Measuring brand awareness is not a piece of cake. You need to know a lot of KPIs, terminologies, and metrics to measure it like an expert.
But let’s suppose you accidentally track any metric wrongly. Then what’ll be the consequences? The department won’t get enough budget for upcoming campaigns, which can be extremely disastrous for your business.
So how do you crack the code? What’s the solution to the problem?
In this article, I’ll provide a comprehensive list of metrics you must know to measure brand awareness. And after reading this article, you’ll be able to measure it.
“Me, I’ll measure brand awareness?”. Yes, you can easily do that. Most companies hire agencies and freelancers to do this task for them. However, if you have less budget yet still want to reap maximum results, then carry out this essential task on your own.
Read this article till the end because it’ll help you become a true champion in evaluating it.
Let’s get started.
What Is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness refers to the level of familiarity and recognition a brand has among its target audience and the general public. It is the extent to which customers can identify a brand by its name, logo, tagline, or other distinguishing elements.
In simpler terms, it is about how well consumers know and remember a brand.
It’s more than just measuring your followers or how many likes you get on your social media post. You also need to check the effectiveness of your services and products. If people know you but they don’t know your offer or product, then mentions, reels, and nothing will be helpful for your business.
Remember, a brand with high awareness is more likely to be at the forefront of consumers’ minds when they think about a specific product or service category. There are two types of brand awareness.
For example, when I say cold drink, your mind immediately pictures Pepsi or Coca-Cola. This specific type is unaided awareness, where you think of a product or service by mentioning a specific category. Whereas if your business is new, then it’s likely that customers will recognize you only when there’s a logo or name with the ad or post. It is aided awareness.
But it’s not just about being recognized; it also involves creating a positive perception and association with the company.
What does the recognition of your business or company do?
It leads to increased customer loyalty, word-of-mouth referrals, and a competitive advantage in the market.
Why Should You Measure Brand Awareness?
You might be wondering why it is important to assess your brand awareness. The answer is simple. Whenever we start a marketing campaign, we have a goal. It can either be increasing sales, getting more sign-ups, followers, or increasing brand awareness. So for that, you need a comprehensive plan. You need to evaluate the plan by checking:
- How quickly it works
- The level of its effectiveness
- Ways to address any issues or areas that are not effective
Another reason why many companies prioritize this is its role in sales.
High awareness = High Number Of Sales
Maintaining a uniform brand presentation can lead to a revenue boost of up to 33%. It’s a way of telling people you are doing business. It’s the core of every business, and if you want to do long-term business, it is extremely important.
Benefits Of Measuring Brand Awareness
Evaluating brand awareness is one of the best things you can do for your business. There are plenty of advantages to doing this. And some of them are as below.
- It allows you to compare your label’s awareness with your competitors. Thus helping you understand your position in the market.
- The measurement helps you better understand your target audience’s preferences and perceptions.
- By measuring it, you can check the ROI of your marketing initiatives.
- It helps in monitoring your company’s reputation and addressing any negative sentiments.
7 Ways To Measure Brand Awareness
Imagine you start a company that sells luxury clothes. You purchase all the outfits, cloth, and everything. But how do you get clients? One month passes, and just like that, 6 months pass, yet you don’t have a single client.
Why?
Because you are yelling about your company in a dark room where your target audience can not hear you. That’s why you should implement strategies and measure them to evaluate your progress. Here are some of the most important metrics and KPIs you shouldn’t ignore.
Talk Less, Listen More With Social Listening
Social listening refers to checking how often people mention your brand on social media. Moreover, on which platform your audience is actively interacting with you? You have to dive deeper to check, are those comments positive or negative.
You can use social media management tools to get all the data and save yourself from manual work. They create a comprehensive report by checking patterns and trends that you might miss.
You should listen to your customers because this can transform your business.
Here’s How You Can Evaluate It:
You need to assess three KPIs for social listening.
- Number of people who see your online mentions
- Check sentiment score
- Evaluate net promote score.
Let’s discuss all of them.
You should check the number of people who see your company’s mentions. Any positive mention can leave a good impression on your company’s reputation. So if an account with a large following mentions you, your reach increases drastically.
Because that’s just how the algorithm works, an account with a million followers will reach more people than an account with 500 followers.
Secondly, sentiment score. With the rise in artificial intelligence, many marketers use AI to check their campaign ROI. Likewise, in this case, there are several social listening tools that can determine whether the post is good, bad, or neutral.
