Increasing brand awareness helps differentiate your brand from competitors, makes customers feel good about purchasing from you, and will become more important as AI advances.
So, what are the most effective strategies for increasing brand awareness? In this article, I’ll share eight proven ways to boost brand awareness, peppered with real examples from Ahrefs’ journey from zero to over $100M in annual recurring revenue.
A brand is a business with a distinct identity that consumers can easily distinguish from other businesses.
By carefully crafting brand identities, businesses can trigger certain emotions from their target audience.
Building a brand identity usually starts with a logo, but it often goes much further than that. Visual imagery, typography, colors, pricing, brand story, positioning, products, and services all help to convey what a brand stands for with its target audience.
Whether an audience likes and engages with a brand depends on their preferences. But one thing is certain—they definitely won’t engage with it if they aren’t aware of your brand in the first place.
So, it’s for this reason that increasing brand awareness is important and you need to get your brand in front of as many potential customers as you can.
But even after that, it’s important to ensure your brand stays top-of-mind with your target audience.
This will give you the best chance of converting them into customers further down the line.
So how can you do this?
Marketing is the vehicle brands use to increase awareness. With marketing, you can create a brand people respect and want to buy from, that helps your brand stay top of mind. But to stay top of mind, you’ll need to expose your brand to customers multiple times.
Traditional marketing theory says this can be as many as seven times. But in reality, it might be more than this, as awareness is only the first stage in the hierarchy of effects.
As you can see, it’s a long road to making a purchase decision, and you can lose a potential customer at any point in this journey.
But the more you increase brand awareness using different marketing strategies, the more chance you’ll have to get your audience to like, prefer, and purchase from your brand over others.
Ok, that’s enough theory—let’s look at some of the most effective practical strategies to raise awareness of your brand.
PR is one of the most well-trodden routes for increasing brand awareness. It’s an effective way to increase brand awareness because it:
- Engages an audience through sharing brand values and storytelling
- Generates buzz around your brand
- Helps build and define your brand’s identity
One recent and memorable example of a PR campaign that increased brand awareness was car manufacturer Jaguar’s rebrand—known internally as “Project Roar.”
Jaguar’s cars looked something like this before the rebrand.
But afterwards, Jaguar overhauled its heritage logo and dramatically changed the look of its cars, focusing only on electric vehicles (EVs).
Although this bold rebrand has been divisive, there’s no doubt that it has got people talking about Jaguar again. It’s also forged a new brand identity for Jaguar, vastly increasing brand awareness in the process.
Rawdon Glover, Jaguar’s managing director, said the rebrand was partly about making Jaguar “socially relevant.”
And according to creatives, it’s worked:
“On Monday, almost no one was particularly interested in Jaguar. It’s now Thursday, and millions are waiting for Jaguar to unveil its take on an EV.”
— Manfredi Ricca, global chief strategy officer, Interbrand.
Using Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, we can see that searches for “jaguar rebrand” have grown by 105% since the start of December.
But you don’t always need a colossal budget and massive PR team to execute a great PR campaign, as our Head of PR, Daria Samokish, proved.
Daria managed to get some incredible coverage across multiple channels, all with a $0 budget. She got coverage on TechCrunch and 200+ publications in 18 countries.
Another example of using PR to raise brand awareness came from Rise at Seven, who wrote their brand name on the beach at BrightonSEO.
Via https://x.com/CarrieRosePR/status/1783184125941149941
Another way to raise brand awareness using PR is through brand collaboration. Often, the more unexpected, the better. For example, when Omega and Swatch collaborated to create the MoonSwatch. It caused people to queue outside for hours trying to get one.
If you run an online business, you’ll have heard that SEO and content marketing are two of the most effective digital marketing channels to help grow your business online. But they’re also both great ways to increase brand awareness.
Here’s why.
- Search visibility – Ranking #1 on Google for lots of keywords gives your brand more search visibility in Google’s results
- Trust and credibility – If your brand appears in a lot of search results on Google it can help increase familiarity with your brand.
- Cost-effectiveness – Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to raise brand awareness—meaning you can do more of it. Content marketing generates over three times as many leads as outbound marketing and costs 62% less than other marketing tactics
At Ahrefs, our blog authors regularly create content that helps increase the company’s brand awareness online. To get this same level of traffic using pay-per-click advertising would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
As a result of this strategy, according to Site Explorer, Ahrefs ranks for 48.2k branded keywords from its blog.
But ironically, brand awareness is more likely to be increased by our rankings for non-branded keywords—where people discover our content for the first time—and then become aware of our brand.
Another way Ahrefs increases brand awareness is by creating useful free marketing tools.
For example, we’ve created a number of free SEO tools that naturally spread awareness of our brand and give marketers a taste of Ahrefs.
Here are a few examples of the tools we’ve made.
And they drive a lot of traffic and brand awareness for Ahrefs. The majority of Ahrefs’ top-performing pages are free marketing tools like this.
