Boost Brand Visibility: Strategies to Outshine Rivals

What Is Brand Visibility?

You know that feeling when a brand or product is 'following you around the internet'? You see it everywhere – in sponsored posts in your social media feeds, banners above your emails, and sidebars beside online articles. That's brand visibility right there.

On a purely technical level, brand visibility means that people see your company name, logo, and products as they go about their daily lives.

A good level of brand visibility means that more people have seen your brand in the real-world. It spans everything from TV commercials and radio ads, to shop signs, product packaging, and social media presence.

Brand visibility is a good thing because the more people know about your brand, the more followers you'll get on social media, more website traffic, and ultimately more sales.

It's not quite the same as your brand’s reach, as this has more to do with your public relations efforts to push your brand as wide as possible. However, brand visibility and reach come hand-in-hand when creating a marketing strategy

Brand Visibility, Awareness, and Perception

If you have a brand that's spotted in all sorts of places, the people who see it might become customers. Not necessarily straight away, but perhaps in the future. It's therefore important to be visible, even if you're not looking to achieve sales instantly.

Now, you might have also heard of the term 'brand awareness'. It's similar to brand visibility, but there are some key differences.

Brand visibility is about being seen, but it doesn't go much further than that. Brand awareness, on the other hand, is about being remembered and understood.

Brand visibility is usually a stepping stone on the way to brand awareness, as every instance of people noticing your brand hopefully leads to them knowing more about the products you sell, and where to find them.

And then there is brand perception. This plays a big role in visibility too, because it's all about your reputation. If people think your brand does or makes good things, they'll be more likely to notice and share updates.

There are other benefits to having a good level of brand visibility, too. For example, it might lead to customers choosing your product over a competitor's simply because they recognize your brand. It's how sportswear giants like Nike and adidas dominate the market. Similarly, customers might trust your products more if they know they've seen your brand name in a few different places.

In this guide, we'll look at a few different tactics you can use to boost brand visibility and exposure.

We'll also explore how you can measure brand visibility. This can be tricky, because you'll be combining data from all sorts of different places. You'll need to look at metrics like social media mentions, search engine rankings, and website traffic. But if you can pull all of these together, you'll get more clues about where you stand with brand visibility.

Key Strategies to Increase Brand Visibility

If you're starting from scratch, you've got a few options to boost your brand visibility.

In fact, sorting out your brand visibility strategy can be a good place to start.

Below, we've listed six elements to guide you on your way. While you certainly don't need to put all of these on your to-do list, tackling just a few will increase your overall brand visibility.

It's important your brand voice is consistent across all channels, whatever route you take. After all, it's a clear, unified message that helps people recognize and remember you more easily. Fail to do this and they might not register your brand at all.

1. Harness the Power of Social Media

A great first step is to improve your social media presence and make sure the platforms are working for you. Post at a consistent rhythm and make sure you're sticking to the most popular content formats for each platform. For example, post short video content to TikTok and Instagram Reels, and longer edits for YouTube and X.

Make sure that you're including visible branding wherever possible, and not just in your profile picture. For example, you could post a picture of your product in its packaging or include company branding on an infographic.

Product placement is often a quick win when it comes to increasing brand visibility.

2. Build Partnerships With Influencers

Partnering with influencers is a great way to expand your reach because you effectively leverage their followers.

Even micro-influencers offer great value if you're just starting out and can't afford to work with the big names. Micro-influencers may have lower followers, but often enjoy high engagement at a lower cost.

Whichever influencer you choose, the nice thing is that influencers tend to have authentic connections with their followers. That means their followers are more likely to pay attention when they see your brand mentioned.

3. Encourage Employee Advocacy

Don’t overlook the power of your own team. Employee advocacy can be a game-changer when your staff shares company content. It can even get more engagement than posts from official brand accounts.

You could also try employee advocacy programs to boost brand visibility. Encouraging your team to share company content can lead to a significant increase in impressions and reach. Everyone wins!

4. Invest in Paid Advertising

Ads can be annoying, right? Yet, they're also effective. Most top brands reserve a chunk of their budgets for advertising on marketing channels. Try running display ads to reach new audiences.

If you do that, your ads are more likely to appear when people are doing everyday tasks, like reading the news or checking their emails.

5. Focus on Shareable Content

Creating shareable content is a big part of brand visibility because media outlets and social media platforms do the hard work for you. Whether it's graphics, videos, galleries, opinions, or blog posts – you can't go wrong when creating something that could go viral.

The goal is to produce something that people love and want to share, which will help your brand spread organically.

6. Tap Into Your Customer Base

Core customers are easier to keep than new ones are to find. They're also likely to advocate for your brand and make it more visible.

