Having a consistent digital brand image increases revenue by 23%.
But how do you measure it? “Brand awareness” can at first appear to be a lofty metric that’s difficult to nail down. Not to mention communicate the value of enough to get the backing to run an entire marketing campaign off of.
But, from attracting better talent to your business to landing more sales, retaining loyal customers and positioning yourself as an influencer—your organization is likely buzzing about ways to unlock the power of branding.
So where’s the happy place? Here’s our guide to measuring brand awareness.
What Is Brand Awareness?
How recognizable is your brand? Beyond just a logo? If someone read your blog without knowing who published it, would they be able to identify your company’s voice?
Would they be able to identify your attitude and style by just scanning a few social media posts? Brand awareness is all about how relevant and recognizable a brand is.
Inc.com lists 500,000 brands in existence currently worldwide. That’s a lot of competition and a lot of options for customers. In today’s political and social climate, customers aren’t just looking for businesses to buy from, they want brands to connect with.
Customers care about the sourcing of products, the quality, and cost, along with a brand’s values, the experience they provide and ultimately how they make a person feel. People want to feel connected, and the brands that are succeeding have invested in cultivating a distinctive community as well as an innovative product or service.
Brand awareness is about harnessing this. While every business might not make the next Yeezy-like cult following, every type of business can benefit from branding. The success of localized businesses like dentist offices and car dealerships weighs on their ability to differentiate themselves.
Tips for Measuring Brand Awareness
Let’s get into the tips for measuring brand awareness.
Make Sure Everyone Is On the Same Page
Brand awareness campaigns can get tricky if everyone isn’t on the same page about what brand awareness is. As you can see from the explanation above, the goal of a brand awareness campaign is not to make a transaction. It’s to increase the reach of your brand and put your business on the radar of members of a target audience.
A lot of organization leaders are obsessed with sales data, which can make it difficult to communicate the value of brand awareness if it isn’t (always) directly related to a conversion metric.
The truth is that brand awareness takes time to establish, and the direct attribution it has to revenue also takes time to completely see. Depending on who you’re dealing with, accepting this reality might be the hardest part about tracking brand awareness for your team.
Once you get everyone on board with what brand awareness is, and will be needed to measure it. Next, you’ll need to get everyone to agree on which Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) should be tracked for every campaign.
Stop Giving The Wrong Metrics Value
A campaign to generate qualified leads will require you to track different metrics than a campaign to sell a product or improve brand awareness. Some metrics might overlap, but since the purpose of each campaign is very different, you will need to tailor your tracking and reporting to align with the goals of the campaign.
For example, “likes” aren’t a helpful metric to measure when you’re tracking sales and qualified leads. Since likes have nothing to do with sales and leads and don’t provide any type of meaningful insight. That’s why “likes” are often referred to as vanity metrics.
But, for a campaign like brand awareness, likes might be useful. While they are definitely not the most valuable metric for tracking brand awareness, as long as you aren’t paying for them, they can provide insights on post popularity when measured against reach and impressions.
Target A Few Unique KPIs Per Campaign
You do not need to track every relevant-ish metric for every single campaign. Campaigns that have a singular purpose and only target a handful of KPIs often provide more actionable data for organizations. Because a secondary purpose to every campaign should always be learning.
Below is a list of KPIs to consider when running a brand awareness campaign.
Search
- Backlinks
- Branded searches
- Keyword variety
- Unique referral traffic
- Pages ranked
- Crawl rate
Social
- Social signals
- Mentions
- Impressions
- Engagement
- Reach
- Social share of voice
Other
- Media mentions
- Net promoter score (NPS)
- The long tail
For your own interest… just make sure you all know that’s not the main purpose.
Stop Tracking Direct Conversions For Every Campaign
It’s an awesome bonus if you see an uptick in sales during a brand awareness campaign. But remember that sales are a metric like brand awareness is. The goal of a brand awareness campaign cannot is sales because it’s brand awareness.
So stop measuring direct sales for every brand awareness campaign. This is where being in touch with where your audience is at in the buyer’s journey will be useful.
For example, if the goal of a brand awareness campaign is to reach new people in a specific audience, the ones who do see your brand, will be at the beginning of their journey with you. This means that their likeliness to convert upon only being introduced to your brand is less likely than if they were at a stage that what closer to the point of conversion.
Not only will making conversions the center of your campaign likely lead to a fail, but the intent to covert will also screw up your messaging. If you’re creating campaigns with the intent to convert, your likely going to create strategies and content that doesn’t actually appeal to an untapped audience.
But Do Track Direct and Indirect Conversions For Comprehensive Reports
Even though making conversion metrics the goal of individual brand awareness campaigns will have you running in circles, you do want to track conversions over time.
Both indirect and direct conversions from all brand awareness campaigns should be reported collectively for quarterly and annual reports. Taking a step out of each campaign and viewing them in a bigger picture will provide a more precise report to how your efforts are contributing to leads, sales, and overall revenue.
This data is known as attribution data. There a few different routes you can take for pulling this information and accurately reporting the conversion value of your brand awareness campaign.
Stop Expecting Overnight Results
Everyone should reach high in life, we get it! But when it comes to marketing campaigns, and brand awareness initiative, you’ve got to find a middle point between your grandiose ambitions of “breaking the internet” and the reality of what your budget is the size and skills of your team, and the product or service that you’re selling.
We are conditioned to think that bigger is always better. But you don’t need to go viral to be successful. There’s a trade saying that goes something like “100 paying followers is better than 1000 uninterested followers” and it’s SO true!
Success for your business will probably look different than success for another business. That’s why it’s so important for everyone to be on the same page with which KPIs you should be tracking, and what brand awareness really means for your business.
One campaign is not going radically to change the influence of your brand. Brand awareness is earned and is something you must commit to building. There are two “hacks.”
You just need to show up every day, be consistent, and be in it for the long game.
Check-In With Your Audience
No matter how clever your message is or how sharp your reporting might be, if your target audience is off, it’s pretty much all for nothing. We meet a lot of businesses who think they know who their audience is. They come to us after countless unsuccessful campaigns frustrated thinking branding just “doesn’t work for them.”
The reality is that sometimes who we want or assume our audience to be doesn’t end up being right or it changes over time. Small businesses run into this a lot. In the beginning, they can get by with guestimating their target audience. But as they start to scale and adopt more sophisticated marketing strategies, they find themselves stuck.
Always make sure that you’re basing who your target audience is off of actual data. Your audience and where they are at on the buyer’s journey should be shaping your campaigns and strategies.
Get Help Measuring Brand Awareness from an Awesome Agency
Make your first impression the best impression. If you need help measuring brand awareness and communicating the value of your campaigns, you’ve come to the right place. We can help with everything from strategy to logo creation, messaging and more!
Click here to learn more about how we can help you achieve the brand awareness you need to dominate your market!