It can help you detect any upcoming issues that can cause chaos. That way, you can improve your company offers in a way that doesn’t hurt anyone’s sentiments.
Do you ever wonder how much customers like your product? Yes, they have given you a 5-star rating. But is your product good enough that they even tell others about your offer and become your unpaid marketer?
Net promotor score is a way to check this. It is usually evaluated through various awareness surveys, but you can also use AI tools for this purpose.
Fuel Your Strategy With Branded Search Keywords
It is a method to check public awareness of your business. It gives you a clear idea of how many people are interested in your company and what associated keywords they are searching for.
Suppose you want to hire the best SEO services for startups. You type that keyword and get numerous search results from companies. This is a general search.
But if you want to stand out, you must make your business a brand. So instead of searching for the best writers, your audience simply writes EchoFish SEO services. That’s how you create a branded search keyword.
You can use tools like Semrush for this purpose. Because you’ll get a clear idea of how many people are searching for your branded keyword, where they are located, and how much they interact with your company.
As your presence grows, you can do automatic keyword tracking. It removes all the manual effort you need to pour into this task. You can also check keywords your competitors use and craft compelling content that attracts your target audience.
Here’s How You Can Evaluate It:
I recommend using Ahrefs, Semrush. Start by checking how many times your name or business is mentioned per week and then per month. Check if there’s a decline or increase in the searches. Maybe your potential customers search more during holidays such as Halloween or Christmas.
Notice if there are any patterns, and depending on your account access, you can also check on which device they are searching from.
Check From Where You Get Direct Website Traffic
Assess the awareness by tracking people who visit your website directly. What do I mean by that?
It means people who aren’t using any third-party link, app, or social platforms to visit your site. Instead, they search for your company organically and type your business name in the search bar to visit the website.
Initially, these numbers will be low. But with consistent efforts, they’ll eventually increase. However, if you’re stuck in the same low traffic numbers, then that’s an issue that needs your attention.
If your website traffic increases, that indicates brand awareness is working, and it will eventually skyrocket your online presence.
Here’s How You Can Evaluate It:
You should use Google Analytics to check the number of direct traffic to the website. It includes page views, blog post visitors, and monthly visitors. You can also use a similar tool like Google Analytics to evaluate progress.
Supercharge Your Company’s Authority With Backlink Profiles
Backlinks are links from one website to another. When one website links to another, it essentially gives a vote of confidence or recommendation to the linked website. Search engines, like Google, consider these backlinks to signal the linked website’s relevance and authority on a particular topic.
You can use a backlink checker to find them easily. Remember that backlinks of the website can tell a lot about your visibility, including:
- How popular your site is
- In which areas your website is most popular
The quantity and quality of backlinks matter a lot in this aspect. It doesn’t matter if you have 10 links, but if they are from websites with low domain authority, they won’t do much for your website traffic.
However, your business presence is strong if you have backlinks from major industry publications, expert leaders, and websites with high domain authority.
Here’s How You Can Evaluate It:
There are various backlink checkers. You can use prepostSEO to check the domain authority of websites for free. Semrush, Ahrefs, and Moz are exceptionally good as they keep track of your backlink growth over the months.
But many experts just focus on backlink quantity. Which isn’t good practice? You should know:
- What’s the link type: dofollow or nofollow?
- Does the site linking to you belong to the same industry as yours?
Do Questionnaires To Learn More About Your Audience
You must have heard of different types of surveys. But yes, you have to do one to measure your brand awareness. But it’s quite different from a normal survey in which you have to talk about the food quality of a college cafe.
With this questionnaire, you can get a clear idea of the awareness level of your audience about your brand. It must include four categories, all of which are related to your company.
- Recognition: To what extent do consumers recognize your brand?
- Recall: How quickly do they think of your company whenever your industry is mentioned?
- Image: What associations do people make when they hear your business name?
- Identity: How do they perceive your brand based? Especially based on their interactions and experience.
I highly suggest adding aided and unaided questions to this questionnaire. Let me elaborate on it with an example. Suppose you’re running a book publishing agency.
So the unaided question is: What company or label immediately comes to your mind when you think of a book publishing agency?
Meanwhile, an aided question is: Which book publishing labels have you heard of? (add names relevant to your industry plus your own)
After getting insights, you can formulate a perfect branding strategy to build an empire. You can also evaluate how your competitors are working on different marketing strategies and how you can dominate the industry.
Here’s How You Can Evaluate It:
Even though I’ve shared some questions, you can add to them the survey. But remember, the most important part is to make this questionnaire with your target audience in mind.
