How to Build Brand Awareness With Digital Marketing

Back in March 2022, my cousin Hina called me at almost midnight, crying a little, asking why her candle business she called it “Wick & Glow” — had made exactly zero sales in six weeks. She’d spent nearly Rs. 15,000 on inventory and packaging, had 340 Instagram followers, and every single order had come from someone she personally knew.

I remember sitting there thinking, this isn’t a product problem. Her candles smelled amazing, honestly better than half the stuff I’d bought from bigger brands. Turns out the real issue had nothing to do with the candles themselves — Wick & Glow simply hadn’t reached anyone beyond the people who already knew her personally.

That phone call is basically what dragged me into learning digital marketing properly, not from courses, but by trial and a lot of error over the next year and a half while helping her rebuild things from scratch.

The First Mistake: Trying to Be Everywhere at Once

We opened accounts on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and even TikTok within the same week. My logic at the time was pretty simple the more platforms we’re on, the more eyeballs we’ll get. That logic turned out to be completely wrong. What actually happened is we posted maybe twice on TikTok, forgot Pinterest existed after ten days, and split whatever little energy we had across four places instead of putting it somewhere it mattered.

By June, I made her shut down the Facebook page entirely and told her Pinterest could wait. We kept just Instagram. That one decision alone made a bigger difference than I expected — her posting quality went up because she wasn’t stretched thin anymore.

Lesson: two platforms, done properly, beat five platforms done half-heartedly.

Consistency Over Perfection (I Fought This for Months)

Hina is a perfectionist. Every post had to have the “right” lighting, and she’d sometimes retake a candle photo fifteen times before posting. Because of this, she was posting maybe once every ten days.

I remember one Sunday we sat down and I made her post a slightly blurry, badly lit video of her literally pouring wax into a jar, just to test something. That video got more views and saves than any of her polished product shots had in the previous two months. It wasn’t good quality by any stretch, but it felt real, and people responded to that.

After that, her rule became: post three times a week minimum, even if it’s not perfect. Her account grew from 340 to just over 2,100 followers in about four months after that shift.

What Actually Got People Talking

We stopped posting only finished candle photos and started showing the messy parts melted wax spills, failed scent combinations, the time she accidentally used too much fragrance oil and the whole flat smelled like lavender for three days straight. That story specifically got shared in her Instagram DMs a lot, people found it funny and relatable.

We also filmed a short video answering something a customer had actually asked her: “why does my candle tunnel in the middle instead of burning evenly?” That single video, shot on her phone with zero editing skills, brought in more comments than any promotional post ever did.

Turns out people don’t want another sales pitch. What people actually respond to is knowing there’s a real person behind the logo, not some faceless business account.

Google Business Profile — The Thing We Ignored for Almost a Year

Since Hina also did local pop-up stalls in Lahore, I kept telling her to set up a Google Business Profile. She kept putting it off, thought it was only for restaurants and shops with physical storefronts. We finally set it up in January 2023, added her stall locations and hours for that month’s event.

Within about six weeks, we noticed people were finding her through local searches, specifically “candle stalls near me” type searches, something we could actually see in the profile’s insights. It’s free, takes maybe twenty minutes, and we genuinely regret waiting that long.

Paid Ads: My Rs. 5,000 Mistake

I’ll admit this one myself. In my excitement, I ran a Rs. 5,000 Facebook ad with a broad audience across all of Pakistan, generic caption, one product photo. It got clicks, sure, but almost no actual orders. Money mostly wasted.

Second attempt, I dropped the daily budget to around Rs. 300, targeted specifically women aged 22 to 40 in Lahore and Karachi interested in home décor, and tested two different photos against each other using Meta’s Ads Manager split test option. One image, a candle next to a cup of chai with soft window light, performed noticeably better. We scaled that one slowly, and it actually brought real orders instead of just clicks.

Small budget, narrow targeting, and testing before scaling that combination is what worked, not throwing a big amount at a vague audience.

Micro-Influencers Instead of Big Names

We couldn’t afford influencers with huge followings, obviously. So we reached out to about six local Lahore-based Instagram pages, each with somewhere between 3,000 and 15,000 followers, mostly lifestyle and home décor accounts, and sent them free candles.

Three replied with genuine posts. One of them, a home décor page with around 8,000 followers, posted a story showing the candle on her actual coffee table, no scripted ad language, just her genuine reaction. That single story brought in eleven direct messages within a day, and four of those turned into actual sales.

That felt more effective than anything paid we’d tried before.

Mistakes I’d Tell Anyone to Avoid

• Chasing follower numbers instead of watching who’s actually commenting and asking questions
• Going quiet for weeks at a stretch, then acting surprised when the numbers start falling
• Switching brand voice between formal captions one day and overly casual slang the next, which confused people about who Wick & Glow even was
• Ignoring DMs and comments for days at a time, which we did early on and definitely lost a few potential customers because of it
• Expecting results within the first month and almost giving up around week five

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Where Things Stand Now

It’s been a little over two years since that midnight phone call. Wick & Glow now has close to 9,000 followers, gets repeat customers every month, and Hina finally quit her part-time retail job to run it full time as of early this year.

None of it happened from one viral post or some secret trick. It came from showing up regularly, being honest about the messy parts of the process, testing small before spending big, and actually talking to the people who followed her instead of just posting at them.

If there’s one thing I’d tell anyone starting out, it’s this: people don’t fall in love with perfect brands. They fall in love with ones that feel real to them.