Boosting Brand Awareness Through Customer Engagement

Your brand is the public face of your business, and building a positive correlation between your brand and your audience is essential.

Simply having a great product or service isn’t enough—your audience should feel connected to your brand to ensure your continued growth, as customers who feel positively toward a brand tend to repeat business. That’s where customer engagement comes into play.

In this article, we explore how strategic digital engagement with your audience can dramatically increase brand awareness, strengthen customer loyalty, and set a foundation for long-term success.

What is brand awareness?

Brand awareness is the degree to which consumers are familiar with your brand, including its distinctive qualities and features, as well as the products or services you offer.

There are many elements involved in increasing brand awareness. Common tactics include:

1. Targeting content toward specific customer demographics
2. Using SEO to amplify your content to new audiences
3. Using additional digital content, including social media profiles, to find customers
4. Re-engaging past customers with remarketing campaigns
5. Working with brand ambassadors to promote your products or services in their own content
6. Adding value to customers through thoughtful digital content

Customers can’t do business with you if they don’t know who you are, what you do, or how to find you. Fortunately, one of the greatest strengths of the internet is its ability to connect people, so using your digital footprint to lead your audience back to you and increase your brand awareness is a no-brainer.

Now that we’ve established the importance of brand awareness, it’s time to consider how you can improve the current visibility of your brand. These techniques can increase your profits over time, and are crucial to your overall success.

Why Is Brand Awareness Important?

Brand awareness is the cornerstone of any successful marketing strategy, serving as the initial touchpoint in the customer journey. When consumers recognize and recall your brand, it inherently builds a sense of familiarity and trust. This trust is pivotal, as studies show that consumers are more likely to purchase from brands they know and trust, leading to increased customer loyalty over time.

Strong brand awareness also provides a significant competitive advantage; in a crowded marketplace, a recognized brand stands out and captures attention more easily. Furthermore, high brand awareness can significantly reduce customer acquisition costs. As more people become familiar with your brand organically or through positive word-of-mouth, the reliance on expensive advertising campaigns diminishes. This organic growth is often self-sustaining, as satisfied customers who are aware of your brand are more likely to recommend it to others. WP Engine customers, for example, benefit from strong brand visibility because our robust and high-performance hosting for WordPress ensures their websites are always accessible and fast-loading, reinforcing a positive brand experience that supports efforts to increase brand awareness.

Understanding these benefits is crucial, but equally important is knowing how to effectively measure your brand’s presence in the market. We’ll explore how to measure brand awareness in a later section, providing insights into tracking your progress and refining your brand awareness marketing efforts.

Target ­specific audiences

Your current branding efforts may target a wide audience base, and that’s okay. However, you do want to segment your efforts, so as to target particular sections. This will mean you’re still reaching out to your entire audience base, but in more specific ways.

Marketing segmentation is a process that enables you to break down your current consumer base into smaller subgroups. However, you will segment them based on brand interactions, behaviors, and other crucial customer data, as opposed to demographics (such as age, gender, and location). You will need to have a better grasp of customer insights to help you come up with a better customer engagement strategy.

You can do this with the help of tracking software like Google Analytics. This will enable you to see how different groups of your audience interact with your website and marketing campaigns, so you can target each group more individually.

Use search engine optimization (SEO)

Search engines play a major role in driving organic traffic. In other words, a favorable placement on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) can help drive more qualified traffic to your website and increase brand awareness and boost consumer engagement.

This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes into play, as it enables you to achieve higher SERP rankings. You can use it on your website, social media profiles, and more.

To get started, there are two types of SEO you’ll want to consider. These are:

• On-page SEO. This relies on factors such as content quality, keyword research, and HTML.
• Off-page SEO. This is influenced by PageRank, bounce rate, links, and more.

While SEO can take a bit of time to master, especially if this is your first foray into its use, the results should prove beneficial to your overall brand.

Increase your social engagement

Social media is one of the greatest sources of customer engagement, but many companies overlook its use. If you want to build brand awareness, social media marketing is crucial.

By prioritizing social customer engagement, you build a better experience for your current customers, while also improving communication with prospective customers. Fortunately, there are a number of easy ways to do this:

• Incentivize interactions: This includes creating contests that offer gift cards or discounts as prizes, and advertising random drawings for customers on your profile.
• Include no-strings-attached offers: For example, you can share exclusive discount codes with your followers.
• Just ask: You can ask direct questions to your followers in the form of social posts, polls, or questionnaires.

When combined, these actions should improve your social presence and customer engagement. Social media is also a convenient platform for customer feedback. How you conduct customer interaction on social media can help improve customer relationships and customer satisfaction. Lastly, social media is another channel to convert potential customers into engaged customers.

Establish remarketing campaigns

While you probably do all you can to convert visitors on your website, not every lead will take the next step. This is where remarketing campaigns come in.

In short, remarketing campaigns aim to connect with previously-targeted audience members, in an effort to get them to convert. For example, you can place advertisements on websites and blogs that you know your audience visits. These ads can be designed to appeal to those who did not convert on their initial visit, in an effort to draw them back.

