How to build awareness for a B2B brand [with examples]

If you're looking to maximize your B2B brand awareness, there are 7 proven tactics that can help you.

I'll take you through which channels to use when trying to boost your awareness and how they can take your brand to new heights.

By the time we're done, you'll have a full view of how to boost your B2B brand's visibility (and attract attention to your products!).

Demystifying what "awareness" means for your B2B brand

Building awareness isn't just about making your brand known; it's about making sure that your target audience repeatedly absorbs your key messages.

It's about communicating what’s unique about your brand—the benefits, the differentiating factors, the mission. But here's the thing...

It's NOT about the channels you use but the impact you create.

You have to ask yourself:

"Where does my ideal audience spend most of their time, and what message do I want them to retain when they think about my brand?"

After asking this question, and identifying the answer you’re looking for, you can begin your journey into brand awareness. Understanding the essence of your brand is the foundation for high-level tactics.

Why awareness alone won't lead to sales

Now, let me debunk the idea that brand awareness alone will magically lead to sales. While it's true that brand awareness is an important part of a comprehensive branding strategy, it's just the tip of the iceberg.

The well-known "Awareness," "Consideration," "Decision" framework highlights this well—the 3 main stages of the B2B buying journey.Source: Qualtrics

Awareness is the first stage, when potential customers become aware they have a problem, and—while looking for solutions—they also become aware of your brand's existence.

It's the starting point, but certainly not the finish line.

Then comes consideration:

At this stage, potential customers start to consider your brand as an option. They're exploring what you have to offer, but they haven't committed to making a purchase just yet.

The final stage is decision:

This is when the actual purchase decisions happen.

It's the culmination of the buying journey (but not the full customer journey!), and it's where you seal the deal.

Awareness alone won't move your prospects to the decision stage. To be effective, awareness campaigns need to be paired with great positioning.

How B2B positioning and product-market fit (PMF) affect brand awareness

How do you fundamentally, inextricably link your brand to the needs and wants of your target audience? How can you use your key messages to position your brand as the ultimate solution to your audience's pains?

Answering these questions represents the strategic effort of making your brand stand out—showcasing what makes it unique and why it's the best choice for your audience. This is what connects awareness to sales.

However, achieving great positioning requires careful planning and execution. And having product-market fit doesn't hurt either.

This is a state where your product aligns perfectly with your target market's needs and how they perceive them.

When you identify a need in the market and build a solution that customers want to buy, that's product-market fit.

Source: Delighted Blog

You could build the most elaborate, unique positioning in the world, and push as much awareness on it as you possibly can, but if the product or service doesn't speak to the customer, it's not going to result in enough sales to make for significant returns. So, think deeply about product and positioning before going all in on awareness.

READ MORE: 9 impactful B2B branding examples & why they work

Where awareness fits in a B2B content strategy

When you understand the role awareness plays in the branding process, you can move on and explore how different channels play unique roles in building brand perception and value in your audience's eyes:

Expert blog posts

Expert blog posts are a powerful tool for B2B brands. You can use them to share your knowledge on a subject, but they also help you build credibility and trust. However, this only works if it's done well.

Generic blog posts just won't cut it.If your blog is spewing out a lot of low-quality content, you risk damaging your brand’s credibility.

We’ll explore how to create expert blog posts that interest your audience and position your brand as an authority later in this article.

Social media

Social media is great to quickly test the effectiveness of key messages that are part of your brand's positioning.

It's so much quicker in helping you understand what resonates with your audience rather than waiting months for a blog post to rank on Google.

However, social media isn't a one-and-done strategy.

It requires consistent effort, some patience (overnight successes are rare), and a whole lot of testing.

Forums and communities

Forums and online communities provide valuable insights into the sentiment around topics related to your company's products.

Analyzing these conversations helps you understand the challenges your potential customers are facing, and if competitors are solving them.

Plus, you can use the voices of community members to address these issues directly in your marketing and speak to your audience.

Paid ads

Paid advertising is a powerful tool to spread messages that you know are working. However, it can be expensive, and not always effective.

You have to adopt a calculated approach to reach a wider audience and test key messages effectively—throwing money at the wall is not enough.

The most powerful way to do advertising is to leverage your existing content (blog posts, product videos, webinars, etc.), especially those that did well organically, and spread them like wildfire across channels.

Only content that people want to engage in will drive down customer acquisition cost (CAC) for your ads—the same rule that applies to organic channels.

Each of these channels can help you elevate your awareness in a unique way. By understanding their individual strengths and integrating them effectively, you can launch effective brand awareness campaigns.

