How to Increase Brand Visibility

How to Increase Your Brand Visibility

If your brand isn’t the first thing a customer thinks of when their current solution fails, you are invisible. 

This invisibility has a literal cost.

Gartner research indicates that 83% of a B2B buyer’s journey happens before they ever engage with a provider. If you aren’t visible during that 83%, you don’t exist. 

You aren’t just losing “awareness”; you are losing market share to competitors who understand the science of attention.

What is Brand Visibility?

Brand visibility is the frequency and ease with which a target audience encounters and recognises a brand across multiple touchpoints. 

It represents the brand’s physical and mental presence in the market, dictating how likely a consumer is to recall the brand during a purchasing decision.

The three core elements of brand visibility are:

• Mental Availability: The probability that a buyer will think of your brand in a buying situation.
• Physical (or Digital) Availability: How easy it is for a buyer to find and purchase your products or services.
• Distinctive Assets: The unique sensory cues (colours, logos, fonts, sounds) that trigger brand recall without needing to see the brand name.

The 2026 Visibility-SEO Feedback Loop

By 2026, the lines between “Branding” and “SEO” will have blurred into a single entity. 

Google’s algorithms now weigh Brand Search Volume as a massive authority signal. When people search for “Inkbot Design logo strategy” rather than just “logo strategy,” it signals to search engines that this brand is a topical authority. 

This creates a virtuous cycle: higher visibility drives more branded searches, which in turn improve organic rankings for non-branded terms.

You cannot ignore brand positioning if you want to rank for technical keywords. The two are inextricably linked.

Beyond the SERP: Securing Visibility in AI-Generated Answers

By 2026, the traditional “top 10” list of blue links will no longer be the sole judge of visibility. We have entered the Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) phase. 

Your brand’s presence is measured by its Citations within AI Overviews and conversational responses from models like Gemini, GPT-4o, and Claude.

To be visible here, your content must move from “answering keywords” to “defining entities.” AI systems do not just look for keywords; they look for Source Credibility and Relationship Mapping.

How to get your brand cited by AI:

1. Entity-First Content: Instead of writing “How to Grow your Brand,” write “The [Brand Name] Framework for Brand Growth.” This forces the AI to recognise your methodology as a distinct entity.
2. Summary-First Structure: Every page should lead with a 2-3 sentence “Executive Summary” that uses clear, declarative language. AI models are trained to look for high-density information blocks for their summaries.
3. Third-Party Validation: AI models cross-reference information. If Nielsen or Gartner mentions your brand alongside a specific topic, AI is 4x more likely to recommend you.

Scenario: A user asks Gemini, “Which UK agency is best for B2B branding?” The AI doesn’t just look at who is #1 on Google; it also considers mentions in industry journals, LinkedIn authority signals, and structured data to identify who is consistently categorised as a “B2B Branding Expert.”

The 95:5 Rule: Staying Visible for the ‘Future Buyer’

A mistake is focusing 100% of your visibility budget on people ready to buy now. Research by Professor John Dawes and the LinkedIn B2B Institute shows that at any given time, only 5% of your target market is “in-market.” The other 95% are “out-of-market” and won’t buy for months or years.

If your visibility strategy only triggers when someone searches “Buy [Product],” you are ignoring 95% of your potential revenue. Visibility in 2026 is about Mental Availability—ensuring that when that 95% does enter the market, your brand is the first one they remember.

Winning through Category Entry Points (CEPs)

CEPs are the cues that buyers use to access their memory when a need arises. To be visible, you must link your brand to as many CEPs as possible.

The Science of Mental Availability

Most marketing “gurus” talk about differentiation. They tell you to be “different.” They are wrong. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has proven that brands compete primarily on distinctiveness, not differentiation.

Visibility isn’t about explaining why you are better; it’s about being remembered. This requires the heavy lifting of building neural pathways in your audience’s brains.

Why Differentiation is a Myth

I once audited a client who spent £50,000 on a “brand differentiation strategy.” They wanted to be the “organic, sustainable, boutique” version of a commodity product. The problem? Their customers didn’t care about being organic; they cared about the product working. By trying to be “different,” they became confusing.

