Short overview:
- Brand awareness is how well people recognize your brand and recall it when they need what you offer.
- Brand awareness makes the rest of your marketing cheaper: it lowers doubt, shortens the path to a sale, and can lift overall marketing effectiveness by up to 30%.
- Five brand awareness strategies that work: affiliate marketing with awareness ads, creator partnerships, helpful content, retargeting, and community building.
- Expect early movement in 3–4 weeks and lasting results in months.
What is brand awareness?
Brand awareness is how well people know your brand. It’s a way to measure a brand’s reputation, familiarity, and favorability.
Brand awareness has two layers:
Brand recognition
People see your brand and know it. They recognize your logo, your colors, or your slogan.
Brand recall
People think of your brand when they need something. For example, if you need a ride, you instantly think of Uber.
Recall is harder to win and worth more. That’s why most brand awareness marketing is about moving people from “never heard of you” to recognition.
What is RichAds?
Ad network for telegram ads,
high quality push and popunder ads,
domain redirect, native and display traffic source,
buy push ads at $0.005 (CPC), pop ads at $0.5 (CPM),
domain ads costs start from $1.5 (CPM), native ads — from $0.001 (CPC),
ad network offers large volumes of traffic in more than 200 geos from Tier 3 to Tier 1.
The importance of brand awareness marketing
Brand awareness is closely connected with reputation and has a major impact on revenue. It’s all about the feelings and ideas people associate with your name: will it be trust and quality, or bad service and unreasonable prices?
Brand awareness marketing helps you influence the answer:
- It lowers doubt. People trust what they have seen before. A familiar name feels safer than a stranger, so more people click, sign up, and buy.
- It helps performance campaigns convert. Awareness-focused campaigns can raise overall marketing effectiveness by up to 30% when paired with performance activity. Your social, search, and affiliate offers all do better when people already know you.
- It shortens the path to a sale. Buyers who already know you need fewer touchpoints before they decide.
- It makes launches easier. A new product from a known brand meets less resistance.
- It protects you from price wars. When customers know and like you, they don’t default to the cheapest option on the market.
- It builds long-term value. Strong brands earn repeat customers and referrals over time.
However, brand awareness is harder to measure than performance marketing. You may see more branded searches, but it takes more time to build a direct line to revenue.
Strategies to build brand awareness
The best brand awareness strategy is all about consistency. You show your brand to the right audience, again and again, with the same message. And there are different approaches to this task: you can run social media accounts, sponsor specific events, or launch your affiliate program.
We’ve chosen five brand awareness strategies that have proven their effectiveness in practice.
1. Affiliate marketing (awareness ads)
Affiliate marketing works well for both instant conversions and building brand awareness. Partners can drive sign-ups and deposits, expand reach, build recognition, or do all of these in parallel. You just need the right ad formats for each goal.
Brand awareness ads usually include video and pop formats:
Pop ads: top pick for big reach
Pop ads, or popunders, are essentially your landing pages with an offer. They open in a new browser tab behind the active page the user views.
The main advantages of popunder ads for brand awareness are their discreet approach, full-page visibility, and extensive reach. The ads put your brand in front of a very large audience and send real visitors to your site.
Pop traffic works best when your landing page is fast, simple, and clear about who you are — you have only 2-5 seconds to engage a user. If the page is slow or confusing, the visit is wasted or, worse, causes reputational damage.
Pre-roll video ads: the strongest format for recall
Pre-roll ads are short videos that play before the video a user intends to watch. The viewer is already focused on the player, so attention is high.
Video advertising is a strong pick for brand awareness and reach because the format offers more creative room and lets you explain brand positioning in detail.
You can create an emotional connection with a user so they remember your brand and return to it when they think of related products or services.
Use pop ads to drive traffic to your site and pre-roll ads to build the memory.
2. Creator and influencer partnerships
People trust people, and you can leverage that pattern. Creators and influencers already have their audience’s trust, and they can lend it to you.
How to do it:
- Determine your target audience. You need a creator who fits your niche and works with your target audience. Follower count doesn’t matter so much because a small influencer with the right audience beats a big one with the wrong audience.
