and Measurable Brand Awareness Objectives and Goals
There’s no one-size-fits-all brand awareness objective. Advertisers must determine the right objectives for their campaigns by taking into account many factors, including their overall business goals, marketing resources, and audience behaviors.
Breaking this down further, you can use these “SMART” guidelines help build brand awareness objectives:
- Specific: Define clear and precise goals that leave little room for interpretation. For example, “Increase brand recall among target audience by 20%.”
- Measurable: Set quantifiable indicators of success that are easy to understand. For instance, “Achieve a 15% increase in website traffic from organic search.” Learn more about how to measure brand awareness.
- Achievable: Ensure the goals are realistic and can be reached within a certain time frame. For example, “Grow social media followers by 10% over the next quarter.”
- Relevant: Align goals with broader business outcomes, such as enriching customer satisfaction, building customer loyalty, and ultimately driving sales growth.
- Time-bound: Set practical deadlines for achieving these goals. For instance, “Increase newsletter sign-ups by 5% within six months.”
Setting clear, achievable, and measurable brand awareness goals not only provides a roadmap for success but also ensures accountability, helping marketing teams stay on track to meet their objectives. By consistently measuring progress towards these goals, advertisers can also optimize their strategies, budgets, and resources along the way to help improve efficiency and optimize results.
Brand Awareness Goals Examples
Now that you have the tools to determine your own brand awareness objectives, consider these common examples of brand awareness goals:
Elevate Brand Recognition and Recall
Brand recognition and recall refers to consumers’ ability to accurately remember and identify your brand among others in the market. Increasing brand recall can help ensure that your brand is top of mind when it’s time for customers to research products or make a purchase decision. That’s why elevating brand recognition is one of the most common goals of brand awareness campaigns.
To help achieve this SMART marketing objective, consider these strategies:
- Develop unique branding. Whether you’re casting a wide net or reaching a specific community with niche marketing, stand out among the crowd by strategically choosing logos, taglines, and colors that are memorable and easily recognizable.
- Communicate your USP. Beyond just visual first impressions, use content advertising to clearly present your unique selling point (USP), distinguishing your products from competitors’ offerings.
- Become a thought leader. Establish your brand as go-to resource for information, insights, and solutions to customer pain points. Use trend marketing strategies, for instance, to join and lead the conversation around breaking news stories in your industry. This way, even if audiences aren’t aware of your products yet, they still trust you to provide the answers and updates they need.
Increase Visibility and Marketing Efforts
Get in front of more potential customers to help grow your online community and scale brand visibility across the web. If this is your brand awareness objective, these tactics can help:
- Build brand affinity and reputation. Use brand awareness campaigns to share positive news, company updates, customer testimonials, and valuable information that helps customers see your brand in a positive light.
- Promote your products. Brand awareness is about building a general knowledge of your business. With the right content, distribution channels, and targeting strategy, you can also get your products in front of the right people at the right time.
- Diversify your marketing mix. Expand your footprint by branching out from the usual advertising distribution platforms, which can become oversaturated. For example, you might consider Google Ads alternatives like social media networks and native advertising platforms.
Increase Consumer Trust and Loyalty
Familiarity can help foster trust. When consumers recognize and remember your brand, they may be more likely to trust and buy from you.
To help build this trust and increase brand awareness, consider these strategies and goals:
- Generate sign-ups, purchases, and leads. Use brand awareness campaigns to build an audience of potential leads by driving people to complete a specific action, such as signing up for a newsletter, downloading an ebook, or buying a product. Remember, there is always room to optimize these objectives and use them to inform future campaigns that move customers down the funnel.
- Drive website traffic. One of the foremost goals of brand awareness campaigns is to increase website traffic. You might be looking to get more eyes on your blog posts, product pages, or company announcements.
- Increase video views and engagement. Native video is one of the most dynamic and effective ad formats on the web. Offering a nearly endless amount of creative possibilities, video can be used to inform, educate, inspire, and develop deeper emotional connections with customers — pulling back the curtain on your brand to help build trust. Cloud-based platform Placetel, for example, worked with Taboola to distribute native video ads on article pages across top publisher sites. These ads generated a whopping 250% increase in impressions, significantly boosting brand awareness.
Developing a Brand Awareness Strategy with Taboola
Achieving your brand awareness goals requires time, patience, and a strategic approach. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by these brand awareness objectives and goals — and you’re still not sure where to start — don’t worry; you’re not in this alone.
Using a content discovery platform such as Taboola can help you set and achieve your brand awareness goals, and continue optimizing campaigns for future success. As a leader in native advertising, Taboola helps place your articles and videos on the websites of the world’s top publishers, reaching people when they’re already engaged and ready to discover something new. Whether you want to promote a new product, drive traffic to your website, or increase lead generation, Taboola gives you the tools to engage new audiences and fill your marketing funnel.
To see how brands have already done it, check out our brand awareness examples and brand awareness case study guide. Use these success stories to inspire your own brand awareness objectives, and start building campaigns that will help you reach, exceed, and continue to refine your marketing goals.