Building Brand Awareness in New Markets

Why Focusing on Your Brand is an Essential First Step, Even for Mature Brands

When an established, mature brand enters a market where awareness is low, the instinct is often to move quickly into demand generation. You may want to launch campaigns, chase leads, and expect immediate results based on your history in other global regions. But without a foundational level of brand awareness, even the most well-designed demand-gen efforts will likely underperform.

Brand awareness isn’t a vanity metric; it’s the oxygen of your marketing strategy.

For brands with a rich history, reputation, and proven value in one market, it can be surprising to discover that these advantages don’t automatically translate when expanding into new regions or verticals.

In this article, I’ll explore why building brand awareness is the essential baseline step when entering a new market, and how mature companies can approach it effectively and strategically.

Why Brand Awareness Matters More Than You Think

1. Brand Awareness Defines Your Starting Line

Every mature brand has an assumed level of recognition somewhere. Whether it’s your home market, your legacy customer base, your established segments or something else. But in a new market, none of that equity exists. You are effectively starting from scratch.

Without understanding this baseline (and without taking steps to raise your brand profile) your marketing return will appear artificially deflated. Low CTRs, poor conversions, low-quality leads: these aren’t signs of weak marketing, but rather symptoms of a brand awareness gap.

2. Brand Awareness Creates Cognitive Availability

In markets where you’re unknown, buyers don’t even think of you when a need arises.

Effective awareness-building ensures that your brand enters the short list of options that a customer considers when a need arise. Without this mental availability, demand generation becomes a lot harder than it should be.

3. Brand Awareness Reduces the Cost of Acquisition

When customers (and potential customers) recognize your brand, every downstream marketing activity becomes more efficient:

• Lower CPAs

• Stronger engagement across channels

• Increased trust and reduced friction in the buying journey

• Higher conversion rates and so on

Awareness is not a “soft” marketing activity: it is directly tied to financial performance.

How Mature Brands Should Evaluate Their Awareness Baseline

Before creating any campaigns or undertaking any other major marketing spend in a new market, you need a clear understanding of where you stand. In other words, what is your baseline of awareness?

Key methods to uncover this baseline include:

• Quantitative brand surveys

Measure unprompted and prompted recall to determine true baseline recognition.

• Market interviews and qualitative research

Understand how prospects perceive the category and who they associate with it.

• Competitive awareness benchmarking

Your rivals may be far aheah, or they may not be. If you don’t know, you’re already behind. Knowing this gap will guide your strategy.

• Digital presence analysis

Search volume, branded queries, and social listening can help identify whether people are already searching for your brand or even talking about your brand.

Once this baseline is established, you can take the next steps and begin to build.

Five Strategic Ways to Build Brand Awareness in New Markets

1. Anchor Your Story in Local Relevance

A mature brand’s greatest strength is its history, but this can also be its blind spot. What matters in your core market may not resonate elsewhere.

Your awareness strategy should answer: Why should this market care about us?

Localized storytelling, region-specific value propositions, and tailored messaging are all key components.

2. Be Present Where Your Audience Already Lives

Awareness grows fastest when you amplify your visibility in channels where your buyers actively spend time:

• Industry events

• Local partnerships

• Niche digital communities

• Regional media outlets

• Category-specific influencers

You’re not just building awareness, you’re borrowing credibility.

3. Use Compelling and Engaging Content to Establish Thought Leadership

Thought leadership accelerates awareness by positioning your brand as a trusted authority.

This could include:

• Insightful blog content

• Industry research papers

• Webinars tailored to the market

• Guest expert appearances and more

Consistency and compelling messaging matters more than volume. You’re building familiarity through repeated exposure to your brand’s voice and expertise in a way that will resonate with your target audience.

4. Invest in Upper-Funnel Organic and Advertising

Many brands underinvest in top-of-funnel tactics when entering new markets. But upper-funnel awareness drives the performance of your lower-funnel demand gen.

Effective tactics include:

• Targeted display campaigns

• Video marketing

• Outdoor media in specific geographies

• Sponsored content

• Brand storytelling campaigns and more

These efforts plant the seeds that lead-generation campaigns will later harvest.

5. Align Your Internal Teams on the Long Game

One of the biggest barriers to successful awareness-building is internal impatience. Mature companies often expect new markets to behave like existing ones. This is one of the biggest points of failure.

Brand awareness takes time, especially in competitive categories.

Tracking and celebrating early signals (search uplift, branded traffic, share of voice growth, positive sentiment trends) helps teams stay aligned and invested.

Awareness Before Leads: The Right Sequence for Sustainable Growth

Lead generation without awareness is like trying to harvest before planting and nurture. Mature brands need to focus on avoiding the trap of jumping straight to performance marketing without establishing any sort of baseline recognition.

Once awareness is built:

• Buyers understand your value

• Sales cycles shorten

• Lead quality improves

• Marketing ROI becomes clearer and more predictable

Awareness isn’t just the first step—it’s the multiplier that makes every subsequent step more successful.

Don’t Fall into the Trap of Undervaluing Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is often undervalued because its outcomes are not always immediate. But for a mature company entering a less familiar market, it’s the most strategic investment you can make.

You’re not starting from scratch—you’re rebuilding context. And once that context exists, your proven value as a brand can do the rest.

By Mike Belobradic
Brand Strategy and Marketing Leader