- Make ads look natural. Provide real photos and ask for honest reviews. User-generated content (UGC) feels more trustworthy than polished ad shots.
- Give creators a reason to share. Provide your product for free or give a discount.
- Use affiliate links and codes. Tracking is crucial, so you can see which creators bring real results.
- Reuse the best content. You can repurpose the creator’s post into a pre-roll video or use the review on a landing page to make the most of your investment.
3. Content marketing
Content marketing builds awareness by being useful. When your guides, videos, articles, and reviews answer common questions, people find your content more often and remember you.
Gartner research found that buyers who felt a supplier’s information helped them were 2.8 times more likely to make a purchase and 3 times more likely to close a larger deal with less regret. It shows that useful content helps build brand awareness and wins trust.
You can publish:
- Guides and how-tos that solve popular problems.
- Glossaries and explainers that capture search traffic from people at the start of their research.
- Case studies with real numbers.
- Short videos that show the product in use.
- Email and newsletters that keep your brand in front of people between visits.
Remember to back up every claim with a source. Content that makes bold promises without proof can hurt your brand.
You can also use content and brand awareness ads together. Show an ad and send people to your best article that links to your offer page.
What is RichAds?
Ad network for telegram ads,
high quality push and popunder ads,
domain redirect, native and display traffic source,
buy push ads at $0.005 (CPC), pop ads at $0.5 (CPM),
domain ads costs start from $1.5 (CPM), native ads — from $0.001 (CPC),
ad network offers large volumes of traffic in more than 200 geos from Tier 3 to Tier 1.
4. Retargeting
Most people won’t act the first time they see your ads. Retargeting reminds people of your brand and increases the chances of conversion.
It’s crucial to separate users who have already seen an ad or visited your site from the others, because this audience requires a special approach. They may recognize your brand, so now your brand awareness marketing is all about recall.
What you should do:
- Create audience segments. Build lists from people who watched your awareness ads or visited your site.
- Change the message as they move down the funnel. Every stage requires a different message. Consider providing a bonus for new clients, a discount for those who signed up for email, and a free product for loyal customers. One audience segment — one offer.
- Set a frequency cap. Showing the same ad too many times causes ad fatigue. Use AI ad generators to create multiple variants, and cap your ad impressions at 1-3 per user per day.
- Exclude people who have already converted. Set up a tracker to get real-time data and don’t pay to show ads to people who’ve already become your customers.
You can check out our retargeting case study to learn how this approach works and what results you can achieve.
5. Building a community
People want to feel part of something bigger, and you can create a community of like-minded people who will help you increase brand awareness. Your customers become your promoters: they talk about your brand and recommend it to others. And word of mouth is the cheapest brand awareness strategy that exists.
How to build brand awareness through community:
- Pick a platform. Create a Telegram channel, a Discord server, a Facebook group, or a subreddit — go where your audience already spends time.
- Engage members. People need a reason to stay in your community. Provide early access, valuable tips, exclusive deals, behind-the-scenes updates, etc.
- Ask for stories. Share customer wins, case studies, and user-made content — you may also offer a reward for this info. Real stories show real people behind the brand.
- Reply fast. You need a support team or a community manager to keep the chat live.
- Use ads to fill it. At first, you’ll need paid ads to bring new members into your channel. The best way is to show ads on the same platform your community is on. For example, the RichAds ad network offers Telegram ads.
How to measure brand awareness
As we mentioned, measuring awareness isn’t easy. It takes a mix of numbers and requires time to collect metrics. Plus, no single parameter tells the full story — you should assess them in groups:
Reach
These metrics show how many people saw your brand awareness ads:
- Impressions.
- Unique visitors.
- Frequency (how many times the average person saw it).
- Completion rate — how many people watched the ad to the end (video ad metric).
At RichAds, we suggest looking specifically at completion rate and impression volume. They are the most important metrics when building brand awareness.
Attention and action
These brand awareness metrics show whether people cared:
- Click-through rate (CTR).
- Time on site.
- Pages per visit.
- Post-view conversions. Sign-ups or deposits from people who saw your video but did not click. The RichAds ad network tracks post-view video metrics, so you can understand the real effectiveness of your campaign.