But these pages also give visitors an option to sign up to our paid tools and become customers of Ahrefs.
By providing high-quality free tools for marketers they want to use, Ahrefs naturally increases awareness about our brand through our core product—marketing tools.
Creating and distributing merchandise is one of the most popular ways to increase brand awareness for growing companies.
Here are a few reasons why.
- Enhances brand recognition – Putting your brand logo on merchandise like t-shirts turns anyone who wears your t-shirts into walking billboards.
- It creates a positive association with your brand – When customers receive merchandise from a brand, they share their experience with others—-raising brand awareness
- Makes the intangible tangible – SaaS businesses like Ahrefs largely operate in the online world. For these types of businesses, merchandise acts as a valuable way to raise brand awareness in the offline world
It sounds easy enough, but often, the devil is in the detail—you’ll have to create something people want that has value and differentiates your brand from the competition.
If you’ve seen Ahrefs at any events, you’ll have noticed we have a lot of merchandise we give away at conferences.
People are often surprised that we give our merchandise away for free, but it’s an important way to raise brand awareness offline. If we’re lucky, they’ll even share a snap on social media.
Like Gus Pelogia did:
Like Sara Fernández did:
Like Aleyda Solis did:
And Michał Suski of SurferSEO wore an Ahrefs T-shirt for his Forbes photo shoot after I gave him one at Brighton SEO (If you are reading this Michał thank you!)
This shows how easily merchandise can spread brand awareness. One of the clever aspects of Ahrefs’ “t-shirt” is that it subtly sells Ahrefs by naturally starting a conversation with whoever sees it.
Another popular item we give away at conferences is our books. We have two books – the SEO Book for Beginners, and our children’s book.
Marketers with children are often delighted to discover we also have a children’s book we give away at conferences.
As far as I’m aware, this is the only SEO children’s book that’s ever been made, which makes it unique.
And our customers love it:
Sponsoring events is one of the preferred ways for businesses of all sizes to increase brand awareness and visibility.
This is because you can:
- Piggyback off the authority of the event – Sponsoring events is one of the fastest ways to increase awareness by associating your brand with an already well-established event as it naturally creates an association between the event and your brand in the attendees’ minds
- Get targeted audience engagement – Events like conferences attract a certain type of audience that might be harder to reach using other methods
Often, through sponsorship, you can pay for your brand logo to be present in key places at an event, e.g., banners, wristbands, lanyards, bags, leaflets, or on the stage. Some events might allow you to have an exhibition stand in a prime location within the event.
Big brands do this at scale by sponsoring a whole location. For example, Crypto.com entered a sponsorship deal with the Staples Center to rename it the Crypto.com arena, which reportedly cost $700 million.
Check out Ahrefs podcast where Tim Soulo talks to Steven Kalifowitz CMO at Crypto.com, about how they went from “less than 50% brand awareness among crypto people to over 80% brand awareness from the general population.”
In the UK, the London Eye is also branded similarly.
What connects both these examples is that they share their website address as their brand, linking the offline and online worlds.
At Ahrefs, we’ve been a headline sponsor of BrightonSEO for many years. One of the perks of being a headline sponsor is that we get our logo front and center of the event.
Even if you Google “Brighton SEO” and head to the images tab, the Ahrefs logo is visible on the top images.
As well as sponsoring several marketing events. We also started running our own events recently.
We started with small meetups at our Singapore office, then ran a small London meetup, and more recently, we hosted our own conference, Ahrefs Evolve, in Singapore.
Running your own events increases awareness of our brand by creating memorable, real-life experiences with your target audience that cannot be achieved through other online marketing channels.
It also can help build a community around your business, generate social media buzz, and provide networking opportunities for attendees.
In short, running your own events or sponsoring existing ones is a great way to create an emotional connection between your brand and attendees.
Posting on social media platforms like LinkedIn, X, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok is one the easiest ways to increase awareness of your brand. Social media does this by facilitating direct communication between customers and brands.
Here’s what I’ve learned from posting content on social media while working at Ahrefs.
- Like and reshare your colleagues’ posts – Sharing and liking your colleagues’ posts about your company is one of the easiest ways to help raise brand awareness
- Consistently post engaging content – Social media isn’t a one-time job—you have to consistently post regularly to increase brand awareness successfully
- Use visual media to capture attention – although it’s possible to grow platforms like LinkedIn using text-only posts, it’s easier to hook people with visual media. Share images and videos, run polls, create carousels
- Be part of the conversation – Add your comments to other people’s posts you find interesting; people will naturally check out your profile and your brand if they like the content
- Use a few hashtags– Using relevant hashtags helps people discover your posts who are interested in the topics. For platforms like LinkedIn, adding 2-3 hashtags seems to work best in my experience
- Tag relevant people in your posts – If you’ve got some quotes from people in your content, make sure you tag them in your post
At Ahrefs, the blog team regularly uses social media to amplify awareness of our blog content. But we also use it to share products and business updates.
