You likely understand the importance of having others know about your brand. But do you know how to measure brand awareness? Check out our helpful how-to guide to make sure your company accurately measures its brand awareness.
Why is measuring brand awareness an important marketing strategy?
It’s understandable to question why measuring brand awareness is necessary. Aside from maintaining a strong brand and building brand loyalty, is brand awareness really that important? Yes, it’s essential to understand how popular your company’s brand name is.
In many ways, brand awareness reveals how well your brand efforts are actually going. If you’re not utilizing brand awareness campaigns, how do you know where your company stands compared to the competition? When you know where your company stands next to others, it’s easier to start increasing your share of voice. Share of voice is a term for measuring your company’s share of its industry or market.
Another reason to focus on measuring brand awareness is to create a baseline of your company’s popularity. Once you understand how popular your brand is, it becomes much easier to see and take action when things start improving or getting worse.
Measure brand awareness using social media, search volume, and more
Now that we’ve covered why brand awareness is so important, it’s time to learn how to boost brand recall with your company’s target audience. Here are four proven strategies to measure brand awareness.
1. Learn about social media opinions with social listening
You probably don’t need an explanation about the importance of social media. With the popularity of all today’s social media channels, your brand can gain a lot of information by using social listening tools. These tools search through the massive amounts of information on social media, automatically tracking and reporting mentions of your company or anything affiliated with it.
What makes social listening distinct is that it enables your brand to instantly see what’s being said about your company, and create a direct dialog with someone in real time. If you want to get extra creative, you can use social media listening tools to also learn what people like and dislike about your competition. A few popular social media listening tools include Sprout Social, Zoho Social, and Falcon.io.
2. Analyze search volume using Google Analytics and Search Console
Search engine optimization or SEO is the process of utilizing tactics to increase the visibility and authority of a web-based property. It’s also one of the best ways to track brand awareness.
To understand how brand awareness and SEO relate to each other, it’s a good idea to connect your website with Google Search Console. Google Search Console uses the power of Google Analytics to gives you the ability to track clicks, impressions, click-through rates, and your website’s position on search engines. All of this data gives you a complete picture of your brand’s visibility, at least in Google’s eyes.
As you gain experience optimizing your brand’s website or having someone else do it, you should begin seeing brand awareness increase. Monitoring website analytics is also great to let you know how well any of your specific marketing campaigns are doing.
With that said, there are other alternatives to Google Search Console and Google Analytics. Moz and Ahrefs are two other companies that provide popular and easy-to-use SEO analytics services.
While we’re on the subject of Google, it’s also a good idea to use Google Trends. This is Google’s system of finding content related to keywords you enter and sending you emails (based on a frequency you choose) listing any websites that mention your keywords. By entering your company name into Google Trends, you’ll instantly know where your brand is being mentioned.
3. Create surveys to measure brand awareness
As your brand’s website and social media pages start gaining traction, it’s important to gather opinions from all of this direct traffic. With that in mind, surveys are also effective ways to gauge how people generally feel about your company. Many companies utilize a specific benchmark called net promoter score or NPS questions in their surveys. NPS surveys have respondents answer questions on a 1-10 scale. An example of this would be rating your preference for a company, with a 10 rating meaning you love the company and a 1 rating meaning you strongly dislike this business.
Asking a random selection of people about your brand can help give an idea of how aware others are of your company and measure overall brand awareness. With that said, you don’t have to create your own survey questions. There are many available survey software programs that automate survey creation.
Another question that addresses brand awareness is to place your company in a group with competitors, and ask respondents which brands they are familiar with and have used. If no one is choosing your company, this presents a problem in the market’s brand awareness.
If survey participants seem to be holding one or two brands above all others in high regard,these might be worth looking into – they may be using strategies your own business could learn from.
4. Reputation management software
It’s understandable to not have the time to manually track and manage your company’s online reputation. Fortunately, there are many types of reputation management software in the market. Most of these programs offer all or a combination of the following features:
- Review/rating monitoring
- Sentiment analysis
- Search engine rankings
- Analytics/reporting features
- Competitor analysis
- Survey creation/reporting
With so many options and features, it’s understandable to wonder how you find the right type of reputation management software. One of the most important things to consider is how well this software fits within your company’s budget. If you estimate this software is going to provide a nice return on investment, it’s likely worth purchasing.
It’s also a good idea to spend a bit of time researching reputation management software customer reviews. Reading about what others like and dislike will help you make a much more informed decision.
5. Take a closer look at referral traffic
When mention brand awareness campaigns, it’s important to make sure that your business is using one of the important digital marketing metrics: referral traffic. Referral traffic is the number of people who are finding and visiting your website from external websites.
5 important metrics of brand awareness campaigns
As you begin to measure brand awareness, you’re likely going to come across a few terms you’ve never seen before. Don’t worry, below we break down five of the most popular terms used in measuring brand awareness and why they’re so important.
1. Reach
If you’re like most people, it’s easy to confuse reach with impressions. To add to the confusion, many marketers often use these terms interchangeably. When it comes to online marketing, reach is the number of unique people who see your brand’s content.
2. Impressions
People see an astounding amount of ads on a daily basis. A recent Forbes article estimated that people see anywhere between 4,000-10,000 advertisements each day. When someone sees a website or other type of digital advertisement, it results in an impression. The total impressions are the number of times someone has the opportunity to see a specific piece of content online. Keep in mind that even with a high number of impressions, it’s up to the viewer as to whether they’ll click through to your website or not.
3. Mentions
Digging into the amount of mentions your brand receives is a smart thing to do. However, you’ll want to also make sure you’re tracking the general sentiment and what’s being said about your brand. Does the public love your brand or could the relationship use a little bit of work?
A decade ago, the thought of a program scanning the internet to understand the meaning behind posts sounded almost impossible. Now, there are many companies offering dedicated brand mention tools that can find and notify you when anyone mentions your company online. A few notable brand mention tools include YouScan, BrandMentions, and TweetDeck.
By tracking your brand’s reach on review websites, social media, and other popular types of internet destinations, brand mention tools are also beneficial for companies wanting to build brand awareness.
4. Clicks
As your website or social media pages begin gaining impressions and reach, clicks should soon follow. With that said, clicks are types of direct traffic. How many clicks a website gets depend on a wide range of factors – including how many impressions your brand’s website is showing up for.
To put it in marketing speak, clicks skew towards bottom-of-the-funnel behavior. Unfortunately, clicks won’t automatically lead to purchases or sign-ups. But this behavior is a good sign that something your brand is doing is effectively engaging your audience.
5. Engagement
Hopefully, each visitor who clicks through to your website stays around for a while. If so, you’ve succeeded in creating engagement. Engagement is a measure of how much interest your brand’s content receives from visitors – are they leaving comments, pressing the “like” button, or sharing with friends?
When it comes to your brand’s website, engagement is typically measured by how long visitors stay on your website. Engagement on social media platforms, on the other hand, includes how many interactions (likes or shares) a post receives.
Wrapping things up
To understand the market perception and popularity of your company, it’s imperative to measure brand awareness. The metrics might seem complicated, but there are many tools to help your brand track and grow its awareness. To learn more about everything you need to create a strong brand, visit our brand strategy guide.