- Social engagement. Shares, comments, and tags.
Memory and preference
These metrics show whether awareness grew:
- Branded search volume. More people searching your name is one of the clearest signs of the effectiveness of your brand awareness strategy.
- Direct traffic — the number of people typing your address straight into the browser.
- Share of voice — it shows how much of the conversation in your market is about you compared with competitors.
What is RichAds?
Ad network for telegram ads,
high quality push and popunder ads,
domain redirect, native and display traffic source,
buy push ads at $0.005 (CPC), pop ads at $0.5 (CPM),
domain ads costs start from $1.5 (CPM), native ads — from $0.001 (CPC),
ad network offers large volumes of traffic in more than 200 geos from Tier 3 to Tier 1.
Brand awareness examples: 4 real-life cases
You can build brand awareness with different strategies, and each one has its pros and cons. The easiest way to choose the strategy that fits your case is to review real-world brand awareness examples and assess their results.
1. RichAds
The RichAds ad network shares a brand awareness case study that used pop traffic to increase reach and drive website visits.
- Geos: USA, UK, Germany
- Impressions: 18.4M
- Users reached: 3.2M
- Visits generated: 412K
- CPM: about $1.2
- Click-to-visit rate: 4.9%
- Time on site: up 29%
It’s a good example of how recognition forms. Each person saw the brand about five to six times, so they remember it.
Furthermore, because pop traffic lands on a real landing page, the campaign produced measurable visits and an increase in time on site, not just views.
You can also read about driving Google Discover traffic on RichAds. It’s another effective source for brand awareness campaigns.
What is RichAds?
Ad network for telegram ads,
high quality push and popunder ads,
domain redirect, native and display traffic source,
buy push ads at $0.005 (CPC), pop ads at $0.5 (CPM),
domain ads costs start from $1.5 (CPM), native ads — from $0.001 (CPC),
ad network offers large volumes of traffic in more than 200 geos from Tier 3 to Tier 1.
2. Daniel Wellington
Daniel Wellington grew by sending free watches to carefully chosen Instagram influencers and asking them to post photos. Followers also got discount codes.
It’s a classic brand awareness strategy, which we described as influencer partnerships.
The brand sent products to creators whose audiences matched its own. And seeing the same watch on many different people made the brand look popular.
3. Spotify Wrapped
Spotify Wrapped turns each user’s listening data into a personal story they want to share. It’s a community-building case — users became promoters and grew brand awareness for free.
The numbers are huge. Spotify reported that Wrapped 2025 reached more than 200 million engaged users in its first 24 hours. Overall, it recorded more than 500 million shares.
4. Red Bull
Red Bull doesn’t mostly talk about its drink; it sponsors extreme sports events and athletes and runs its own stunts. The footage from those events spreads far beyond sports fans, so virtually everyone knows Red Bull. The brand became linked with the word “extreme”.
It’s a great example of brand awareness, showing how much feeling around the product matters.
Sure, event sponsorship takes a big budget, but a smaller version works too: you can sponsor a local event, a creator’s challenge, or a community meetup that fits your brand. It also creates a steady supply of content you can use to build brand awareness through ads or content marketing.
What is RichAds?
Ad network for telegram ads,
high quality push and popunder ads,
domain redirect, native and display traffic source,
buy push ads at $0.005 (CPC), pop ads at $0.5 (CPM),
domain ads costs start from $1.5 (CPM), native ads — from $0.001 (CPC),
ad network offers large volumes of traffic in more than 200 geos from Tier 3 to Tier 1.
How to increase brand awareness: a launch plan
To wrap it all up, we built a step-by-step plan to increase brand awareness using RichAds traffic.
Step 1: Prepare
- Set your goal. For example: “Reach 2 million people in three countries and lift branded search by 20%.”
- Determine your main message. Describe who you are and why people should care.
- Build a landing page. It should be fast-loading, clear at a glance, and mobile-first. Use branded colors and GEO-specific references.
- Set up tracking. Connect your tracker so you can see visits and conversions.
- Record your baseline. Check branded searches, direct traffic, and the current traffic level and conversion rates.
