Awareness campaigns for B2B and internal communications: how to plan, design and deliver
As a specialist brand and communication design agency, one of our most in demand services are the creation of Awareness Campaign designs.
What is an Awareness Campaign?
An awareness campaign is a focused effort to educate and inform a specific audience about an issue, idea, service, or behaviour. The idea is to make people aware of something, whether it’s a social issue, a brand, or a message.
Whether it’s encouraging workplace safety, building trust in your brand, or changing habits – these campaigns are designed to drive understanding and action.
At Halo Media, we create campaigns for global brands – from health and safety initiatives in remote mining communities, to internal cultural change in corporate teams.
Why are awareness campaigns important for B2B?
In the B2B world, awareness campaigns play a vital role in:
- Educating employees on safety, mental health, policies or behaviour change.
- Building alignment during mergers, change management, or rebrands.
- Strengthening external perception – especially in sectors like mining or finance where trust matters.
- Creating clarity across multilingual, dispersed or siloed workforces.
A well-crafted campaign doesn’t just deliver information – it connects people through education and engagement.
How to plan B2B Awareness Campaigns
1. Start with a strategy
Successful awareness campaigns begin with a solid strategy. Without this, your efforts can fall flat. So before jumping into design or messaging, you need a clear plan.
Set SMART objectives
Ask: What’s the outcome we want?
- Increase visibility?
- Change behaviour?
- Shift perceptions?
Set SMART goals – (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) – to guide the campaign direction.
Know your target audience inside-out
Understanding your audience is critical. In B2B, your audience could be:
- On-site employees with limited access to digital content.
- Executives with inbox fatigue.
- Global teams working across cultures and languages.
Tailor your content to suit their environment, literacy level and pain points. Make time to really understand their behaviour and what motivates them.
Craft a powerful message
Your message must be clear, concise and compelling. It needs to resonate with your audience and communicate a peer purpose.
Use emotional or action-driven language. For example:
“Work safe. Come home.”
“Let’s talk about mental health.”
Make it relevant to the audience’s role and challenges.
Choose the right channels
Reach your audience where they’re most engaged:
- Digital screens in high traffic areas
- WhatsApp videos
- Toolbox Talks
- Email campaigns
- LinkedIn or Teams posts for knowledge workers
- Posters and flyers
- Internal and external social media
We often create campaigns using multiple touchpoints, so the message sticks.
Choose platforms that align with your target audience’s preferences. For instance, if your audience is a group of young adults, then the most effective way to reach them would be to focus on social media platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. Or if you are doing Health and Safety Campaigns, make sure you have relevant Toolbox Talk.
Time it right
Timing can make or break a campaign. Plan around:
- Safety weeks or awareness days
- End-of-year peak pressure periods
- Campaign fatigue
For example, don’t launch a “Festive Stress” campaign mid-December – the impact will be lost. You might need to launch your campaign at a specific time, considering industry events or trends. So, make sure to align your objectives against a calendar which gives you time to plan your campaign.
2. Bring Awareness Campaigns to life with strong creative
After you’ve developed a solid strategy and understand your audience, it’s time to focus on your campaign’s creative. Here’s how you can infuse creativity into your awareness campaigns:
Tell a story through visuals
Visual storytelling can explain, inspire and connect faster than words alone. Use:
- Infographics to simplify data
- Videos to show emotion
- Illustration or photography for impact
For example, a video that tells the story of a person’s journey to success can be a powerful way to motivate and inspire viewers.
Keep it consistent
Maintain a consistent visual identity across all campaign materials. Why? Because consistency creates recognition and trust, especially in environments with mixed literacy or languages, which leads to more successful awareness campaigns.
Design for real users
Put your audience at the centre of your design. Ensure that your awareness campaign materials are user-friendly and easy to understand. Remember that your audience may have varying literacy levels, or speak different languages, so your design needs to be functional for their needs.
Consider their workspace too – let’s say you need a safety campaign for mine workers and part of this is a TV screen in a communal area, you’ll need to consider:
- Varying literacy levels – keep it clear and simple
- Multi-language environments – use imagery to help bridge the language gap
- Harsh lighting or industrial settings – have enough contrast and clarity that it can be read from a distance and in bright/low light.
Make it interactive
Want people to do something? Engage them through interactive elements which can be educational and fun:
- Quizzes
- Surveys
- WhatsApp reply campaigns
- “Talkback” stations with feedback boxes
Example: For a safety culture campaign, we used a quiz to identify understanding gaps and guide follow-up sessions.
Create emotional connection
Facts don’t always stick. Feelings do. Create emotional messages. Emotional content is more likely to be remembered and acted upon.
Whether it’s pride, fear, empathy or belonging – emotional content helps people remember and act.
Just make sure it aligns with your brand tone – not everything has to be warm and fuzzy. Some campaigns call for urgency or even bold humour.
Step 3: Measure what matters
If you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it. And if you can’t prove impact, it won’t get buy-in again.
It’s not enough to just launch a campaign and hope for the best when creating awareness campaigns. It is important to measure the success of your program and to be prepared to improve it. Here’s how to do it effectively:
Define your KPIs
If you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it. And if you can’t prove impact, it won’t get buy-in again. So make sure you define clear KPIs for your campaign. These could include website traffic, click-through rates, social media engagement, or any other metrics relevant to your objectives. For example, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, you could set a clear KPI to track the number of mentions of your brand or product on social media.
Match your KPI to your objective. For example:
- Impact → change in behaviour, awareness shift, reduced incidents
- Reach → email opens, video views, poster visibility audits
- Engagement → survey responses, quiz completions, click-throughs
Use the right tools
Track the performance of your campaign using analytics tools.
Tools like Google Analytics, Power BI dashboards, social media insights, or even WhatsApp read receipts can help you track performance. For internal campaigns, simple feedback forms or team surveys can be enough.
A/B test your message
Try different headlines, visuals or timings to see what works best. In A/B testing, two (or more) versions of a piece of content (e.g. a web page, ad, or email) are compared against each other to determine which version performs better. Using this method, you can quickly test different elements of your campaigns and find out what works best.
What resonates in London may fall flat in the field. What works for finance execs may miss the mark in operations.
Gather feedback and iterate
Ask your audience: What worked? What didn’t? Would they like more of this type of content? Listen to feedback from your audience. Understand what worked and what didn’t. By the time you’ve gathered feedback on multiple campaigns, you’ll learn their likes and dislikes which will help you to create an effective campaign more quickly.
Then tweak your campaign – don’t let it be a one-and-done.
At Halo, we often create modular campaigns that evolve based on real-time feedback.
Bonus: Examples of awareness campaigns we’ve created
Here are some real-world awareness campaigns we’ve delivered
- Malaria Awareness Campaign for remote mine sites in multiple African countries – visuals, video, and multi-language materials.
- Mental Health Week campaign for a multinational team – animations, posters, daily tips and video interviews.
- Diversity & Inclusion Campaign across six countries – story-led comms in local languages.
- Toolbox Talk Campaigns – ready-to-go kits with presentations, flyers and facilitator guides.
👉 Want to see more examples? Browse our work.
Ready to launch your campaign?
If you’re planning a B2B awareness campaign and want to create something that’s actually seen, remembered and acted upon – we’d love to help.
From strategy to execution, we work with teams around the world to create campaigns that change minds and move people.
