How Do You Measure Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness is a crucial element of your digital marketing strategy, but knowing how visible you are to potential customers can be confusing. To help, we’re looking into how to measure brand awareness to ensure you’re visible to your target audience and doing everything you can to improve brand recognition.
What Is Brand Awareness?
Before exploring how to measure brand awareness, it’s crucial to understand what it means. Brand awareness refers to the extent to which a brand is recognised by customers or clients and is often measured as a percentage of a target market that recognises the brand. It is the level of familiarity and recognition that a brand has among its target audience and is considered a key factor in the success of a brand and its marketing strategy efforts. When we say brand, we refer to the company name and design qualities, such as logo, font, and colours, that differentiate a business from others.
The Importance of Brand Awareness and Why You Should Measure It
Brand awareness is essential for several reasons, such as:
- Increased visibility. Strong brand awareness means more people (and more of your target audience) recognise and remember your brand.
- Competitive advantage. High brand awareness sets a business apart from competitors.
- Customer loyalty. Familiarity and recognition of a brand lead to increased trust and loyalty amongst customers.
- Higher demand. Customers are more likely to seek out a well-known brand, which leads to high demand.
- Better pricing power. Companies with strong brand awareness often have better pricing power, as customers are more willing to pay more for well-known and trusted brands.
Successful brand awareness is great for businesses, so measuring it and ensuring you’re doing everything possible to better your strategy is key. Here are some examples of how to measure your brand awareness.
Running Regular Research Activities
Research is crucial when building a digital marketing strategy, which includes brand awareness research. This is not a one-time thing; it should be conducted regularly to ensure you stay on top of changing industry trends and measure brand awareness against any changes you’ve made to your business.
Regular research activities can be conducted in many ways, but one of the ways we have found to be the most successful is surveys. Surveys provide objective and quantifiable measurements of a brand’s recognition and a baseline that can be tracked over time to measure the effectiveness of brand awareness campaigns.
The Importance of Social Media
As a leading content marketing agency in Lancaster, we have had plenty of first-hand experience in social media management and have seen the positive effects social platforms can have on brand awareness.
Social media is a crucial tool in measuring brand awareness and is a great, cost-effective way to track how recognisable your business is to your target audience. Social platforms provide a vast reach, allowing your business to connect with millions of potential customers across various platforms, meaning a strong social media presence is vital.
When it comes to measuring brand awareness through social media, there are plenty of tools available to use. Checking your post engagement is a quick method of tracking brand awareness, which can be done by monitoring likes, comments, and shares.
Social media is also an excellent tool for connecting with your target audience and finding out more about them, what they like, what they don’t like, and which types of posts they engage with most, for example.
Google Trends and Brand Awareness
Google Trends is an incredibly valuable tool that offers insight into the popularity of specific search terms over time. It can be helpful in tracking brand awareness because it allows brands to track the following:
- Search volume
- Regional interest
- Trend analysis
- Competitor analysis
- Keyword analysis
When monitoring the above trends, it’s important to pay close attention to how they change after implementing brand awareness campaigns to see if they have been successful and understand what needs to be done to improve the stats and increase brand awareness.
Why Impressions Matter
When measuring brand awareness, considering impressions is a crucial element. They indicate the number of times a brand’s message has been seen by potential customers, providing a baseline for keeping track of improvements over time. The more impressions a brand receives, the higher the likelihood that the brand will be noticed and remembered by the target audience. This helps build brand recognition and increase the likelihood of customer engagement and conversions in the future.
In addition, impression metrics provide valuable insights into the reach and visibility of a brand’s advertising campaigns and overall marketing efforts, making it a key metric for measuring brand awareness.
Considering Website Traffic and Search Volume Data
Both website traffic and search volume data must be considered when measuring brand awareness as they provide insights into how potential customers interact with your brand online.
Website traffic indicates the number of people visiting a company’s website, so high traffic suggests that the brand is successful.
Search volume data shows how frequently people search for a brand or its related terms on search engines, such as Google. This data provides insight into the level of interest in a brand and can be used to gauge its online visibility.
Here at SQ Digital, we use all of the above and more to collate data on our client’s brand awareness. Our approach principles include “Don’t Begin Projects Without Defining Measurable Objectives”, which we believe is critical to assist our clients in building meaningful digital marketing solutions that can be measured by success.
As part of this, we provide our clients with a Brand Snapshot, which identifies the brand’s key components, products and services, and brand voice and personality to pin down exactly what we need to know to measure and increase brand awareness. We also use Personas, which are cleverly curated to bring your target audience to life and acknowledge what they need, what they’re looking for, and how our client’s brand will be of service.
This information provides us with a baseline of data and allows us to identify any missing key components in our client’s digital marketing strategies. From here, we can use this data to fill in the gaps and build on their online presence to improve brand awareness.
If you feel your brand would benefit from this, we are more than happy to help. Please get in touch today to begin your journey with SQ Digital.