Step 2: Make the creative
- If you use popunders, we recommend adding a pre-lander to your campaign. For pre-roll video advertising, you’ll need a 15-second video.
- Show your brand name and logo in the creative, and add a clear call to action.
- Make several versions with different hooks, CTAs, and designs to test. Check out our list of AI video generators that can simplify production.
Step 3: Launch a test
- Register on RichAds and choose your preferred traffic type. The minimum deposit is $150.
- Pick your GEOs (one per campaign). Start with markets where your niche is most popular. The RichAds ad network team shares Top GEOs and Verticals reports regularly, so you can make an informed choice.
- Set the targeting options (device, OS, browser, language, schedule, and more) to match your audience.
- Use Premium sources to drive quality traffic.
Step 4: Optimize
- Look at completion rate, CTR, and CPM by GEO, device, and creative. Stop weak creatives or campaigns.
- Check post-view conversions for pre-rolls to see the full picture.
- Set up Micro Bidding to put the budget behind the best sources.
- Automate optimization with Automated Rules so you can focus on analysis and creativity.
Step 5: Add retargeting
- Contact your manager to launch a retargeting campaign.
- Build segments from your site visitors, depending on their actions. Your RichAds manager will help with all technical details.
- Set targeting and a frequency cap so people don’t get tired of the ad.
Step 6: Scale and measure the growth
- Move more budget into the GEOs and creatives with the best results.
- Compare your baseline with branded search, direct traffic, and return visits.
- Write down what worked, then use it as the base for your next campaign.
Remember that brand awareness is a long game. Your campaigns should run steadily for months to deliver tangible results.
Conclusion
Brand awareness is the must-have foundation for any marketing goal. If people know your brand, you get more clicks and pay less to convert.
The best strategy to use at the start is awareness ads. They put your name in front of real audiences, building recognition.
Your competitors are already fighting for attention, so there’s no time to delay. Launch your brand awareness campaign on RichAds today and leverage its premium traffic, global reach, high-converting ad formats, and expert support to see your brand grow.
What is RichAds?
Ad network for telegram ads,
high quality push and popunder ads,
domain redirect, native and display traffic source,
buy push ads at $0.005 (CPC), pop ads at $0.5 (CPM),
domain ads costs start from $1.5 (CPM), native ads — from $0.001 (CPC),
ad network offers large volumes of traffic in more than 200 geos from Tier 3 to Tier 1.
FAQ
Brand awareness is how well your target audience knows your brand. It’s not the same as ad reach or loyalty. It runs from complete unawareness up to top-of-mind, where you are the first brand someone thinks of.
There are two kinds of awareness:
- Aided (prompted) awareness asks: “Have you heard of X?”
- Unaided (unprompted) awareness asks: “Which brands come to mind in a category?”
The RichAds ad network experts recommend using broad reach, repetition, and a consistent message. You should build a clear brand identity and put your brand in front of people regularly through ads, content marketing, collaborations, or social channels.
Keep one consistent message, and run brand awareness campaigns steadily to drive long-term growth.
Brands with higher awareness are more likely to be considered for purchase. Moreover, several studies show that people prefer brands they trust even if they’re pricier.
Plus, brand awareness makes your performance campaigns cheaper and easier to convert.
The RichAds ad network team names three metric groups:
- Reach: impressions, unique visitors, frequency, completion rate (for video ads).
- Attention: CTR, time on site, pages per visit, post-view conversions, social engagement.
- Preference: branded search volume, direct traffic, share of voice.
You should measure them together. Additionally, you can run surveys and brand lift studies to see the brand awareness growth.
Video has the strongest effect on brand awareness. A FreeWheel and MediaScience study of 436 people found 33% unaided recall after one in-stream ad, compared with 12% after one social ad.
The RichAds ad network also has several cases of successful brand awareness campaigns on popunders.
Brand awareness growth is slow. A realistic plan is to expect early recognition movement within 3-4 weeks of a campaign. However, lasting brand strength takes many months or even years of steady presence.
The RichAds ad network experts also highlight that brand building is a must-have foundation for performance campaigns, so they suggest a split of about 60% brand building and 40% sales activation.
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