Coca-Cola is history’s greatest example of brand awareness. Whether or not you even like the stuff, chances are you know exactly how Coca-Cola’s logo looks, how it’s glass bottle is shaped, and that it’s the preferred drink of Santa Claus. So it makes sense that marketers are encouraged to study Coca-Cola, and to use that “iconic, timeless logo” as inspiration when creating their own designs. Their brand strategy has stood the test of time.

All that said, Coca-Cola might not be the best branding role model. For starters, the company has been around for 125 years. And it’s worth $190 billion. And according to LinkedIn, it has more than 63,000 employees.

Those are three things that you and your online store won’t have. At least not this quarter.

So let’s take a deep dive into how to brand, ecommerce store style.

• First, we’ll hit on a few key things to keep in mind as you build a brand strategy.
• Next, we’ll look at how to make noise once you decide what branding means to your business.
• Then we’ll wrap up by going over some actionable brand awareness tips that ecommerce stores like yours can take to increase brand advocacy.

The whole time, we’ll study examples of how businesses — businesses like yours, not business like like Coca-Cola — have made brand awareness come to life.

What Is Brand Awareness?

Brand awareness is the process by which businesses of all sizes cultivate recognition their products and services. Companies cultivate brand awareness through messaging, design, social media, ads, and more.

Brand awareness is a hot buzzword and has inspired countless books, including Sticky Branding, Brand Thinking, The Brand Gap, and Archetypes in Branding, among many others. And indeed executing successful branding and brand awareness strategies is complex enough to justify multiple books.

But if we’re talking narrowly about What is brand awareness, let’s not overthink it: It’s awareness of a brand. That’s it. Knowing that a brand exists, and hopefully having some idea about what that brand does.

Now, that doesn’t mean brand awareness is easy. As far as buzzword-y definitions, though, there are trickier ones.

The Difference Between Brand Awareness And Brand Identity

Alright, so brand awareness is pretty simple – awareness of a brand. What, then, is brand identity?

Brand identity is what people think about when they think about a brand. So if brand awareness is making noise about a brand, then brand identity is the content of that noise.

A strong brand identity stirs up feelings and emotions about a brand, leading to an association between the brand and certain characteristics.

Let’s look at a couple of examples.

This is an Apple ad from years ago. Now, clearly we can’t all have the marketing firepower of Apple! But there are some very basic brand identity lessons here. Stuff that we don’t need a gajillion-dollar marketing budget to implement.

Apple was trying to cultivate a brand identity that was cool. It’s no coincidence that “Mac Guy” on the right is younger, has longer hair, and is dressed casually, his hand comfortably resting inside his pockets. His older counterpart, meanwhile, is wearing a stuffy suit, is interrupting, and is generally all things not cool.

How Do You Measure Brand Awareness And Brand Identity?

Without comprehensive market research surveys – and ain’t nobody got time for comprehensive market research surveys – it can be tricky to measure the effectiveness of our brand awareness and brand identity activities. After all, you can’t open up Google Analytics and check a Brand Awareness report.

There are, however, perfectly measurable things you can look at to gauge how your branding activities are going.

Page views and impressions, for example, could be the direct result of a brand strategy, especially if those views and impressions are coming from channels being used for branding.

You can also use tools like Mention and TweetDeck to measure how much noise your brand is making on social. Google Alerts, meanwhile, lets you measure chatter about your brand on the web.

Not every page impression, social share, or blog mention can be attributed to brand awareness. But all of these numbers should move north as your branding efforts gain strength.

You can also pay especially close attention to which branding messages are moving the needle. If certain messages are resonating better than others, you can let that shape your marketing.

For instance, let’s say you want to be known as a fun business. But lo and behold, your Facebook ads about product quality are converting better than the fun ads. You could swim upstream and double down on the fun messaging – or you could lean into product quality as a selling point because, hey, it seems to work.

Another thing to keep in mind is that conversions – sales – can play a huge role in brand awareness and brand identity activities. For one thing, conversions – like traffic and mentions – will increase with a well-executed brand strategy. That’s great, of course. But a sale doesn’t mark the end point of your brand’s popularity. It’s more like the midpoint. Because a sale opens up new opportunities to further increase brand awareness.

A sale gives you a chance to send a followup email with discounts codes, or to inform the customer about your referral program, or get them to sign up for your newsletter. In short, a sale solidifies someone’s place inside your brand ecosystem. And the more people you can get firmly planted in that ecosystem, the better your chances to increase your brand awareness.

So brand awareness is measurable, and sales are important. Got it. But how do we do it? Here are some steps that even the non-Coca-Colas of the world can take.

6 Tips For Building Strong Brand Awareness

1. Identify What Makes You Different

Brand awareness is awareness of something. What’s your something?

The first step of building a brand identity is identifying a trait (or traits) that sets you apart from your competition — your USP. So study your competition. How do they define their brands? And just as importantly, how don’t they define their brands? Look for characteristics that you can call your own.

Negative Underwear does a brilliant job of this. Just look at their “About” page, which says, “When we realized that most lingerie companies were run by men (not exactly experts in bras, right?), we decided things needed to change.”

So they identified an issue with the market — that women’s underwear was being dominated by men — and made the solution to that issue part of their brand.