What do I mean by that?
It means you’ve to ask relevant questions only. Ensure that it reaches the right audience.
Empower Your Business with Social Share of Voice
It is a measurement of your brand’s visibility compared to your competitors. With time, the social share of voice is also evolving; it’s no longer bound to just measuring your digital advertisements’ success.
But how can you use it?
You can use it to evaluate the performance of your business in various components. It includes:
- Marketing
- Advertising
- Social media platforms
Every aspect holds great importance and tells how customers perceive you. It also tells which area needs more budget.
Suppose you have more followers than your competitors on LinkedIn. But on Twitter, your competitors are thriving, getting retweets, likes, and getting a lot of social media engagement. Remember, you can spend more budget to improve your Twitter presence.
Here’s How You Can Evaluate It:
You can do it manually or by using a social listening tool. You can use Mention.com or TweetDeck for this purpose. After opening the tool, you need to type your brand’s name.
Simply write:
- How many times your company name is mentioned
- How many times your competitor’s name is mentioned
Use this formula to calculate social SOV.
(Number of your brand mentions/number of your competitors’ mentions) × 100.
Steal The Spotlight With Earned Media Coverage
Earned media coverage is unpaid, unbiased review of a third party. These people have used your service and then give you free coverage. Here’s how it goes.
Customers used your product => They like your product => Give you unbiased, positive reviews => More trustworthy.
In comparison to paid reviews and sponsorships, these are more important.
Here’s How You Can Evaluate It:
You can use tools like Ahrefs or Moz. Type your brand name like this.
-site:yourdomain.com
It’ll show you the volume of mentions where people didn’t link you. You can go one step ahead by contacting these sites and getting more backlinks.
Metrics Beyond Traditional KPIs
I’ve shared some of the most important KPIs with you. But to outshine the competition, you’ve to put in extra effort. And that’s why you should also track these KPIs. Some of the traffic KPIs are as follows.
If you think you can make different accounts and keep checking your website. That will eventually increase your page viewers. Then you are wrong.
Because different page views from the same IP are equivalent to one user, use this metric to check your popularity.
Check how the audience interacts with your website.
- How much time do they spend on your website?
- How do they interact with your social content?
Bounce rate is another important metric you shouldn’t ignore. A high bounce rate is a negative thing. Visitors either don’t like your content or don’t find what they are looking for.
Many people will visit your website for the first time. But how can you make sure they keep coming back? What are the metrics to check it?
Return visitors are users who keep coming back to your website. It fosters familiarity; thus, converting return visitors to your customers becomes easy.
Other than traffic KPIs, you should also focus on social KPIs. Suppose you are making an Instagram or Facebook page for your company. Use these metrics to track and check your progress on social networks.
Source: ADTMag
Firstly, you need to check how many impressions your post gets. Initially, the number might be incredibly low, but if you stay consistent and post high-quality content, you’ll see an increase in impressions.
More Impressions = More Chances Of Reaching Target Market
Engagement is the most important core of your social media. You are posting daily, but if no one sees the post and there’s no social engagement, you are doing something wrong. These engagement metrics include:
- Likes
- Shares
- Reposts
- Comments
Check which content performs best. Make a comprehensive content strategy for each platform. Lastly, CTR is also known as click-through rate. It shows how many people found your ad relevant and clicked on it.
Tips To Increase Brand Awareness
Now you know the most essential metrics, KPIs, to evaluate your brand awareness. Let’s explore tips to enhance your reach and visibility. They are as follows.
- Produce high-quality and relevant content that resonates with your target audience. Utilize blog posts, videos, infographics, and social media to share valuable information and engage your audience.
- Partner with influencers or industry experts with a significant following in your niche. Their endorsement can increase your visibility and credibility.
- Improve your website’s search engine optimization to increase organic traffic and visibility in search engine results.
- Encourage customers to share their experiences with your business through user-generated content. Repost and share this content to amplify your reach.
- Create branded merchandise like t-shirts, bags, or stickers to give away or sell, increasing your visibility in the real world.
Conclusion
Brand awareness is more than designing a logo or writing a catchy caption. It’s about how you stand in the competitive landscape.
At EchoFish, we help businesses reach their fullest potential by generating high-quality leads. Your business success is not far away from you.
Contact us today.
I'm a very hard-working, motivated, and committed individual with a positive attitude towards life and a passion for doing new things that help people.I love challenges in my career because they make you more robust than before when you overcome them.