Brand awareness is a somewhat ambiguous concept that can appear difficult to measure. Even though more than 89% of marketers rank increasing awareness as their top goal, many don’t know how to measure it.
In its most basic definition, awareness reflects whether or not potential consumers are familiar with your brand through recognition and recall measures. Surviving and thriving in the modern marketplace requires constant innovation and a measurement mindset. If measuring is skipped, there is no way of assessing the strengths and weaknesses of your strategy. As such, awareness measures should not be overlooked.
Why is awareness important?
Brands that have achieved high awareness tend to have greater success and higher rates of conversions in the long run. If a customer is aware of your brand, they are much more likely to select it in a purchasing scenario and favor it over competitors.
In some cases, brand awareness is so great that the brand name becomes representative of the product category. If customers were to be prompted with an image of tissues, for example, it is likely that they would think of Kleenex before tissues. This phenomenon, known as a brandnomer, is a reflection of high brand health and peak top-of-mind awareness. Although this is not necessarily the goal when analyzing awareness, it is a clear a marketing success in awareness.
Brand awareness is difficult to measure as it is challenging to directly connect growth in business with a specific awareness strategy. Although the concept may appear as immeasurable, there are multiple techniques we can implement as to assess the effectiveness of our awareness marketing strategy.
Techniques for measuring brand awareness
Successful
Surveys:
Regardless of the way in which they may be conducted (email, in person, website, phone), you may ask customers (or a randomized sample) whether or not they have heard of your brand or if they can recall it when prompted. Although this is a useful tool, results may be tainted with a certain degree of bias. Make sure you are selecting an audience that is representative of your clients and making the survey fun and mobile friendly to incentivize completion.
Website traffic:
You may use Google Analytics to assess the number of people who have visited your website, used a bookmark or clicked a link to your site. Changes in traffic over time may provide a general idea of brand awareness; nevertheless, this measure is not exact. Awareness could be high and website traffic low; the results are not always reciprocal.
Track Mentions:
Using Google Trends may provide a general idea of how your brand name is performing and the overall awareness of your target audience. Google Trends tracks the number of online mentions of your brand. Although the platform does not differentiate between good or bad mentions, any mention suggests that people recognize your brand.
Google Trends can help you visualize where mentions come from, how you are performing compared to competitors and how many people are linking to your website and sharing your posts. As such, it can be an invaluable tool for measuring awareness.
Brand Tracking Software:
Businesses may choose to rely on analytics platforms to directly measure their brand image compared to that of competitors. These platforms are easy to use and provide insights as to how your target market is responding to your brand and the impact of your campaigns. Existing trackers include Qualtrics, Latana and Upware and considerably facilitate the process of measuring brand awareness.
Creating brand awareness is the basis of any marketing strategy. Using any (or all) of the aforementioned techniques will provide a clearer idea of the health of your brand and help you develop a stronger awareness strategy for your business.