Don’t Fly Blind: Why You Need to be Measuring Your Brand Awareness

It’s impossible to understate the importance of brand awareness: it is the necessary first step in the customer journey, and it is the foundation that will determine whether you succeed or fail to achieve your objectives.

Brand awareness is how familiar consumers are with your brand and products. Can they recognize your brand – who you are, what you do, what you stand for – when they hear your name? Do they even think immediately of your brand when they think about a specific product or category?

The only answer to those questions worse than “no” is “I don’t know.”

Why You Should Measure Brand Awareness

If you’re not measuring brand awareness, you’re flying blind, unaware and unable to see where you are and what’s going on around you. Whenever you make any maneuver – like releasing a new product, entering a new category or deploying a new marketing and promotion campaign – you can’t concretely determine how effective it is, how much it drives the bottom line, how much it moves the needle.

In today’s business landscape, it is essential to have your finger on the pulse of consumer perception by measuring brand awareness.

By doing so, you’ll gain a better understanding of your brand positioning vis-a-vis your competitors, where you’re able to see how your brand stacks up against theirs and how well your brand is growing compared to theirs. You’ll also establish a baseline to determine how your brand awareness changes over time and in response to any and all brand awareness campaigns and tactics you employ. And that will allow you to make smarter, data-informed decisions on how to move forward more successfully.

Metrics for Measuring Brand Awareness

Here are a few KPIs you should be tracking to measure brand awareness.

• Share of voice. This is a measure of how often your brand is mentioned online compared to your competitors, and it is a great place to start when checking up on your brand health.

• Search volume. This captures how many people are searching for a specific keyword in search engines. You can monitor this for the name of your brand or products, as well as other potentially relevant keywords.

• Web traffic. This shows how many unique visitors are engaging with your website. A breakdown of this data will point you to which pages are getting more engagement, and it will also help illuminate how visitors navigate your website and where there might be opportunities to optimize.

• Content performance. Like web traffic, this shows what the reach and engagement is on your different pieces of content. Normally, at the bottom of content like this, there is a call-to-action (CTA), and tracking the conversion rate for each piece then comparing them to each other will show which pieces are performing better than others.

• Social engagement. This includes the volume of likes and comments on your branded posts, as well as the volume of organic brand mentions by other users. By measuring across all the social media platforms on which your brand posts, you can get an informed view of how your audiences are perceiving and engaging with your brand, and it will also show which platforms are better avenues for connecting with your audience.

• Earned media. Rather than originally created content posted on your brand’s own platform, this refers to articles about your brand published by media outlets, but it also includes consumer-generated content like online reviews and YouTube videos. By tracking your brand’s earned media, you can see how others outside your brand talk about you, and you can also track how many referrals and conversions come from these external pieces.

Why Brand Awareness Measurement Must Be Included in Your Brand Health Tracker

Brand tracking is an investment in your brand’s’ health. A brand tracking program asks real consumers about “if” and “how” they view and engage with your brand and its competitors. The brand tracker monitors responses to these questions over time and delivers real insights that can help you make educated and confident decisions about your marketing and product development.

A brand health tracking program is an essential component for any business or organization that wants to grow and succeed.

If you’re already using a brand health tracker, it’s smart to strategically incorporate brand awareness metrics (like the ones listed above). Some of your existing tracker infrastructure might tangentially touch on brand awareness, but emphasizing that lens will ensure you’re not overlooking how your customers enter the first stage of their engagement and buying journey with your brand.

How Measuring Brand Awareness Translates Into Business Outcomes

Returning to the questions posed above: Can your audiences recognize your brand (who you are, what you do, what you stand for) when they hear your name? Do they think immediately of your brand when they think about a specific product or category? Measuring your brand awareness can help you pinpoint the answers to these questions – and understand what needs to be done to move the needle forward on both of them.

Brand awareness insights can identify new market opportunities, as well as potential threats from competitors. They can also point the way toward new potential strategic partnerships that will further enhance your brand’s visibility, perception and awareness with your target market. By improving audience targeting, you can also lower customer acquisition costs, helping both the costs and revenue sides of your balance sheet.

With these insights grounding and guiding your decision-making, you won’t be flying blind anymore and can steer your brand to even greater heights.

FAQs

1. What is the difference between brand awareness and brand recognition?
   Brand awareness is a broader term that encompasses brand recognition, which is specific to how instantly recognizable your brand and/or products are based on the logo, name or other identifying information. Brand recognition is the ideal next step after building brand awareness.

2. What role does branding play in brand awareness?
   Branding is the curation and promotion of your brand itself; it’s the thing that is shared with your audience to build brand awareness. It includes your brand’s name, logo, images, voice, values, associations, connotations and other characteristics unique to how you present your brand.

3. Can small businesses build brand awareness on a limited budget?
   Of course! Every brand needs to build brand awareness to succeed. Small businesses with a limited budget can invest in things like printed collateral (posters, flyers, billboards) and advertisements on TV, social media and/or the local newspaper. But free word-of-mouth through building relationships and loyalty with your customers can be just as effective at building brand awareness.

You Need a Trusted Co-pilot

Don’t fly blind, and don’t fly alone. Material’s insights driven strategy services leverage extensive research, behavioral science and analytics capabilities to illuminate and predict what consumers really want and will do. We help organizations uncover rich human insights to answer critical questions and unlock customer-centric growth.

Want to learn more about how Material can help your brand awareness measurement get you where you want to go? Reach out today.