Brand awareness is simply the number of potential customers who remember your brand. It’s important knowledge for your business and if your goal is to maintain or increase brand awareness it is important that you develop a method to measure it.
When consumers are presented with many products of the same kind, they are more likely to purchase a product from a brand they already trust, rather than one they have never heard of. Therefore, maintaining high brand awareness levels is vital to a business’s success.
Identifying brand awareness metrics
Many companies measure brand awareness by a number of metrics, but not all. Social media managers measure it by analyzing the number of followers and interactions on social media. Sales reps measure brand awareness based on their customer interactions. But before you begin to measure brand awareness, it is vital that you establish what brand awareness means to your stakeholders. Once you have brand awareness metrics at your fingertips, you can start performance marketing campaigns, calculate the cost of customer acquisition and take your marketing activities to the next level.
Here are four common methods companies use to measure brand awareness.
1. Website traffic
One of the easiest ways to measure brand awareness is by finding out the direct traffic to your website. If users can identify and remember your brand name, then direct traffic is a way to measure brand awareness. Finding out how many organic brand search terms bring people to your site is an effective way to measure how many of these people are aware of your brand or product.
2. Social media followers
It’s fair to assume that the more people look for your brand or product, the more they are aware of it. Assuming that most people who follow you are interested in what you do and who you are, your social media followers will give you a good idea of your brand awareness. However, analyzing your brand awareness through campaigns does not count those who know your brand already. Instead, it helps find out how your content such as blog posts, videos, and social media content has performed and how they contribute to brand awareness.
3. Consumer research
Consumer research studies such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) and online surveys are excellent methods for measuring brand awareness because they allow you to get the answers you need from your target audience. Brand measurement studies can be performed with real people via email, face-to-face interviews and consumer surveys. For the best results, measure brand awareness on an ongoing basis. Each time a study is conducted the results are analyzed and added to a brand measurement dashboard where they can be analyzed, tracked over time, and shared with key stakeholders in the organization.
4. Brand tracking
Brand tracking is the most effective and reliable way for marketers and brand managers to measure brand awareness and a whole host of other things such as brand sentiment and NPS. Compared to market-research-based studies, it utilizes more data and information sources to give you a more cohesive understanding of your brand’s health. These include social media, online forums, and keyword research, in addition to consumer research surveys. It helps measure all aspects of a brand product and its competitors in its category, including metrics such as advocacy, affinity, influence, attraction, association, awareness, loyalty, perception, personality, reputation, memory, preference, strength, feeling, emphasis, trust, use, and more.
As with consumer research, brand tracking should be performed and monitored continuously. It involves both machine-driven and human expertise for deriving relevant insights.
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The best way to measure brand awareness is to have a clear strategy, to take a number of measures before starting a marketing campaign, and to measure and track it regularly. Netscribes understands that every company has unique business questions they wish to answer by measuring their brand awareness. For that reason, we tailor our brand insights solutions to suit your needs.
One of our clients, a global corporate insurance provider, wanted to conduct a brand awareness study that measured the strength of its brand versus its competitors across 12 countries. Read this case study to find out how it met this goal through our customized research solution.
