Brand awareness is an essential component of every marketing strategy. But if you hear anyone saying that it’s simple to measure, it will be an exaggeration – to say the least. Experienced marketers know that estimating its effectiveness gets tricky.
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Fear not, though. This guide will go through six reliable methods for you to effectively measure brand awareness. Before that, we will explain why it’s such an important element of business success.
Why Should Businesses Invest In Brand Awareness?
Building brand awareness is about making your brand memorable and effectively positioning it against the competition. It comes with many advantages, the most important being:
- Generating more leads. Brand awareness campaigns help you reach more leads through your content marketing, social media, or email marketing efforts. These leads are highly likely to turn into paying customers and increase your revenue.
- Retaining existing customers. Brand awareness increases brand recognition, meaning customers know and trust your products or services. Such marketing campaigns enable you to remain relevant to your customers’ needs, urging them to return. And we all know that retaining customers costs less than acquiring new ones, right?
- Building brand loyalty. Brand awareness is the first step to building brand loyalty. People already recognize and remember your brand, making it all that easier for you to foster trusting relationships and emotional connections with your customers.
- Gathering valuable insight. Brand awareness metrics not only show how many users are familiar with your business but also indicate how they think of it. The insight you collect from your brand awareness campaigns will allow you to reconsider your resource allocation and the ways to increase your brand exposure.
6 Reliable Methods To Measure The Performance Of Your Brand Awareness Campaigns
Now that you have a solid understanding of the benefits that come with investing in brand awareness, it’s time to explore the most reliable methods to measure it.
1. Search Engine Analytics
Major search engines offer analytic tools that help you monitor your brand’s online traffic. Such information may include your rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs), mentions from other websites, and branded organic traffic. More often than not, the higher you score in these analytics, the better your brand awareness. However, a solid SEO strategy is crucial to improve your website’s visibility in search engines. You must also ensure that the brand awareness you gain in SERPs is positive and yields long-term results.
What does this mean? First things first, perform keyword research to identify the keywords that resonate with your business and specific goals. These valuable keywords are the ones that you want to rank high for in search engine results. For instance, if you own a SaaS tool competitive to Mailchimp, then ‘Mailchimp alternatives’ could be the keyword you should be aiming for. Most importantly, you’ll have to feature relevant content on your blog to boost your website traffic and demonstrate to every reader who lands there that you’re an authority in your niche.
Read PR SEO: 8 Genius Tips to Get More Coverage
2. Content Marketing Performance
Speaking of website traffic, let’s explore the importance of your content for measuring your brand awareness. Ask any experienced SEO specialist what is a prerequisite for ranking high on search engines. They will probably tell you that producing great content is the way to expand your reach and increase your website traffic. Constantly monitoring your content’s performance gives you insight into how it impacts your brand awareness.
While creating blog content, keep an eye on crucial metrics like conversions or organic traffic to understand how many new users land on your site. All you need to do is invest in tools like Semrush or Aherfs to track your ranking progress while discovering ways to optimize your content. When it comes to conversions, leverage Google Analytics to check how many of your visitors turn into customers.
Over time, it will be much easier to identify patterns in your content’s performance. Based on this information, you can decide which content types serve your business objectives best and put your focus on optimizing them further, whether it’s your website content or social media posts. On the other hand, you could make informed decisions regarding the types of communication that seem to be underperforming.
Read Using Social Listening to Improve Your Content Strategy
3. Social Listening
Social listening is an effective tool to measure your brand awareness across social media. Simply put, it involves keeping an ear out for social media conversations and analyzing how users talk about your business. You can dive into factors like which demographic groups mention your brand the most, whether or not your influencer marketing campaigns bring the desired results, how your hashtags perform, and more.
Versatile social media management solutions like Determ offer all the advanced tools to scan various platforms for comments and conversations and monitor every aspect of your social media performance. Also, you get to gather all relevant reports under one roof. This way, it’s simpler to identify and leverage patterns when planning actions to boost brand awareness on your social media channels.
