How To Measure Brand Awareness in 11 Different Ways

 

Marketing professionals often prioritize brand awareness in their marketing efforts. Brand awareness can have several benefits, from making your brand more recognizable to expanding your target audience. Understanding the importance of brand awareness and how to gauge it is an important step toward improving your marketing processes and can directly impact your ability to generate revenue and brand loyalty.

In this article, we define brand awareness, discuss its importance, provide a list of important brand awareness metrics and offer 11 strategies to help you measure your brand awareness.

What is brand awareness?

Brand awareness is how familiar people are with your brand. It measures how frequently your target audience considers your products and services over those of your competitors, how frequently your brand ranks highly on search engine results and how recognizable your marketing efforts are. Brand awareness is an important aspect of marketing and can provide insight into the success of current promotional efforts.

Benefits of brand awareness

Here are some advantages companies can experience from prioritizing brand awareness:

Increase acquisition

Having high brand awareness can help increase your customer acquisition. Customer acquisition refers to the number of new customers your brand gets. When you promote your brand through awareness campaigns, you may reach more leads and convert them into active customers. An increased acquisition rate can lead to higher revenue and profit margins.

Promote retention

Brand awareness can also help you keep and maintain relationships with your current customers. Maintaining customers, also known as customer retention, is an important part of securing passive income for your organization. Gaining new customers often takes more time, effort and resources than selling to existing accounts. Increased brand awareness could help you remain relevant to your target audience, increasing your customer retention rates and saving your organization acquisition efforts.

Build brand persona

Brand awareness can be important for newer organizations because it can help them establish a brand persona and tone of voice. Connecting with an audience through your brand’s unique personality is an important step toward solidifying your persona and establishing brand recognition. Creating awareness about your brand’s uniqueness can help you remain memorable and relevant in the market.

Brand awareness metrics

Below are some important brand awareness metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that can help you determine your success in this area:

Coverage

Coverage refers to how frequently your brand appears in publications like magazines, newspapers and social media pages. High levels of coverage may show an elevated level of brand awareness. The more variation in your coverage, the more audience personas you may reach. For example, if your brand appears in a magazine for hikers and in a magazine for busy moms, you may expand your audience base by promoting brand awareness in both groups.

Message pull-through

Message pull-through refers to the quality of your coverage. If you can incorporate key brand messaging when featured in publications and social media posts, your brand awareness efforts may be more successful. If your coverage rates correlate with an increase in customer acquisition or revenue, it may indicate your key messages are coming through in your coverage. However, if you’re receiving ample coverage but not seeing any change in acquisition or revenue, it may show that you can benefit from changing your critical messaging.

Web traffic

Web traffic refers to the number of users who visit your online platforms in a certain amount of time. Web traffic can directly correlate to the success of your brand awareness efforts. Typically, the more visits you receive on a website or social media page, the higher your rates of brand awareness. You can monitor your web traffic data to measure the success of your marketing and brand awareness efforts.

How to measure brand awareness in 11 ways

Here are 11 steps you can take to measure brand awareness:

1. Create a survey

Consider creating surveys to get information about how your customers heard of your organization. You may also use surveys to ask non-customers if they’re familiar with your brand or business. To create surveys, you may use email, telephone or direct mail. The data you collect in these surveys can provide accurate information about how your brand receives attention and the level of awareness.

2. Review your social media presence

Reviewing the analytics of your social media pages is another effective way to determine your brand’s level of awareness. This information can help you understand how much traffic your social media pages receive and how frequently your followers interact with your posts. Many social media platforms have analytic tools, which you can use to understand:

• Your number of followers

• Your number of page visits

• Your number of likes

• Your number of shared posts

3. Use search engine analytics

Many major search engines offer tools and analytic services to help you determine your online brand awareness. Consider using these resources to better understand your brand’s online traffic and performance. You can look at information like search engine ranking and mentions of your brand on other websites. Typically, the higher your brand ranks on search engine results and the more mentions you receive on other websites, the better your brand awareness.

4. Consider brand tracking software

Some brand-tracking software solutions automatically track your brand awareness. Research the current offerings to determine which solution is best for your brand or business. You can use these software solutions to create and schedule brand awareness surveys, send the surveys, receive the results and categorize the data into metrics you can apply to your current brand strategy.

5. Research your mentions

Mentions refer to social media pages, blogs, websites and publications in which your brand name appears. Understanding who is talking about your brand, how frequently they mention it and who comprises their audience can help you make informed decisions about your awareness efforts. Some automated software options continually scan the internet for mentions. Consider researching these options to automate the process and apply the findings to your current brand awareness campaigns.

6. Review branded search volume

Branded search volume is a part of search engine analytics and refers to the number of times users access your website by typing in the exact name of your brand. This metric is important because it explains how many customers remember your brand name and actively seek your offerings instead of finding your website because of a related keyword or search topic. A higher branded search volume typically indicates a strong brand presence and recognition.

7. Measure share of voice

Share of voice is a metric similar to mentions, but it also incorporates the number of times your competitors appear in publications or on social media pages. This comparative analysis can help you understand how well your brand performs against competitors in the market. Your brand awareness campaigns are working if your brand receives mentions more frequently than your competitors. You may consider revisiting your current strategy if your competitors receive more mentions than your brand name.

8. Analyze earned media

Earned media includes analyzing the website traffic of third-party sites that mention your brand. While this metric doesn’t directly measure your brand awareness, it can help you understand how your affiliates and partners contribute to your overall awareness. Understanding their contributions can help you make informed decisions about future partnerships and select affiliates that contribute the most to your brand awareness efforts.

9. Check your referral traffic data

Referral traffic is a metric that measures how many times your partners, affiliates or third-party websites include links to your brand’s website. This information is important because it helps you understand your brand awareness among other businesses instead of your audience or market. Being aware of companies that recognize or promote your brand can help you measure which audience most successfully converts to customers. This information can help you make informed decisions about future marketing techniques by identifying audience personas that respond well to your marketing.

10. Monitor your content’s performance

It’s important to monitor your content’s performance continuously to understand how it influences your brand awareness. Analyzing your brand awareness over time and identifying trends in your content or messaging can help you determine which types of communication help your brand awareness and which you can discontinue. This could include your website content, direct marketing copy, product descriptions or social media posts.

11. Use social listening

Social listening involves tuning in to the conversations of social media users and understanding how they talk about your brand. Social listening is an effective tool because it helps avoid response bias when using brand awareness surveys. To use social listening, consider investing in software or analytic tools that scan public social media platforms for comments containing your brand name. Then, you can read these comments and conversations to better understand your brand’s perception and the type of engagement it receives with users.