In 2026, visibility comes from being easy to categorise. If I have to think for more than two seconds to understand what you do, you’ve lost. You don’t need to be “unique” in a way that breaks the category; you need to be the most apparent choice within it.

The Power of Distinctive Brand Assets (DBAs)

Your logo is a shortcut. It is a mental “file icon” for all the experiences a customer has had with your business. If you keep changing your “vibe,” you are deleting the file.

The 2026 DBA Audit: Are You Recognisable or Just Pretty?

To increase visibility, you must move beyond “good design” to “distinctive assets.” Use this checklist to audit your brand’s current strength. A “True Asset” must be Unique (used only by you) and Fame-worthy (most of your audience links it to you).

• Visual Palette: Can someone recognise your ad if you remove the logo? (The “Blur Test”).
• Typography: Do you own a specific font style, or are you using “Standard Sans-Serif #4”?
• Tone of Voice: Does your AI-generated content sound like your brand, or does it sound like a generic LLM?
• Audio Branding: (Crucial for 2026 Voice Search) Does your brand have a specific “sound” or “jingle” used in video/podcasts?
• The ‘Nudge’ Asset: Do you have a recurring character, shape, or visual metaphor (e.g., the Mailchimp Freddie) that triggers instant recall?

Share of Search: The New Metric for 2026

Forget “Impressions.” Impressions are a metric that platforms sell to take your money. They don’t track how many people actually saw or processed your brand.

Instead, look at Share of Search (SoS). This is the volume of searches for your brand divided by the total volume of searches for all brands in your category. Les Binet’s research has shown that Share of Search is a leading indicator of market share. If your SoS is growing, your sales will follow in 6-12 months.

The Share of Search (SoS) Workflow

By 2026, Share of Search has replaced “Share of Voice” as the most accurate predictor of market share. Unlike social media likes or impressions, search volume is a “truth serum”—it represents active interest.

The 2026 SoS Calculation Method:

1. Define the Category: List your brand and your top 5-10 direct competitors.
2. Pull Branded Volumes: Use tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, or Google Trends to get the 12-month rolling average for each brand name.
3. Filter Out Noise: Ensure you are excluding generic terms. (e.g., If your brand is called “Apple,” you must filter for “Apple technology” vs “apple fruit”).
4. The Formula:

Why this matters for your 2027 planning: If your SoS is 15% but your actual Market Share is only 10%, you are an “Under-Performer with Potential.” This means your marketing is working, but your sales process or Physical Availability is failing. Conversely, if your Market Share is 20% but your SoS is only 5%, your brand is dying—you are living off old momentum and will see a sales crash within 12 months.

The Death of Performance Marketing as a Standalone

For the last decade, SMBs have been addicted to the “Performance Marketing” drug. You put £1 into Meta or Google Ads, and you get £2 out. But by late 2024 and through 2025, the cost-per-acquisition (CPA) on these platforms skyrocketed due to privacy changes and AI-driven bidding wars.

The shift in 2026: Leading UK agencies have moved back to the “60/40 Rule.” This principle suggests that 60% of your budget should go toward long-term brand building (visibility) and 40% toward short-term activation (sales).

Real-World Example: Airbnb

In a bold move, Airbnb slashed its performance marketing spend and pivoted to brand-building campaigns. Many analysts predicted disaster. Instead, Airbnb saw its direct traffic increase and its profits hit record highs. They realised that if people are already looking for “Airbnb,” they don’t need to pay Google for the click. That is the ultimate goal of visibility: Disintermediating the platforms.

Technical Visibility: Beyond the Visuals

Visibility also has a technical layer. If your site takes 5 seconds to load on a mobile device in a London Tube station, you are invisible. You’ve been filtered out by the user’s impatience and the search engine’s requirements.

