Measuring brand awareness often times divides marketing teams. It is viewed by some as a pointless exercise — an accumulation of vanity metrics that bears no relation to marketing ROI.
At Sticky Branding, we believe that one of the strongest drivers in getting customers to buy is brand recall. Simply getting customers to know your brand, like it, and trust it will increase their likelihood to buy!
Increasing awareness is important. However, brand awareness has always been one of the hardest things to measure. Here is how we approach this thorny topic.
1. Monitor Website Traffic
Measuring your website traffic over time can reveal patterns and insights into your brand awareness.
By closely following Google Analytics, you can track the number of people who typed your URL into their address bar, used a browser bookmark, or clicked a link in an untracked email or offline document. These are people who are actually looking for your brand by its name. They know you, and they are looking for you.
These patterns will help focus on what your traffic is looking for and adjust as needed.
2. Look at Your Site’s Search Volume Data
It’s important to check the volume of searches for your brand name, and to track it over time to see if search volumes are increasing. If they are not increasing it may be time to come up with a new SEO or PPC strategy.
3. Use Social Media Listening
One of the most effective tactics is to look at where people are already talking about your services or products: social media, blogs, websites, and podcasts. A free tool that we use for blog and keyword monitor is TalkWalker Alerts.
Social listening takes you a step further. HootSuite or Sprout Social or other tools allow you to listen to online, organic conversations about your brand across social media and the web. Listening to these unsolicited opinions allows you to hear consumer’s thoughts in a neutral environment.
So, Which Metrics Should You Measure?
Mentions: Monitor the number of times your brand has been mentioned online, and you can discover the number of conversations involving your brand. Track the changes over time.
You can also track conversations that do not include @mentions or happen outside the official, owned channels of your brand.
Reach: Your reach is the potential number of people that your mentions will be seen by. It takes into account the number of followers of each account who mentions you.
This is one of the reasons influencers should be given extra attention during marketing campaigns; their large audience means anything shared by them has the potential to be seen by a lot of eyes.
Engagement: For some, engagement is beyond awareness. It can be important to track because it will provide an indicator of the effectiveness of awareness.
You will want to know if people are actively digesting your content rather than watching it slip by on their news feed.
What Should You Be Measuring Against?
Benchmarks: In order to track changes in brand awareness you need to benchmark against your baseline metrics. Generally three to six months is a good amount of time to spot any natural highs and lows, as well as any discrepancies.
Shares: Benchmarking your metrics will tell you if the awareness of your brand has increased, but you will not be getting the full picture. You need to establish the proportion of conversations concerning your industry that are centered around your brand.
Increasing the number of customers that can recall your brand is integral to success.
In the past, the challenge was gaining an accurate insight into the level of your awareness, but social media listening and website analytics have simplified the process, while supplying richer data.
Need help understanding how to both monitor and grow the buzz around your brand? We’re here to help!