Most marketers incorporate brand awareness in their marketing strategy. They understand that for customers to buy from you, they have to know your business well and understand its benefits among competitors. However, apart from putting in motion your brand awareness strategy, you should not miss out on measuring the results of it with certain metrics.
This article will discuss what brand awareness is and offer steps and strategies on how to measure brand awareness.
- What is brand awareness
- The importance of brand awareness measurement
- Tips to measure brand awareness
What is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness is the extent of familiarity of your business among existing and potential customers. There are different levels of brand awareness. For instance, you may find that customers can recognize your brand name or logo but may not know your range of products and services.
At a more advanced level of brand recognition, the customers can distinguish your products and services from your competitors. All this information is easily accessible and available for further action when a marketing specialist knows the ways to measure brand awareness.
Why Is Measuring Brand Awareness Important?
Measurement of the performance of your strategy directly influences your future campaigns aiming to increase brand awareness. The following are the top reasons for measuring brand awareness:
- Establishes if your marketing efforts are effective
- Provides insight for more successful subsequent brand awareness and sales campaigns
- Gauges the popularity of your business
- Helps you to establish the platforms where your company is most popular
- Gives you an understanding of what customers know about a business
- It is a form of sentimental analysis that helps you find out how customers perceive your business
8 Steps on How to Measure Brand Awareness
Before the dominance of the internet, measuring brand awareness was a complex process. Businesses had to hire agencies, and it took months to get feedback. Nowadays, you can use easily accessible online tools such as website analytics, social media, brand tracking tools, and review websites for brand awareness measurement.
Overall, brand awareness can be measured quantitatively and qualitatively. Quantitative measurement looks at the numbers and determines how many people know or engage with your company. On the other, qualitative measurements give you a sense of what people know about your business and how they feel about it.
Below is a detailed look at how to measure brand awareness and the most effective metrics.
1. Check Your Website’s Direct Traffic
Direct traffic is an important brand awareness metric as it indicates what percentage of your website visitors already know about your business. These users usually enter your URL address on the address bar to access your website.
You can easily track the exact amount of your direct traffic and its percentage of the total visits using Google Analytics. Analytics tools also show the average time users spend on your website per visit and if there are recurring visits from the same customers.
In addition, look into the brand search volume. This is the traffic from keywords specific to your business, product, or service names.
Like direct URL searches, branded searches show that the customers are particularly looking for your company or products. For instance, instead of “best vitamin C serum”, they are searching for “brand name + vitamin C serum”.
2. Analyze Your Referral Traffic
This is traffic directed from other websites, including social media, email, backlinks, and affiliate websites. Assess the percentage of your referral traffic and its quality. How well does it convert? Is there a specific source that brings in most of the referral traffic?
Track organic backlinks versus those resulting from your marketing and public relations efforts. Organic ones show that other websites consider your content and products highly valuable. You also want to ascertain that the outsourced ones are effective.
3. Track Brand Mentions
There are numerous tools you can use to track your brand mentions. Some, such as the Google Alerts tool, are free, while others are paid. These tools enable you to monitor where your brand is being mentioned online. For example, on forums such as Reddit and Quora, news sites, blogs, articles, and social media posts such as influencer mentions, customer reviews, and hashtags.
Note that Google Alert does not provide listening for your selected keywords on social media platforms. To track social media mentions, use the filters on each platform to fine-tune your tracking.
Analyze your mentions to understand where they are coming from and the circumstances under which you are mentioned. How often are you mentioned on a given platform, and does it positively or negatively impact your reputation?
Some tools give detailed information about the mention. Aside from indicating where it came from, they show its reach, interactions, engagement, and influencer score. You can use this information to improve your offerings, find opportunities for growth and expansion, and learn about issues customers encounter with your business as early as possible.
4. Review Social Media Presence
The number of followers on social media platforms is one of the metrics of how to measure brand awareness online. The followers are fans of your brands that engage with your content and buy or are interested in your products. The more they are, the wider your level of brand awareness.
However, your following is only effective as a brand awareness metric if it is legitimate and engaged. 10K true fans are better than 500K bought followers who do not interact with your brand or buy.
You can easily track the number of followers and page visits through the specific social media platform’s analytics tool.
5. Assess Social Media Engagement
Track your engagement on all the social media platforms where you have a presence. Take note of the number of likes, comments, shares, views, retweets, saves, etc., you get on your posts. Do they increase, decrease, or remain the same over time?
If you recently ran a social media brand recognition campaign, notice if it impacted your engagement positively. Take note of the type of content that gets the most engagement and use it to increase brand awareness and conversion.
6. Run an Online Survey
When creating an online survey, the key is to determine your target audience and the right questions to ask them. Then choose a channel or tool for conducting the survey. You can use various online tools, including social media, email, Survey monkey, Questionpro, etc.
You can start by surveying your existing customer. It can be a detailed or simple survey. For example, email your customers or post on social media asking them how they found out about your business and which products/services they have bought or are aware of.
For a more detailed survey, combine open and closed-ended questions. Aside from asking the abovementioned questions, ask the customers about their experience with your business and how they feel about it overall.
7. Check Monthly Search Volume
The monthly search volume for your brand name or products and services indicates how many people conduct an organic search for your business. Use tools such as Ahrefs, Keywords Everywhere, or Keyword Planner to check your monthly search volume. Simply enter your brand or product/service name on the search bar to see the result.
If you realize a significant number of searches, get the advantage of it by developing and implementing a search engine optimization content strategy. Whereby you create content that would be relevant to the audience searching for your company online.
You could also search for your brand name, products, or services on Google Trends to review interest in your business over time. For instance, the Etsy Google Trends report from 2004 to the present shows the gradual increase in the company’s brand awareness over the years, with occasional spikes in interest at given times.
8. Monitor Reviews
Review websites are one of the most common places where people talk about their experience with businesses. The volume of customer reviews can give you a sense of your brand's popularity. You can track how customers perceive your business and whether the perception has changed over time. This sentimental analysis is essential for business reputation management.
For instance, on Pissedconsumer.com, Amazon has tens of thousands of customer reviews and ratings, which reflects their popularity among consumers. They also have 5 million page views, which indicates interest from potential customers looking up reviews to make a purchase decision.
Most businesses do not track the implementation and effectiveness of their brand awareness strategy. Yet, it is a core aspect of your overall marketing strategy. It can be difficult to establish the key performance indicators (KPIs) and measure the return on investment. However, the 8 metrics discussed above can help you with your brand awareness measurement and improve your marketing.
When you know what is working vs. what is not, you will be more effective with your brand awareness strategies. As a result, you will have improved customer acquisition, retention, and brand recognition, leading to increased revenue.
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