Measuring brand awareness can be tricky. By using digital channels, businesses can have access to thousands if not millions of potential customers. Fortunately, there are many tools and strategies available to businesses today. Using social media, trends data and analytics are all examples of ways to measure brand awareness.
Why is brand awareness important? Most consumers like to feel comfortable with a brand before they buy from them. In 2021, it was found 68% of people made online purchases solely using social media. This in turn can create what successful investor Warren Buffet calls an ‘economic moat’, allowing the business to maintain a higher market share than competitors.
In this blog, we’ll continue to touch on how businesses can measure and improve brand awareness.
Brand Awareness Explained
Marketers consider brand awareness to be the degree to which consumers can recognise products and services. It allows consumers to make purchasing decisions based on associations with the brand. This can be used by businesses to offer quality assurances. Brand awareness can also include company values, such as being environmentally friendly.
Brand awareness is often the deciding factor between companies that offer similar products. A recognisable brand helps build consumer trust, which decreases the perceived risk of making a purchase. The more familiar potential customers are with a brand, the more likely they are to be converted to paying customers.
Read about how businesses can create brand awareness.
5 Useful Brand Awareness Metrics
Measuring brand awareness can be a great way for a business to monitor the performance of its marketing content.
There are many ways to measure brand awareness with no individual method necessarily being superior. Some of the key metrics below may however be more useful to some businesses depending on their marketing strategy.
Surveys
Businesses can use brand awareness surveys to directly engage with their target audience. Along with ascertaining the degree of awareness held by consumers, the right questions can reveal the attributes associated with a brand. Surveys conducted regularly can allow businesses to track changes in brand awareness over time.
External links and referral traffic
With the help of Google Analytics, brands can track the amount of website traffic coming from external links. This can provide useful marketing information to increase brand awareness in the future. Analysing this data allows businesses to identify effective content types for brand sharing and messaging.
In addition, the existence of external links should signal to a business that they’re a trusted brand. As discussed earlier, brand trust and brand awareness go hand in hand.
Social media mentions
Social media is a potent tool for building brand awareness, as it’s a platform for businesses to engage with public issues. Brands mentioned on social media without any prompting tend to be closely associated with their products. When a brand gets mentioned in discussions around industry topics for example, it can indicate positive brand awareness.
Branded search volume
Search engines are highly trafficked by consumers looking to find products and services. A 2023 global report found that 43.2% of internet users between 16-64 say one of the main reasons they use the internet is to research brands and products. As such, the number of people reaching a company site through branded searches (those including relevant keywords) is an organic SEO indicator.
Earned media
This refers to content or references featured in third-party sources like articles, social media and physical content. As with external links, earned media broadens a brand’s reach. When analysed in conjunction with other brand awareness metrics, earned media gives businesses an insight into where their customers are coming from.
Harnessing Brand Awareness
For those that aren’t experienced, brand awareness measurement data that can be difficult to interpret. Even for seasoned marketers though, it can be a significant time investment to pick out the main points from brand awareness data. This is largely because brand awareness metrics provide insights across multiple marketing channels. By using a full-service digital marketing agency, you’ll be able to have more available resources for your core business operations.
You’ll also get an easy-to-understand data summary for your business. Measuring brand awareness regularly allows a business to build brand awareness more effectively going forward. This helps inform your marketing strategy, making it easier to meet marketing goals.
It takes a long time for any business to build up their brand recognition, so it pays to make sure people stay aware of yours! Deliver Media provides free marketing audits that make use of brand awareness data.
