In times when the presence of social media is growing faster than ever and penetrating deeper into a user’s world, platforms can quickly fall by the wayside of their fierce competitors. For instance: Instagram reels stood no change in comparison to Tiktok’s addictive new media consumption format – or so it seemed at first. 

Amidst all this, it’s common to get swayed and ignore key data findings which fuel results and performance in paid media. At a given time and for a specific industry, one platform may seem more on trend and therefore, more valuable than other based on personal experience (and common opinion). However, if we factor in the volume of engaged users alone – it can bring to light a different perspective. 

Instagram has remained a popular choice of social media platform for many years, with over 2 billion active users recorded each month. Allowing users to publish a range of different content types, including high-production-value content makes it a powerful and reliable facilitator for brand awareness and growth for businesses.

 

Quick Summary:

• Social media is growing faster than ever and becoming the ultimate tool for raising brand awareness.
• Instagram has proven its worth as a growth channel, with over 2 billion active users/per month.
• Brand awareness strategy is the key to facilitating brand recall and recognition in your target audience.
•  A clear brand identity is at the heart of a sound awareness strategy.
• KPIs are both essential to track the performance and make agile changes to your strategy.
• Meta’s data-rich ad account dashboard is a blessing in disguise for informing your campaigns. 
• Brand awareness over time results in seamless, uninterrupted purchase journeys.
• Connect with us today for a free consultation and find out how we can elevate your social media presence. 

 

What is Brand Awareness?

Brand awareness refers to the extent to which consumers can recall or recognise a brand for its products and qualities under myriad circumstances. This can be witnessed in the digital space when a consumer journeys down a marketing funnel based purely on their knowledge and familiarity with aspects of a brand. 

This is measured through the commercial value driven by a consumer’s perception of the brand and not necessarily the product. This is known as brand equity.

If you see the bitten apple logo, you can quickly recognise the brand it’s representing. This is because Apple has successfully built itself strong brand equity, resulting in easy brand recognition amongst consumers. 

Similarly, if you were asked to name a company that sells phones – Apple is likely to be in the top two companies you name. This is known as brand recall.  

Brand recognition and recall are core objectives of brand awareness marketing.

Why is it Important?

Brand awareness builds trust and credibility in consumers, as well as differentiates ‘who you are’ from your competitors. These are ingredients to increasing your sales, ROIs (Return on Investment) and setting your business on a long-term path to consistent growth. 

 

How to Create a Strong Brand Awareness Strategy?

The first step to developing a sound awareness strategy is to have a robust and clear brand identity. This will serve as a strong foundation for building a strategy that successfully communicates the message to the target audience. Other steps involved in building a brand awareness strategy include:

• Define the target audience.
• Find out the best channels to reach them.
• Develop engaging, brand-aligned content relevant to the platform.

Set KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to track the performance of the brand awareness campaigns. This will allow you to make changes and necessary updates, if necessary. KPIs can include:

• Reach: total number of people exposed to the ad.
• Impressions: total number of times an ad was seen. 
• Engagement: this includes a range of metrics such as views, likes, shares etc.
• Brand lift: the impact on your brand equity. For instance, for Instagram ads that would be ‘ad recall lift’ which measures how many viewers would remember seeing the ad if they were asked about it within the first few days.

How Does This Relate to Instagram?

With Instagram, it is possible to create many different formats and styles of content. It’s a platform with a vast user base and hence, it can accommodate a large variety of content, businesses and influencers – each of them catering to a different database. Through thoughtful campaign structures and tailored messaging – businesses can guide users in a deliberate fashion to absorb their brand identity.

Meta is consistently improving it’s ad-account dashboard and data precision, to guide businesses towards growth and expansion in an informed manner. Access to Meta’s data insights is highly valuable for tailoring your strategy and approach, as you go.

These tools can aid and assist in the management and reporting of your brand awareness campaigns.

Our in-house paid media experts have helped businesses achieve significant success through social media advertising. Connect with us today for a free consultation on how we can support your business and growth objectives.

 

Reporting on a Brand Awareness Strategy

Brand awareness can easily seem like marketing voodoo without clear metrics. Therefore, it’s highly important to nail down the KPIs as early on as possible so it’s clear and easy for you to gain insights from the reports. 

For successful and sound reporting on brand awareness, the metrics you focus on should relate to your campaign objectives. For instance: if the aim of a brand awareness campaign is to widen the reach, then it’s important to include and monitor the reach metrics in your report. 

Although these concepts can sometimes seem simple to understand, yet difficult to implement – brand awareness can be understood by putting yourself in the shoes of the user and doing so again and again over time. 

If you have viewed or engaged with interesting, informative and relevant content – you are much more likely to recall the brand at key consideration points. You are even more likely to convert as a customer if you develop a sense of relatability and connection with the brand.

Engaging with the content from a business you know and trust makes for a seamless purchase journey. This can be achieved over time by consistently studying the data and using it to adjust the campaign. If you can achieve this, a customer is highly likely to avoid ads from all competitors and unknown brands, while staying loyal to your brand. 

To elevate your brand’s reach and recognition through a highly relevant and focused brand awareness strategy, get in touch with our experts today.

FAQs

1. What are brand awareness Instagram ads?

A brand awareness Instagram ad is an advertisement type on the social media platform - Instagram. It is designed to increase the visibility, recognition and recall of a brand amongst the recognised target audience. Brand awareness via Instagram is of great significance in the long-term success of a brand that wants to generate sales from the platform. This will eventually serve in improving the conversion numbers outside of pay-per-conversion model. Brand awareness is integral to growing a brand holistically.

2. What is the difference between reach and brand awareness ads on Instagram?

Reach and brand awareness are different campaign objectives within the Instagram ads. Reach refers to the total number of users that have been exposed to an ad, whereas Brand awareness measure the level of familiarity, recognition or recall of a brand amongst the targeted users. Whilst both have their benefits and utilise efficient awareness ad tactics, they are not the same. It’s important to consider this, when strategizing on brand awareness via social platforms: reach for breadth of ad exposure and increase in number of unique individuals reached is likely to create a favourable impact.