What is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness is a marketing term that describes the extent a customer is able to recognize a brand. It can be perceived as a vague concept, especially among data-driven marketers who like to gauge success with the confidence of numbers. However, just because there isn’t one standard metric to track and measure brand awareness doesn’t mean it can’t be easily implemented and integrated into your brand marketing.
Why is Brand Awareness Tracking Important?
The ability for consumers to recall a brand can be one of the strongest drivers that influence consumer’s purchase. Brand awareness helps increase the likelihood consumers can recall the brand. And when presented with multiple options, the likelihood a customer will choose a brand they’re familiar with is a lot higher.
Brand awareness also serves as the foundation of brand equity – a brand’s value determined by consumers based on their experience and perception of the brand. Higher brand equity gives you the leverage to foster brand trust, establish premium prices, and expand a service or product line.
Your approach to measuring brand awareness will depend on various factors, including your goals and objectives, business strategies, and audience behaviors, but above all, brand awareness tracking requires continuous research on your customers and the metrics below.
Let’s explore some general key metrics and tools!
What are Some Metrics and Tools I Can Use to Measure Brand Awareness?
1) Website Traffic
Website traffic tells you how many people are visiting your website, either via search, direct links, or paid advertisements. It doesn’t only offer insight into whether people are aware of your brand, but whether they are interested in learning more. When looking at your website traffic to measure brand awareness, you will want to see a spike in traffic after a brand-specific campaign and an overall increase in traffic over time.
Google Analytics is a simple yet powerful tool that any marketer can utilize to measure website traffic. A good traffic source in Google Analytics to use to measure brand awareness is direct traffic. Direct traffic comes to your site by typing in your URL for the most part, so it is safe to say they’re already familiar with your brand. You’ll also be able to track referral sources to help you understand which platform drives the most traffic to your site.
2) Search Volume Data
Search volume data can tell you how many people are searching for your brand or your products organically. The higher the search volume, the higher the brand awareness. It may seem obvious, but people simply can’t search for your brand if they aren’t even aware of it to begin with.
Tools like Google Trends, Google Keyword Planner, and SEMrush allow you to gain deeper insights into various metrics like search volume and search ranking. You can also see what people are searching for in your industry and how your keywords stack up in comparison.
3) Social Media Engagement
Social media is an excellent platform to spark and assess conversations about your brand and learn if your overall customer sentiment is positive or negative. It also helps you understand the key drivers to your awareness. Is it a specific group of influencers or certain types of hashtags?
Sprout Social and Hootsuite are social media management tools that help you easily track your performance on various social media channels. You can track metrics such as likes, comments, shares, saves, social reach and more, which indicate how often people actively engage with your brand.
4) Media Value Earned
You earn media value when your brand gets featured by a third media publication such as podcasts, articles, speeches etc. You can use this press not only as a promotional material, but to also gauge if there is a spike in leads, sales, or followers. This observation can help identify your best communication channel and better understand your target audience.
Google Alerts is a great way to start for beginners who are not ready to invest in PR platforms. It allows you to track any online conversations that mention your brand, your keywords, and even your competitors.
5) Survey
A survey is an effective way to track and measure your brand awareness by communicating directly with your audience and gathering data. A brand awareness survey measures your target market’s awareness of your brand. By capturing key demographic data, a survey enables a detailed analysis of how consumers view your brand and how you can improve its positioning among target audiences.
Fuel Cycle has a host of ways to engage with your core customers to gather brand awareness through surveys. Furthermore, Fuel Cycle can also help you find new audiences to survey and measure brand awareness with, using Fuel Cycle CoRe and Panels!
Final Thoughts
Tracking brand awareness doesn’t have to be a scary or complicated process. Try one of the few options above and see which strategy is the most suitable for your business goals. If you’re not sure which to begin with, or if you’re ready to step up your engagement and understanding with your customers, consult with one of our experts today!