With a strong remarketing campaign established, you can then hope to claim all those previously non-converted audience members. This can boost your overall conversion rates.

Work with brand ambassadors and build brand partnerships

Social media influencers—that is, individuals with popular social media profiles that act as brand ambassadors to their large online audiences—are one of the best places to look when it comes to reaching out to your own audience. After all, the right industry influencers will often have the attention of your ideal audience on a fairly large scale.

You’ll first need to find these influencers by looking for the most popular and oft-mentioned individuals, websites, and social profiles in your niche. When you’re ready to open communication, focus on establishing a relationship, rather than simply asking for favors. A quality, longstanding relationship with an individual who wields a lot of digital influence can help you build continued success as the relationship grows.

While an influencer can help you reach your current target audience, a brand partnership can connect you with an entirely new audience segment. You can even market your brand to a previously unexplored market this way.

In short, a partnership is when two brands with similar products or services work together to improve sales and increase awareness on one another’s behalf. It’s best to create these connections with brands that have a slightly different audience, so as to further improve your reach.

Best of all, these partnerships are beneficial to both parties and can be quite easy to set up, once your brand is firmly established. For example, check out how Uber and Spotify worked together on a brand activation that resulted in a huge win for both companies!

Deliver quality content

It’s one thing to create impressive content for your own blog. When it comes to building brand awareness, however, creating high-quality guest content is what will put you on the map. This includes offering thorough. expert advice throughout the piece, as well as answering questions in the comments section of the post.

By guest posting around the web, your brand will not only be known for its quality content but also for its knowledge and willingness to share with the community.

How to Measure Brand Awareness

Tracking brand awareness is essential to understand the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and to identify how to improve brand awareness over time. A practical framework involves a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods.

Quantitative Metrics:

• Search Volume Data: Monitor the number of times users search for your brand name or branded keywords using tools like Google Keyword Planner or SEMrush. An increase in branded search volume often indicates rising awareness.
• Direct Website Traffic: Track direct traffic in Google Analytics. Visitors who type your URL directly into their browser or use a bookmark are likely familiar with your brand. This is a strong indicator of brand recall.
• Social Mentions and Reach: Utilize social listening tools (e.g., Sprout Social, Brandwatch, Mention) to count how often your brand is mentioned across social media platforms. Also, track the reach and impressions of your social media content.
• Share of Voice (SOV): This metric compares your brand’s visibility (e.g., mentions, ad spend, keyword rankings) against your competitors. It helps gauge how much of the conversation in your industry revolves around your brand.

Qualitative Methods:

• Surveys: Conduct brand perception surveys to gauge awareness. Ask questions like, “When you think of [your industry], what brands come to mind?” (unaided recall) or provide a list of brands and ask which ones they recognize (aided recall). Tools like SurveyMonkey or Google Forms can facilitate this.
• Focus Groups: Organize focus groups to gather in-depth qualitative feedback about brand perception and recognition.
• Brand Lift Studies: These studies, often conducted in conjunction with advertising campaigns (e.g., on social media platforms or Google), measure the impact of specific campaigns on brand awareness, recall, and perception among a target audience versus a control group.

To effectively measure and increase brand awareness, start by setting clear benchmarks. Understand your current level of awareness before launching new initiatives. Regularly monitor these metrics and look for trends and correlations between your marketing activities and changes in awareness. For example, did direct traffic increase after a specific PR campaign? Interpreting these results will help you refine your strategies and allocate resources more effectively to continually boost your brand’s visibility.

What is customer engagement?

Now that you’ve established your brand, it’s time to engage with the people who love it! Customer engagement is the strategy you use to engage and communicate with your consumers, often via direct contact and social media campaigns.

Less directly, customer engagement can also include the experiences you provide to your customers. So whether the communication is a reaction, a direct interaction, or an overall response to your brand’s message, it’s all part of the customer engagement experience.

Brand Awareness vs. Brand Engagement: Key Differences

While both brand awareness and brand engagement are critical components of a successful marketing strategy, they represent distinct stages in the customer journey and are measured differently. Understanding these differences is key to knowing how to increase brand awareness and foster meaningful customer relationships.

Brand Awareness focuses on familiarity – the extent to which your target audience recognizes and can recall your brand. It’s about making sure people know your brand exists and what it generally stands for. Think of it as the top of the marketing funnel; the goal is to cast a wide net and make an initial impression. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for brand awareness include website traffic (especially direct and organic), social media reach and impressions, search volume for branded terms, and media mentions.

Brand Engagement, on the other hand, is about the depth and quality of interactions customers have with your brand. It moves beyond simple recognition to active participation and relationship building. This occurs further down the funnel, where interested prospects interact more deeply. KPIs for brand engagement include social media likes, comments, shares, click-through rates on content, time spent on page, newsletter subscriptions, product reviews, and customer retention rates. Essentially, it measures how invested customers are in your brand.