Technical Visibility: Building the Brand Knowledge Graph

In 2026, visibility isn’t just “seen by humans”—it’s “understood by machines.” Search engines use a Knowledge Graph to understand how brands, people, and topics relate to one another. If you don’t explicitly define these relationships, the AI has to guess.

1. Implementation of Organization & Person Schema You must use JSON-LD Schema to tell Google exactly who you are. This is no longer optional. You should map your brand to its founders, its products, and its primary locations.

2. The ‘SameAs’ Property The sameAs property in your Schema is the most powerful “visibility hack” for 2026. It tells Google: “This brand mentioned here is the same entity as this Wikipedia page, this Crunchbase profile, and this LinkedIn company page.” This consolidates your authority into a single, unshakeable entity.

3. Digital Footprint Cleanliness AI systems are sensitive to conflicting data. Suppose your address on Google Business Profile differs from the one on your website; your “Trust Score” will drop. Technical visibility requires 100% data consistency across the web.

The “Consultant’s Reality Check”

I’ve seen it a thousand times. A client comes to me complaining that their “SEO isn’t working.” I look at their data, and they are ranking #1 for a dozen keywords, but their CTR is abysmal. Why? Because when users see their brand name in the search results, they feel nothing. No recognition. No trust. No “Oh, I’ve heard of them.”

SEO brings them to the water, but brand visibility makes them drink.

If you haven’t invested in a brand differentiation strategy, you are just a blue link in a sea of blue links. You are a commodity. And commodities are always sold on price. If you want to sell on value, you must be visible before the search even begins.

Sector-Specific Visibility Strategies

The way you increase visibility depends heavily on your sector. A real estate firm in Manchester doesn’t need the same visibility strategy as a fashion brand in Soho.

Real Estate Branding

In property, visibility is about local dominance and trust. You need to be seen as a fixture of the community. Real estate branding relies heavily on physical signage combined with hyper-local digital targeting.

Retail and Fashion

Here, visibility is purely aesthetic and aspirational. If your retail branding or fashion branding doesn’t evoke an emotional response within 500 milliseconds, you are invisible. You aren’t selling clothes; you are selling a visual identity that the customer wants to adopt.

Non-Profit Sector

Visibility for charities isn’t about “sales”; it’s about “salience.” You need to be the first brand that comes to mind when a donor feels a specific “pity” or “empowerment” trigger. Branding for non-profits requires a delicate balance between visibility and avoiding the appearance of wastefulness with donations.

B2B Visibility: Influencing the ‘Invisible’ Buying Committee

In 2026, the average B2B purchase involves 8.2 stakeholders (up from 5.4 in 2015). Most brands only focus on the “Decision Maker” (the CEO or CMO). But the “Gatekeepers” (IT, Procurement, Legal) are the ones who usually kill the deal.

Visibility in B2B means being present for all eight people.

• The User: Wants to see “how-to” videos and ease-of-use case studies.
• The IT Director wants to see ISO 27001 certifications and integration documentation.
• The CFO: Wants to see ROI calculators and “total cost of ownership” (TCO) comparisons.

The “In-Feed” Strategy. Since 75% of B2B buyers now prefer a “rep-free” experience, your visibility must happen “in-feed” on platforms like LinkedIn and niche industry forums. You aren’t just selling a product; you are selling the “Confidence” that your brand is the safe choice. If the IT director hasn’t heard of you, you are a “risk.” If they’ve seen your technical whitepapers in their feed for six months, you are a “partner.”

The Verdict: Stop Shouting, Start Encoding

Increasing brand visibility isn’t about getting “more” impressions. It’s about creating the correct impressions that encode your distinctive assets in your target audience’s minds.

In 2026, the brands that win are those that understand the intersection of human psychology and technical SEO. They use a blue ocean strategy to find uncontested market space and then use exhaustive visibility tactics to build a moat around it.

If your current strategy is just “posting more content,” you are on a treadmill to nowhere. You need a cohesive brand identity that works as hard as your sales team.

Ready to stop being invisible?

Explore our services or get a quote to see how we can fix your brand’s visibility gap.

Frequently Asked Questions