Are you looking to improve your next brand awareness campaign?
You've come to the right place.
Brand awareness is the first step of every customer journey. Campaigns built for brand awareness are essential to brand marketing (learn more about why in our article dedicated to brand awareness).
In this article, we have collected best practices and neuroscience-backed strategies to help you improve your brand awareness campaigns before launch.
Whether you’re new to brand awareness or a seasoned brand marketer, these tips will enhance your campaign effectiveness. Let’s jump right in:
Tip #1: Make the Brand the Story of Your Ads
Magnum’s campaign builds its narrative around the brand
Nothing is worse than spending a fortune on an ad campaign only to find out later that your audience can’t recall your brand after exposure. This is the risk you face if your brand takes a secondary position in your ad campaign.
To avoid this, make your brand the main character in every ad by weaving the brand story into the campaign narrative. This approach helps draw attention to the brand, strengthens brand associations, and seamlessly incorporates your branding into every aspect of your ad.
Ultimately, this strategy will positively impact your brand awareness campaign effectiveness.
Tip #2: Draw Attention to Your Brand Logo
Awareness starts with attention.
Ensure your brand stands out in your visuals by applying attention heatmaps, either from predictive AI models like Neurons AI or real-world eye-tracking studies.
Your audience needs to see your brand to remember it. Brand recognition and recall are cornerstones of brand awareness, and neither is possible without exposing your audience to the brand in a way they actually see it.
This brings us to the next tip:
Tip #3: Stay Away from the Corner of Death
The "Corner of Death," or the bottom right corner of your ad, is a place with little to no attention.
Surprisingly, this spot has become almost an industry standard despite its poor attention-drawing ability. Placing your brand here is less than ideal. You might as well not put your brand anywhere on your visual.
Instead of burying your brand here, place your branded elements, including products, logos, and colors, in the center of attention.
Tip #4: Use Brand Colors to Build Brand Recognition
Using brand colors on your visuals can improve brand recognition by up to 80%. This is a significant increase. Just think of McDonald’s red with its golden arches; they are enough to bring the brand to mind.
Since most first impressions of a brand are visual, adding your brand colors to your visuals is an easy and effective strategy. Using brand colors in your brand awareness campaign ads will improve your brand recognition, recall, and overall brand awareness.
Tip #5: Have a 1-Second Strategy
The average social media ad is viewed for only 3.4 seconds. That’s not a lot of room to play with. The first couple of seconds of your ads must be impactful. If the beginning of your ad isn't engaging and fails to draw attention to your brand and product, your audience will quickly scroll away.
This means your budget takes a hit for no good reason. Therefore, the first second of your ad is the most important part. Having a 1-second strategy can help you maximize your ad's effectiveness and achieve the results you’re looking for.
Tip #6: Increase Focus on Your Visuals
Our research shows that optimizing Focus on your visuals can improve the audience’s reported feelings of familiarity toward your brand. Familiarity is the foundation of brand recognition and ultimately brand recall, the two most important aspects of brand awareness.
Improve your focus to make your brand feel more familiar and trustworthy to new audiences.
Tip #7: Use Celebrity Endorsements
Faces capture attention remarkably well, especially the faces of famous and beloved celebrities. Not only do they capture the audience's attention, but they also help build positive associations with your brand.
The use of celebrities in ads is nothing new. To make this strategy more effective, ensure the celebrities you choose are connected to your niche. For example, using Michael Jordan to sell basketball shoes works extremely well due to the obvious connection.
Let's be honest: most of us won’t get the opportunity to work with A-list celebrities like Jordan.
But the next tip shows you the next best thing:
Tip #8: Tap into Influencer Marketing
Influencers can be immensely powerful when targeting specific audiences. Although their reach may be smaller than celebrities, their connection to their audience can be even stronger.
According to the original theory of the two-step flow of communication, mass media rarely influences the opinions of the many directly. Most of us don’t have the time or resources to evaluate every option, so we rely heavily on the opinions of others. Our views about products, politics, or ideas are often shaped by a trusted source, known as an opinion leader. These opinion leaders can be our neighbors, family members, or online influencers.