So, consider starting a referral program or encouraging user generated content. Happy customers can become your best advertisers, bringing in new leads and letting others know that your brand exists.

Enhancing Brand Visibility Through Clever Content

Creating compelling content is key to boosting your brand’s visibility. This is all about making relatable content. However, you also need to make sure it's optimized with keywords or hashtags before you hit send.

Develop a Strong SEO Strategy

If you have a solid SEO strategy, this will mean that more people see your content through search engines. You'll need to do a bit of keyword research to make sure you're using targeted keywords that align with your brand. These will be the same terms your target audience is typing into search engines.

These keywords should be naturally threaded into your website content, including blog posts. This can help improve your rankings on search engine results pages, driving more organic search traffic to your site.

Supercharge Your Social Media Content

Social media can be optimized, too. The most obvious way to do this is to use relevant hashtags to make your posts more discoverable. Be careful not to overuse them though, as this can look inauthentic and spammy.

You can also reach more social media users by repurposing existing content into different formats for different platforms, or encouraging user-generated content around your brand.

Collaborating with influencers is another great way to expand your reach since it means more people will see or hear your brand name. Their followers might even click on your profile and give you a follow. This approach can be especially effective for lead generation.

Stay on Message

A clear, unified message helps you become a recognizable brand, and that makes it easier for people to recognize and remember you.

Remember to tailor your content for each platform. What works on your website may need tweaking for social media channels.

Keep track of your efforts. Monitor your website traffic, social media engagement, and search engine rankings. This data will help you refine your content strategy over time.

Measuring Brand Visibility Success

To measure brand visibility, you need to track key metrics. Sounds obvious, right? Well, you'd be surprised how many marketing strategies forget to monitor some basic success indicators.

By regularly measuring brand visibility metrics, you’ll get a fuller picture of how many people have spotted your brand. The same metrics will also help you measure brand awareness.

Here are seven to oversee:

1. Basic Engagement

Start by monitoring your brand mentions across social media platforms and other marketing channels. You can do the simple things like monitoring likes, shares, and comments to see how people engage with your content. This will give you a good starting point for assessing the overall success of your brand.

2. Sentiment

Use analytics tools to track the sentiment and tone of all brand mentions. Are they positive, negative, or neutral? This insight helps you adjust your strategies to change the ways in which people think of your brand. You can even run sentiment analysis on your own posts to see how audiences might be interpreting your content.

3. Share of Voice

This is a great metric for comparing your brand’s visibility to competitors. By working out how many mentions there are of your industry, and then how many refer to your brand in particular, you can measure your share of voice. It's a good metric to measure brand visibility, as it tells you where you stand in the conversation.

4. Search Volume

Another way to measure brand visibility is to track the search volume for your brand name. Higher search volume is obviously a good sign of greater visibility because your relevant keywords are getting out there. Google Analytics is the go-to option to measure website traffic from branded searches.

5. Social Listening

Social listening tools like CisionOne are a great secret weapon when it comes to tracking online conversations about your brand. They can tip you off about trends, and also highlight any issues affecting your visibility.

6. Media Coverage

Don't forget to track those important media mentions, too. Thankfully, most of these can be found through online searches, but if you know your brand was recently mentioned on TV, or in a podcast, you'll need to make a special note of it.

7. Brand Recall in Surveys

To catch those untraceable offline moments of brand visibility, you can conduct surveys to see if consumers recognize your brand. To pick up those who've seen your product on shelf in a store, or remember your logo from a bus stop ad, running occasional surveys is important to track overall brand visibility.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid When Boosting Brand Visibility

You might be eager to increase your brand’s visibility, but watch out for these common mistakes that can hold you back.

Ignoring Your Existing Customers

Ignoring your existing customers is a big no-no when building brand awareness. They’re your biggest fans, so keep them engaged and happy.

Pay particular attention to review sites, as this is where people will go to express themselves more formally than on social media.

Neglecting customer feedback can harm your reputation and visibility. If someone drops a bad review, respond to it as soon as you can. Brands sometimes hire agencies to do this work, although that can cause further problems if a customer doesn't believe the brand is taking their issue seriously.

Equally, if you've heard that customers are happy with your service or products, ask them to leave positive reviews.

So don't forget about your existing customers, focus on turning them into powerful voices for your brand. Employee advocacy programs (or user generated content) can be a great way to encourage your customers to recommend your brand to others.

Overlooking Traditional Media

Don’t forget about traditional media. While digital platforms are important, TV, radio, and print can still reach wide audiences. Magazines are especially influential as they become more specialized in order to target a niche audience. A mix of both traditional and digital media can boost your visibility far more effectively than sticking to just one type.

