Learning how to measure brand awareness is a crucial part of tracking the performance of your brand image. Awareness indicates how familiar people are with your company, and higher familiarity means a greater chance of sales. Unfortunately, brand awareness has always been something of an abstract topic among marketers, making it notoriously difficult to measure.
What is Brand Awareness? Brand Awareness Examples
Brand awareness is a measure of how familiar your target audience is with your brand. There are tons of brand awareness examples out there. For instance, when people are looking for a way to search for something online, they automatically think of Google, because of the “awareness” surrounding the company and what it can do.
Brand awareness can start with something as simple as someone being familiar with your company’s name and logo. However, an excellent brand awareness campaign also means ensuring people know how to connect your name to a specific set of values or a unique offer. For instance, when people think of athletic apparel for everyone, they might think of Nike. When you imagine an easy-to-access coffee shop with a relaxing vibe, you think of Starbucks.
Why is Brand Awareness Important?
If people aren’t aware of your brand, they can’t purchase from you. Brand awareness is the very first stage in the marketing funnel. Your customers need to know who you are and what you can do so they can consider you when they’re looking for solutions to their problems.
Learning how to measure brand awareness is important because you want to be able to ensure your marketing, promotion, and branding efforts are not only helping you reach a wider quantity of people, but the right quality of leads too.
Measuring your brand awareness strategy helps you to identify whether you’re building attention for your company in the right circles (among people more likely to buy your products or services).
Ways to Measure Brand Awareness
Though often regarded an abstract concept, brand awareness does have an ROI, and metrics you can measure. Here are just some of the ways you can quantify brand awareness, and determine whether your marketing strategies are working:
1. Launch a brand awareness survey
One of the best ways to ensure people are aware of not just your company, but what makes your brand special, is with a survey. Select a target group of people you’d like to be most aware of your brand and ask them if they’ve ever heard of your company. You can host polls on websites, or even go out into the real world and talk to people.
Sending surveys to your existing company will help you to determine what people in your current consumer pool associate your brand with. You can even ask how existing customers found out about you, and why they chose to buy from you.
2. Check social media
Followers are sometimes seen as a “vanity metric” by social media marketers but they’re an excellent insight into how many people are familiar with your brand on a broad level. If you’re rapidly gaining new followers after your new marketing campaign launches, you know that more people are generally “aware” of your company.
People choosing to actively “like” or follow your brand on social media also usually means they’ve taken the time to learn a little about you, and decide they’re interested in your company.
3. Use Google Trends and Analytics
Google has plenty of tools available to help you track important metrics like brand awareness. The Google Trends tool, for instance, will allow you to see whether overall mentions and searches for your brand name, product, or CEO’s name are increasing over time.
You can also look for branded search volume in your Google Analytics account. Branded search volume refers to the number of searchers who come to your website by directly searching for your business name.
4. Look into name mentions
One of the best ways to determine if people are aware of your brand is to find out if they’re talking about you. Mentions can appear in everything from blogs to comments on other websites, and social media @references. There are various tools online that can help you to keep tabs on social media platforms and publishers to see who’s talking about you.
It’s also worth setting up notifications on social media to ensure you’re aware when people @mention you on their channels in case you’re getting an influencer shout-out.
5. Look at referral traffic stats
How many of your customers arrive on your doorstep because they’ve been advised to do so by another customer? Referral stats, or the number of people who are referred to your brand, are an excellent insight into your current position with “word of mouth” marketing.
If your referral statistics are good, you might even decide to start a campaign where you reward people for sending new customers your way.
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