The 7 brand awareness tactics I recommend for your B2B firm

Now, let's get into the heart of the matter by exploring some strategic tactics that will maximize your B2B firm's brand awareness:

1 . Build topic clusters starting from your products and write blog posts on them

Instead of publishing random blog posts, it’s better to consider a more strategic approach.

List your products or services on a Word doc, and then brainstorm 3 to 5 key industry topics or market categories for each one of them.

Let’s imagine you are a company selling manufacturing robots: some key topics for your blog posts might include smart factory, industrial automation, operational excellence, and robotics in manufacturing.

Now that you’ve chosen your high-level category topics (also known as topic clusters) you can take each of these topics and break them down into 5 or 10 further sub-topics using the Google auto suggest feature.

Source: Google Workspace

But don't rush through this process.

Brand awareness is not a quick fix; it's a long-term commitment. This means that your strategies require consistency and patience.

Prioritize quality over quantity.

Write high-quality blog posts you'd want to read yourself on each sub-topic—involving experts,and investing time in creating good content.

Original content helps people associate your brand’s name with expertise, quality, and trust.

This leads to loyalty, with customers coming back to your brand, becoming advocates who recommend your products to others.

When done well, this strategy can lead to extensive brand awareness over a long time period, as well as high-quality content for your website which makes you more trustworthy in the eyes of potential customers.

2 . Use social media as a messaging playground

Brands are constantly fighting for the attention of potential clients.

Without a strong brand presence, you risk being drowned out in the digital noise. Social media helps you quickly test if a key message or benefit resonates with your target audience so you can iterate.

You can use the algorithms to your advantage by publishing snippets of educational content mixed with your B2B brand's story (from the audience's perspective, start with their needs).

Do that for the first 2-3 months and let the platform figure out what your audience engages with the most.

This stage helps you identify what topics are generating the most interest—whether it's related to a particular topic, a strong pain point, or a natural response to a key message that's part of your brand positioning.

Use the most engaging posts to both boost the messages that work best with your audience on your website's sales pages but also increase the number of times those topics / messages appear on your social.

This data-driven approach can help you create a more focused B2B social media strategy, especially on platforms like LinkedIn.

You can even get creative with strategies like using personal profiles to discuss certain topics and then re-posting via the company page.

There are a lot of different formats you can use, such as LinkedIn carousels that can attract high engagement on specific educational topics.Plus, links to blog posts still do pretty well on company pages!

(Just remember to add a caption and not just spam people's feeds)

Remember, social media is a quick way to build brand awareness, but you have to be consistent for it to be effective.

This 3-month burst strategy can help you avoid wasting extra time with ineffective and non-strategic content.

3 . Create ads to boost content - not products

While paid advertising is a powerful tool, using it strategically will give you the most returns. One strategy that B2B brands often overlook is to use existing content that has already proven to work organically—either on social media, your website or on other platforms—and "boost" it via advertising networks like Google Ads to reach a massive scale.

It's one of the only tactics that truly scales your brand awareness to a global audience.

Be prepared for a surge in traffic and the management complexity that comes with it as ads can quickly amplify your brand's reach.

It’s better to focus on paid advertising once you've already done enough organic marketing through blog posts and social media posts.

That's because your brand will have built a base authority that you can then use to make your ads more effective and be seen as trustworthy.

Ads can also serve as a testing ground for key messages to see what actually resonate with a broader audience, similar to social media.

However, a word of caution:

Paid ads without prior content success are not cheap, so be ready for significant budget allocation if you plan to use them.

Remember the "Rule of 7," a concept in marketing that suggests people need to encounter your brand at least 7 times before remembering it.

This is where ads really help, allowing you to reach so-called "high mental availability", where prospects will often randomly think of your brand.

Finally, If you're going straight to sales-focused ads, you will need to spend a lot before optimizing your customer acquisition cost, especially if you're not sure if your product has fully-reached product-market fit or if your positioning resonates. If your B2B company has a long sales cycle, you might want to focus on the lead conversion rate instead.

Source: CleverTap

4 . Obsess over co-branded content partnerships

Doing co-branded content partnerships is a relatively simple yet highly effective tactic to gain brand awareness, collaborating with other brands in mutually beneficial ways.

Your ideal partners are those that operate in a similar industry to yours but aren't either directly or indirectly competing with you.

For example, as a data consulting firm, you might be well-suited to partner with database product companies.

Other brands are eager to collaborate to acquire more visibility and brand awareness themselves.

When you provide high-quality content for them in the form of a guest post, webinar appearance, video, etc — they benefit from your expertise and you benefit from the additional authority they provide.

It's a win-win scenario!

Identify complementary brands within your network and contact them. Go straight to their editor, don't bother sending to corporate emails.