Here’s an example of a LinkedIn post I shared to amplify my post on SEO interview questions.
I tagged all the contributors to let them know the post was live and created an image with the contributors to make the post more shareable.
Another way to raise brand awareness on social media if you don’t already have a following is to collaborate with established social media influencers within your niche.
For example, we have previously done sponsored social media posts with Aleyda Solis and she spoke at Ahrefs Evolve, but it was really nice of her to share this spontaneous update.
Pay per click marketing (PPC) is when you pay an advertising platform like Google, Meta, or LinkedIn to run ads. PPC campaigns can be targeted at a specific audience or created to increase brand awareness.
The benefits of using PPC to increase brand awareness are:
- Instant visibility – PPC ads appear at the top of Google’s search results and are prioritized in many other ad platforms
- Precise targeting – Some methods for raising brand awareness are imprecise, PPC is not. Meaning your ads are targeted to an audience that is likely to engage with your content
- Measurable results – Businesses can measure the effectiveness of their PPC campaigns, which can be optimized for increased brand awareness
Paid advertising is useful if you need to raise brand awareness fast. But you need to have something of value to share with your new audience, otherwise, visitors will bounce from the page and click on one of your competitors’ results—and forget your brand.
At Ahrefs, we use paid social media to boost awareness of our blog content. This helps increase brand awareness on platforms that we’re less well-known on, like Instagram.
Here’s a recent example of a fantastic data study my colleague Mateusz Makosiewiz did that is now being promoted on Instagram to increase awareness.
Using this approach, we’re driving brand awareness to targeted people on different social media platforms, where our blog post alone might not reach.
Here’s another example: Louise Lineham created a brilliant video and shared it on LinkedIn. Tim immediately suggested running ads to promote it to boost it (and raise awareness.)
To raise brand awareness on social media, you need to start by sharing something interesting. If it naturally gets attention organically, then you can be fairly sure it will do well as a paid campaign.
Over 70% of marketers consider television advertising an effective medium for reaching a mass audience and raising awareness.
Here’s why.
- Huge reach – TV can reach millions of households around the world. In 2024, 60.7% of Americans watched TV for 3 or 4 hours a day
- Credibility boost – TV ads are generally considered to be one of the most trustworthy forms of advertising. In the UK, 42% said television is where they are likely to find advertising they trust, compared to 5% for social media
- Works with other channels like SEO and social media – Adding your social media handle or website to your ad can result in further traffic to other channels
So, if you’re sitting on a pile of cash, there’s probably no better way to raise awareness of your brand than television advertising.
It doesn’t come cheap, though—a 30-second ad during the Superbowl would cost roughly $5.5 million.
One of my favorite recent examples of TV advertising was from Calm.
In a marketing masterclass, Calm used the 2024 U.S. election to raise brand awareness of its App by running a 30-second ad of silence.
Although the budget was big for the slot, the ad itself was about as minimal as possible.
We saw a similar trend with Kanye West’s superbowl advert earlier in the year. With this ad, he told people to go directly to his website in a $0 video ad shot on his iPhone in his car.
It’s easy to scoff at an ad like this—but it worked. Organic traffic for the website spiked following the ad. Here’s the Ahrefs chart:
On Instagram after the ad, Kanye said he had $19.3m in total sales from the TV ad, which probably outweighed the cost of the ad.
What can smaller businesses learn from this? The biggest lesson is that you don’t have to make your ads as polished and perfect as you might think.
Authenticity is one of the most important factors in today’s marketing—whether you choose to advertise on TV or not.
Your brand needs a coherent story to help people understand what it represents. Without a clear story, increasing brand awareness could become harder than it needs to be.
One of the simplest ways to raise awareness is to share your company’s story publicly.
This is because it:
- Differentiates your brand from the competition
- Shows brand authenticity
- Allows audiences to engage with your brand on a deeper level
At Ahrefs Evolve 2024, Tim Soulo publicly shared Ahrefs’ origin story, which started with our CEO, Dmytro Gerasymenko, contacting Majestic to request access to their API for a project he was working on.
When Dmytro heard the price for access to the API, he was stunned. Rather than paying for the API, he made his own tool.
When it came to choosing a domain for the tool, “links.com” was not available. Creatively, Dmytro used the HTML code for the link element as the domain name, which then became our company name: Ahrefs.
Brand stories like this help increase awareness and help connect with potential customers.
Final thoughts
As you work to increase brand awareness for your business, you’ll start to notice that these methods are interconnected. While you can raise awareness using one method, usually combining multiple approaches gives you the best chance of getting your brand out there.
Also, if you run an online business, don’t underestimate the power of offline ways to increase awareness. They can be just as effective—if not more so—than online strategies.
Got questions? Let me know on LinkedIn.