Using online influencers can be a powerful tool to maximize the impact of your next brand campaign.
Tip #9: Encourage User-Generated Content (UGC)
While celebrity endorsements and influencers can be costly, getting your customers to do your marketing can be free. This requires careful planning. One way to encourage your audience to help is to create social media-worthy experiences. Depending on your niche, these can be social events, Instagrammable food presentations, or unique unboxing experiences.
For example, a unique unboxing experience can add value by creating a personalized moment for your customers. This elevates the perceived value of your product and encourages customers to share the experience. When their mindset is already positive, they are more likely to advocate for your product. While celebrities can be effective advocates, nothing beats the impact of a trusted family member or friend.
Tip #10: Use Cross-Channel Advertising
Although your focus may be on social media, using other platforms can enhance your brand awareness campaign.
Our research with TikTok revealed that priming your audience on other platforms before showing them your ads on TikTok can result in stronger engagement and positive emotions toward your brand.
Every customer interaction with a brand can impact the overall brand image. Therefore, using a cross-channel advertising strategy can significantly enhance the effectiveness of your brand awareness campaigns.
Tip #11: Use an Omnichannel Marketing Strategy
While discussing other channels, it's worth looking at omnichannel marketing.
Cross-channel marketing focuses on priming and exposure, whereas omnichannel marketing spreads the same story across channels, with each channel contributing to the narrative in a slightly different way.
Weaving the brand story into your ads and campaigns helps convey your message and build stronger brand relationships. Omnichannel marketing takes this further, creating unique customer experiences that start in one place and continue in another, spreading across spaces and platforms.
Tip #12: Match the Platform’s Aesthetics
Whether you’re using Instagram, TikTok, or LinkedIn for your brand awareness campaign, your content doesn’t exist in isolation. It’s surrounded by other content with a specific aesthetic.
Why does this matter? Most people don’t enjoy watching ads. If your ad looks too different from the user’s feed and doesn’t match the platform’s aesthetic, your audience is more likely to skip and scroll through your content.
You can combat this by developing content that matches the visual style of your selected platform. This will make your content feel more organic and more desirable for your audience to engage with. Give it a try.
Tip #13: Consider Your Visual Complexity
Social media is noisy. To stand out, you might need to tone down the complexity of your visuals. We use Cognitive Demand to measure visual complexity. Simpler visuals can help you stand out and convey your message to audiences unfamiliar with your brand.
This combination is ideal for building brand awareness. As discussed above, you don’t exist in isolation. Considering the content around you can inform your approach to visual communication.
Tip #14: Think About Ad Size to Minimize Intrusion
While social media may be more uniform in ad sizes and formats, there’s still room for consideration. Some ad formats are more intrusive, some are more eye-catching, and others are better for maintaining engagement and attention.
Choosing the right ad format depends on the type of campaign, the impact you want to achieve, the power of your brand, and your industry.
Dive into our eBook on Display Advertising to understand the subconscious impact of different ad sizes and platforms on your audience.
Tip #15: Test Your Creatives With AI
According to Google, 87% of an ad’s impact is driven by the creative.
Optimizing your visuals for impact can make all the difference. To achieve this, you need to be willing to test your visuals multiple times during the development process.
Testing is often neglected during creative development, but this is a mistake. Testing not only enhances the effectiveness of your visuals, but it can also streamline and speed up your workflows. Visual optimization and testing tools like Neurons AI help creative teams improve performance and maximize the impact of every dollar spent on advertising campaigns.
Summary
Optimizing brand awareness campaigns is crucial for better reach, growth, and influence. Effective strategies make your brand stand out and memorable to your audience.
By focusing on engaging visuals, leveraging endorsements, and using strategic marketing channels, you can enhance brand recognition and recall. Continuous testing and optimization ensure your campaigns are impactful and resonate with your audience, ultimately driving stronger engagement and positive associations with your brand.
Want to take your ad campaigns to the next level?
Get a free demo of Neurons and put your visuals to the test.
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