The goal is to start a conversation around co-branding content pieces.

The best way to convince them that your contribution is worth considering is to provide them with the data that your piece is going to bring relevant traffic to them.

Research their blog, see if they have a gap in a particular topic, check whether it has enough search volume on UberSuggest, and if it does, write the first 2 sections.

Then send the early draft to them with the data in hand and wait.

That's how you provide value upfront.

By doing so, you can use their domain authority (DA) to your advantage, which is a score that predicts how likely a website is to rank in search engine result pages.

The more links you gain from reputable websites, the higher your DA.

When working with your partner, you should target engaging topics and produce content that rivals the best of your own blog.

Do NOT cheap out on it.

Insert a few strategic links back to relevant pages on your website, but ask for permission when you do.

Partners don't like it when you're just trying to sell yourself.

The outcome?

Both your partner's blog post and your own page will rank high on Google, creating a double win for your brand as traffic will flow from their article to your website.

This strategy allows you to reach new audiences and levels of visibility that you couldn't achieve through your website alone.

You can use keyword research tools like Ahrefs or SEMrushto identify topics with high search volume and low competition, giving your co-branded content an edge.

Source: SEMrush SEO Toolkit

5 . Do email outreach that's truly personalized

Email outreach is a tried-and-true method for building relationships AND brand awareness, albeit at a smaller scale than other tactics.

But it requires a personal touch to be effective.

Many people are skeptical of email outreach because they perceive it as an overused strategy that only creates spam.

However, it doesn't have to be that way.

Your strategy can be different and genuinely valuable.

Here's how to do it:

Start by creating a value-added experience, such as custom audits that take 20 minutes to create for each prospect.

The key is to offer something personalized without giving away your service, teasing your possible customers to pique their curiosity and have a tangible taste of the value.

Create about 10-20 of these personalized experiences at once, and send them out in a sequence of 3-4 personalized follow-up emails.

Tools like HubSpot can help you track open rates and engagement thanks to automated sequences.

Keep the emails short, typically 2 / 3 sentences, and include a link to the custom, personalized experience.
Source: Hubspot Knowledge Base

If done right, email outreach can work wonders in places that you wouldn't be able to reach through other channels.

If a business professional doesn't use social media or read blogs, email can be a direct line to them.

6 . Take a stance the world just can't ignore

This tactic is not for the faint of heart.

But it can make your brand stand out in the crowd.

Taking a bold stance that the world can't ignore is risky, but if executed well, it can generate significant word-of-mouth for your brand.

The key to this tactic is to take a surprising or even *shocking* stance that aligns with your brand's mission and creates a strong, memorable impression. You could say something a bit spicy like:

"Production line robots that can be monitored without hiring 100s of thousands of $ worth of talent? We're the only company doing it right."

Staking a claim like this can attract attention, but it's also a high-risk strategy. You need to know your competitors very well, and be aware of any ethical, legal, and cultural / societal implications.

When shock value is done right, it’s memorable.

Taking a stance is a powerful way to set yourself apart and establish your brand as different. Word-of-mouth (WOM) naturally follows, as people talk about the brand that isn't afraid to be unique and take a stand that ultimately delivers immense value.

7 . Use customers' voice contextually

While general testimonials can be useful, there's an even more effective way to leverage the voice of your customers (also referred to as VoC).

By using testimonials that are contextual to the benefit the person received from using your products or services, you are rooting it in value.

Instead of a generic testimonial stating that working with your company was great, aim for more specific and impactful feedback.

Ask questions like:

"What made you sign up to our product?", or "How did feature X or product Y help you achieve your desired outcome?”

Use the responses when the relevant feature appears in your marketing materials, whether it's on your website, in ads, or social media.

This kind of contextual testimonial ties a person's success directly to your product, providing a powerful endorsement to the real value you deliver.

It's one of the best forms of brand awareness because it links your brand with tangible successes reached by your customers thanks to you.

Great positioning + awareness = B2B brand growth

Great positioning—together with effective awareness strategies—is the key to brand growth. It's the combination of telling the right story and making sure that story reaches the right people.

When your positioning strategy aligns with your go-to-market approach, your brand can achieve true growth.

Both are part of your larger B2B brand marketing strategy.

"Awareness" is just the tip of the branding iceberg

In closing, I want to stress that "awareness" is just the tip of the branding iceberg. While it's a crucial activity to carry out for any brand, there's so much more to explore and master on your journey to brand success.

The tactics I've shared today are not just theoretical concepts—they're practical tools you can use to build a strong and memorable brand.

If you invest in a deep understanding of your target audience, consistent brand messaging, and a quality before quantity mentality to publishing content, you're going to do well. Good luck on your journey!