In other words, social listening enables you to understand what users think of your brand and how they engage with your social media marketing campaigns. But social listening takes you one step further by helping you build brand awareness. How can you do that? By turning your mentions into unique opportunities to provide your followers with useful responses or exclusive offers, you can make the most even out of negative interactions.
4. Customer Surveys
It’s almost self-explanatory why customer surveys are one of the most powerful ways to learn about how your customers heard of your business and its products or services. Conducting regular customer surveys gives you a clear picture of how your brand awareness has changed over time. Here are some questions that will help you understand your prospective and existing customers’ level of brand awareness:
- Have you ever heard of our brand?
- Have you ever used or purchased any of our products/ services?
- If yes, what did you think of them?
- When did you first come across our brand, and where?
- What’s the first brand that pops to mind when you think of [specific product/ service]?
- Would you recommend our products/ services to other consumers?
These surveys get you into your customers’ minds and help you analyze their thoughts on your brand. Moreover, they offer tangible and accurate metrics for optimizing your brand exposure. You shouldn’t believe that running such a survey is complicated, either. You can use dedicated survey tools to create your surveys and then share them with your target audience through email campaigns or social media. And if you truly want to step up your game, you must also consider monitoring your reviews on third-party websites.
Read Market Research Process in 4 Steps
5. Share Of Voice
Share of voice indicates the percentage of users talking about your brand compared to your competitors. This type of comparative analysis allows you to understand the market share you and your rivals own. Share of voice is a metric that you should monitor for different aspects of your marketing. Such as your website, social media, and paid advertising. For example, you’ll want to track the total number of mentions your brand gets against the ones owned by your key rivals to know your social media share of voice.
You can tell that your brand awareness campaigns are performing well if your brand receives more mentions than your competitors. If it’s the other way around, maybe it’s time for you to revisit your marketing strategy. But even if that’s the case, remember that this metric can come in handy for you to identify the potential of raising your brand awareness within your industry. When users are familiar with your competitors, your value proposition probably meets their needs and addresses their pain points. All there’s left is for them to recognize and interact with your brand, too.
6. Referral Traffic
Another great method to measure brand awareness is through referral traffic. This metric refers to traffic coming to your website through a different source instead of users searching for your brand in Google. This source may be a third-party or partner website or one of your affiliate marketers’ social networks or sites.
This type of information is the perfect way to measure your brand awareness among different industries and target audiences. Knowing the businesses that promote your products or services enables you to identify the audience personas you haven’t targeted yet and are likely to convert into customers with future marketing efforts.
Not to mention that external websites linking to your domain show that your brand is an authority in its industry, which could result in improved SEO rankings. But whatever you do, make sure this kind of traffic comes from high-quality and valid referring domains. In the opposite scenario, bad referring domains could hurt your brand reputation and decrease your search engine visibility.
Final Words
Brand awareness might be a complex metric since there´s no direct correlation between it and your conversion rate. However, it shows you where your business stands in your industry compared to competitors and how your target audience perceives your product or service. One of your main business goals should be for your brand to be the first one that comes into consumers’ minds when they think of your niche.
Monitoring if your marketing campaigns bring the expected results and lead to trusting customer relationships is only a matter of tracking the correct brand awareness metrics. From connecting with customers through social listening to conducting customer surveys, ensure to incorporate all the above methods in your marketing strategy. Also, invest in the right tools to give your customers the most memorable experience possible and make their levels of awareness of your brand skyrocket!
If you’d like to measure your brand awareness better, book a demo with our experts and see how Determ can help you.
Maria Fintanidou works as a copywriter for email marketing automation software Moosend, having created the Help Articles (FAQs) and overseen the platform’s translations in Greek and Spanish. She loves exploring new cultures and ways of thinking through traveling, reading, and language learning.
