Increase Brand Awareness with These Unforgettable Strategies

March 24, 2025

Brand awareness is crucial for making sure people know who you are and what makes you stand out. It’s how you build trust, show your brand’s personality, and make a real connection with your audience.

Since authenticity and connection will be major content themes in 2025, now’s the time to start focusing on your brand awareness strategy.

Here, we’re sharing some fun, creative ways to get your brand noticed and how to increase brand awareness with influencer marketing and PR—while standing out from the crowd.

What Is Brand Awareness?

Brand awareness is how well consumers know a brand and its products or services. The more they recognize and remember you, the more likely they are to become customers.

This isn’t the same as brand recognition, which is when someone recognizes your brand from its logo, colours, fonts, or mascot. Brand awareness, on the other hand, is about staying on people’s radar—whether it’s through ads, products, or even something unexpected, like a playlist.

Why You Need a Captivating Brand Awareness Strategy

Back when companies were the first of their kind, generating brand awareness was a piece of cake. Putting a simple ad in the local paper was enough to get people talking.

Today, getting the word out about your brand isn’t so black and white. There’s more competition than ever, and your product drop won’t likely generate a waiting list unless you have a solid strategy in place. That’s where a cross-platform brand awareness approach comes in, helping you show up where your audience is and attract them in fresh, creative ways.

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How to Develop a Brand Awareness Strategy That Works

Incorporate these effective strategies next time you want to take your brand awareness up a notch.

Get Real About Your Brand Identity

Not every brand has a crystal-clear identity. If yours doesn’t, now’s the time to define it. Ask yourself questions like:

What’s our brand’s personality like?
How do we want to sound and look across platforms?
What values do we want people to associate us with?
How are we actually showing those values in our marketing?

Think Cross-Platform

Once you understand your brand identity, you can start to think about how to show that to your target audience. Today, taking a cross-platform approach is a no-brainer—but it still pays to know exactly which platforms your audience visits.

For example, if you’re targeting Millennials, do your research. According to numerous studies, their preferred platforms are Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

It’s a pretty inclusive list, but if you’re targeting Boomers, you may leave off LinkedIn and TikTok, concentrating your efforts on Facebook and YouTube.

Why cross-platform? Being present across the different platforms your target audience visits will create multiple touchpoints between you and your customers, making the most of your engagement opportunities.

Take It Offline

Some of the most memorable brand awareness campaigns don’t just live online—they become real-world experiences. There’s a reason why 2024 saw countless brands launch unforgettable merch, such as McDonald’s Nuggies, Arby’s Meat Sweatsuit, and Bentley Motor’s (surprisingly affordable) fragrances.

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Does merch align with your brand? Is there something you often speak about in your content? If so, explore the possibilities to give your audience something memorable they can own.

Get People Talking

In a perfect world, when you create great content or make great products, viewers will naturally share it with others. But what if you don’t have the right audience? What if the algorithm doesn’t favour you? And what if you’re struggling with content creation?

Going viral isn’t an exact science, but it does come down to taking creative risks and making content people actually want to engage with. Skilled content creators get this and know how to create engaging content—that’s one of the reasons they have so many followers.

Some ways to get people talking about (and to) your brand include:

Create polls: Ask interesting questions, and people will answer.
Teach people something: People love surprising facts.
Follow a trend (but make it your own!): For example, what products do you use for an “Everything Shower”? How are you acting “demure” in your day?
Include a call to action: A simple “Like this video if you agree!” can go a long way.

Call in the Experts

Not sure where to start? If building brand awareness feels overwhelming, it’s ok to bring in help. Whether that means hiring a skilled content creator, a PR agency, or an option that offers both, you can leave the creative strategy up to them.

Unforgettable Brand Awareness Campaigns

The better a person connects with your brand, the more likely they will want to support your business. In fact, 84% of people say they’re more likely to buy from a brand they have an emotional connection with.

Authenticity and transparency truly do pay off. Here’s a look at how others are making an impact.

1. Barilla Pasta: Playlists

One of our favourite examples of brand awareness done right is Barilla. Known for their innovative marketing, one of the pasta company’s past brand awareness efforts is their Spotify playlists.

What it is: Barilla offers a range of types of pasta, like spaghetti, penne, and linguine. Each has its own cooking time, which usually, people cooking the pasta will have to set a timer for.

Infusing fun and personality into their brand, Barilla opened up a Spotify account and curated several playlists with songs that measure the length of time it takes to cook each type of pasta.

With playlists like Mixtape Spaghetti, Moody Day Linguine, and Timeless Emotion Fusilli, full of hits such as Hard Knock Life by JAY-Z and Help by The Beatles, it’s no wonder Barilla has amassed 479,772 followers on the platform.

Why we love it: Not only does Barilla’s playlist show off its fun personality, but it showcases all of the other types of pasta it makes, too.

2. Nosferatu (2024): Perfume

While Nosferatu isn’t exactly a brand, the production studio behind it, Focus Features, is. And before the film's debut on December 25th, 2024, they took a sensory approach to their marketing.

What it is: Releasing Nosferatu Eau du Macabre in early November in collaboration with Heretic Parfum, the brand drummed up excitement for the film by channeling its chilling excitement.

It was received with raving reviews (over 350 5-star reviews, to be exact) and is often sold out.

Why we love it: Heretic is known for its creative, clean fragrances, which made it ideal for this partnership. What’s more, they sent the scent out to influencers in the fragrance realm, like @oliviaol’factory (who has a 472k following), to create excitement for this fragrance and, ultimately, the film.

3. Knifewear

As a Canadian company, we love to include local brands in our content as much as possible. Knifewear does an awesome job at brand awareness, taking a cross-platform approach to reach and engage a broad audience.

What it is: When you buy a product from Knifewear, it’ll be sent with a recent edition of their paper zine, The Pigeon. You’ll also be enrolled in their weekly newsletter, which often includes videos from their YouTube channel. They even host in-person events and are present on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.

Why we love it: The marketing team at Knifewear is meeting every customer on their preferred platform—and medium. You can watch a knife demo on their YouTube channel or open their printed (totally punk rock) zine and find a list of music to listen to while you sharpen your knife.

They’re taking an all-encompassing brand awareness strategy that’s authentic to who they are. Plus, the content they put out is actually helpful and engaging.

Using Influencers & PR to Double Down on Your Efforts

Why Self-Promotion Will Only Get You So Far

Say you release a product to bring awareness to your brand. You announce it on your social media and post it in your blog, but as you know, it will only be seen by those who currently follow you, visit your site, or after someone decides to share your post.

How PR Can Help

Public Relations manages the relationship between a company and the public. Used to navigate a crisis, bring awareness to company values, or build brand awareness, this tried and true tool is one of the best you can implement to increase brand awareness and let the public know who you are.

Where Do Influencers Come In?

Influencers can be a part of your overall PR strategy by helping to share your vision, values, or products with their followers. Want to connect more authentically with your target audience? Incorporating influencers into your marketing strategy gives you a direct line of communication with a larger pool of people.

Get Personalized Strategies & Expert PR for Your Brand

If you want to stand out from the crowd, contact MODERNSPEAK. We have the experience, authenticity, and ingenuity you need to make your next campaign a success.

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