Misusing Hashtags

Avoid using generic hashtags. #marketing or #business won’t cut it if you're sending out a LinkedIn post. Who is searching a #marketing hashtag? Create unique, relevant tags that truly represent your brand and campaign.

Interestingly, most people don't search for hashtags, but are attracted to them when they appear on, for example, X's sidebar. Get a viral hashtag going and your brand visibility will skyrocket.

Aiming for Quantity Over Quality

Talking of skyrockets, producing quality content instead of churning out vast quantities of marketing material isn't exactly rocket science. A lot of low-quality content won’t help your brand shine, and in fact, could negatively harm it.

Focus on creating valuable, engaging posts that your audience will want to share. This approach will lead to lots of people spotting your brand name and increased brand awareness.

Similarly, be careful not to spread yourself too thin across social platforms. Social media burnout won't help anyone. Pick a few sites where your target audience hangs out and master those first.

Going it Alone

Don’t forget about building relationships with influencers and industry leaders. A relationship is just as beneficial for them as it is for you. Their endorsements can significantly boost your visibility and it doesn't always cost a lot to get influencers on your side.

Case Studies and Examples of Successful Brand Visibility Campaigns

Great brand visibility campaigns tend to have simple, but powerful messages that resonate with their target audience. A company doesn't have to spend big bucks to get this right, but it's natural that your market share and visibility is going to increase for every extra dollar you invest in branding.

Sometimes a brand will team up with a celebrity or public figure who has similar values in order to generate impact that goes beyond their product. Nike did this when collaborating with NFL star Colin Kaepernick for a series of ads in 2018.

Below, we've listed a few more of our favorite examples of successful brand visibility campaigns.

Let's take a look and think about why they worked so well.

Apple’s “Think Different” Campaign

Let's go way back to 1997. Very few people had personal computers, almost no one had a cell phone, and Microsoft ruled the tech industry. Apple repositioned its brand as one known for innovation and creativity, having failed to rival Microsoft as an effective business tool. In order to align Apple with visionary thinking, the brand used iconic figures who changed the world in a series of attention-grabbing ads – people like Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, and Martin Luther King. The concept was simple: a photo of the person alongside the slogan “Think different”, and the Apple logo. Yet the message was clear.

Heinz's Hashtag Campaigns

In one rather unexpected partnership back in 2023, Heinz teamed up with the vodka brand Absolut in order to tap into a social media trend revolving around the pasta dish penne alla vodka.

By teaming up with loads of different influencers, and using the hashtag #AbsolutelyHeinz, they soon went viral. In fact, that single campaign significantly increased their social media reach and engagement.

BUXOM Cosmetics and Their Amazon Advertising Campaign

The makeup brand BUXOM Cosmetics achieved impressive results with their Amazon advertising campaign back in 2022. According to those in the know, they had three main goals: increasing sales, boosting ad impressions, and restructuring their ad campaigns.

So, how did they do? They smashed it! The attention-grabbing ads surpassed their impressions goal by 65.8% in the first month of the campaign and maintained a 24% average above their target after that. Impressive stuff.

Frequently Asked Questions

Brand visibility is a big deal in today's crowded marketplace. Before we come to the end of our guide, let's explore effective strategies and metrics for boosting your brand's presence and impact.

How can a company enhance its brand visibility in a competitive market?

Good news, there's lots of ways to do this. But it all starts with putting together a brand visibility strategy that creates a strong online presence. Polish up your website and social media profiles first, then make sure your content is valuable and shareable. After that, put your brand visibility strategy into action – for example, partnering with influencers who align with your brand values to reach new audiences.

What strategies are effective for promoting brand visibility?

Increasing brand visibility can be achieved by using a mix of digital and traditional marketing. Try content marketing, search engine optimization, and paid online ads. Don’t forget about offline methods like sponsorships, events, and print advertising. Remember, consistent messaging is really important.

How does brand visibility impact customer loyalty?

When customers see your brand often, it leads to increased brand awareness, making them more likely to remember and trust you. This familiarity can lead to repeat purchases and recommendations to others. A visible brand also shows stability and reliability, which customers value.

What are the key metrics for measuring brand visibility?

Start by tracking website traffic, social media engagement, search engine rankings, and other brand visibility metrics. Look at brand mention volume and sentiment across platforms. Measure increases in direct website visits and branded search queries. For extra points, throw in some customer surveys about brand awareness and recall.

What role does brand visibility play in the overall marketing strategy?

Brand's visibility is the foundation of your marketing efforts. It helps you stand out from competitors and means your customers are less likely to forget about you.

A visible brand can also boost your other marketing activities, from lead generation to customer retention.

Brand Visibility: Simple Strategies to Outshine Your Competitors