These two concepts support each other. Strong brand awareness creates the initial pool of potential customers who can then become engaged. Conversely, high levels of brand engagement can lead to increased brand awareness through word-of-mouth referrals and user-generated content. For example, a new startup would prioritize brand awareness marketing to simply get its name out there. An established company, however, might focus more on strategies to increase brand engagement to build loyalty among its existing customer base and encourage advocacy. Both are vital, but the emphasis may shift depending on your business goals and market position.

How to increase customer engagement

Brand awareness informs your audience about who you are, but customer engagement is what allows them to gain first-hand experience interacting with you.

Here are three ways you can improve your customer engagement to better connect with your current and potential customers!

Humanize your brand

To the outside world, your brand is just that: an inhuman and unknowable brand that is only looking to make a profit from its customers. This is why one of the greatest ways to increase customer engagement is by humanizing your brand.

You can do this in many ways, but one popular option involves creating a brand personality. It will be an ambassador for your brand, much like Progressive’s Flo or the Pillsbury Doughboy. This individual personifies your brand, which should make it easier for your customer base to connect to your business.

Personalize your customer communications experience

One of the easiest ways to connect with your customers is during the customer service experience. Whether by email, text message, or another digital means of communication, your customers should feel engaged and taken care of throughout the entire process.

This is where creating a personalized customer communications experience is important. Fortunately, there are many ways to do so. One method is to use the information you’ve collected on your customers, such as names and birthdays, as a way to connect with them. For example, you can send each person an email on their birthday that includes a special discount or offer.

You can even add such personalizations to your website, via quizzes and questionnaires. These will help to offer more customized recommendations, which can further improve the overall experience for your customers.

Listen to your audience

As a brand, you want your audience to listen to you. You can achieve this by creating useful content, establishing a strong social media presence, and creating well-crafted digital campaigns. However, you should also consider the fact that your audience wants you to listen to them.

By listening to your audience, you show them that you take their concerns seriously. It also helps you to engage on a more personal level, which will earn your brand respect.

Fortunately, listening is easy. Keep an eye on your social media profiles, and take into account what your followers are saying. Answer their questions and concerns directly, even if just to acknowledge that they’ve been heard or connect them with your customer service team, and implement changes based on what you’re hearing whenever feasible.

How to Measure Customer Engagement

Measuring customer engagement is crucial for understanding the health of your customer relationships and the effectiveness of your strategies to increase brand engagement. It involves tracking how customers interact with your brand across various touchpoints. Here are key KPIs and steps to measure it:Key Customer Engagement KPIs:

• Session Duration & Pages Per Session: Longer sessions and more pages viewed on your website can indicate higher engagement with your content. (Tool: Google Analytics)
• Repeat Visit Rate: The percentage of visitors who return to your site shows ongoing interest and loyalty. (Tool: Google Analytics)
• Net Promoter Score (NPS): Measures customer loyalty and willingness to recommend your brand by asking how likely they are to recommend you on a scale of 0-10. (Tools: Survey platforms like Delighted or AskNicely)
• Social Interactions: Likes, comments, shares, saves, and click-through rates on your social media posts reflect how engaging your content is. (Tools: Native social media analytics, Sprout Social, Hootsuite)
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV): The total predicted revenue a customer will generate throughout their relationship with your brand. Higher CLTV often correlates with strong engagement. (Tools: CRM systems, custom analytics)
• Conversion Rates on Engagement-Driven CTAs: Track sign-ups for newsletters, webinar attendance, downloads of gated content, or community forum participation.
• Customer Feedback & Reviews: The volume and sentiment of reviews and direct feedback provide qualitative insights into engagement. (Tools: Review sites, survey tools, customer support logs)

Steps to Measure and Improve Engagement:

1. Define Your Engagement Goals: What does successful engagement look like for your brand? Be specific (e.g., “increase average session duration by 15%,” “achieve an NPS score of 50+”).
2. Select Relevant KPIs: Choose the metrics that best reflect your engagement goals. Don’t try to track everything; focus on what matters most.
3. Utilize Analytics Tools: Implement and configure tools like Google Analytics, CRM dashboards (e.g., HubSpot, Salesforce), social media analytics, and survey platforms to collect data accurately.
4. Establish Baselines: Understand your current engagement levels to measure progress effectively.
5. Monitor and Analyze Regularly: Track KPIs consistently (daily, weekly, or monthly) and analyze trends. Look for correlations between your engagement activities and KPI changes.
6. Implement Feedback Loops: Actively solicit customer feedback through surveys, polls, and social listening to understand their needs and perceptions better.
7. Adjust Strategies Based on Insights: Use the data to refine your content, communication, and overall customer experience. For instance, if social media comments are low, experiment with more interactive content or question-based posts to foster brand engagement.

Increase brand awareness through customer engagement

When you combine your brand awareness and customer engagement strategies, you can improve brand loyalty and the overall digital experience for your audience. As you might imagine, this is likely to have numerous beneficial effects for your business.

The ultimate goal is to increase brand awareness while building trust with customers to help position your brand above your competitors. Of course, you’ll also want to implement as many of the techniques discussed throughout this post as are practical for your business.

Boost brand awareness with quality performance and support

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