How to measure your brand awareness

As any business marketer will know, building brand awareness will be at the heart of every marketing campaign they create, especially initially when launching a new brand.

How you go about introducing your new product or service to your prospective customer’s matters, mainly because first impressions count, so you will want to make the right first impression to successfully build upon.

How your brand is recognised and perceived will make or break its success, so this is why building brand awareness is so important. But how do you know that you are doing it right?

How can you measure your success so that you can do further work to improve your brand recognition?

Why your ongoing brand awareness efforts matter

Your brand identity should leave a positive long-term impression in the minds of your target audience. Continuing to build your brand awareness will help to raise the chances that your ideal customers will think of you first when looking to buy the product or service you offer.

Brand building is a multi-faceted and continuous process that involves trust and credibility, but you need to know that what you are doing is proving effective. 

It is not just about having an attractive, accessible website or eye-catching logo, although creating a memorable logo is an important element. It is making sure that you are sending the right message and attracting the right audience.

You need to check behind the scenes to test and measure your marketing approaches. This means being very organised and precise with your different marketing campaigns so you can see the impact that any changes, tweaks and new ideas are having on your audience and the company’s bottom line.

Looking deeper for answers

As a marketing manager, you can appreciate how improving brand awareness and recognition will encourage customers to recall your brand name and choose to buy your product or service. 

However, without hard facts and statistics to present to the board of directors, you will have a hard time proving that your efforts have helped to increase the company’s bottom line. 

It can be very challenging to justify spending money on raising your brand awareness by simply looking at your overall business revenue. 

You need to go deeper to be able to measure how your brand awareness impacts your bottom line and to ensure that you are getting a good ROI.

Looking for the right metrics 

Firstly, you should take a look at the direct traffic numbers coming to your website. This traffic is coming from users that will have typed your web address directly into their browser.

Check your Google Analytics to monitor your direct traffic numbers. These are the users that specifically remember your brand and your web address meaning that they have an excellent brand recall, which is an important part of your aim to raise brand awareness.

Your direct traffic number is an important metric to watch and monitor as you roll out new marketing campaigns or make any major changes to your marketing approach. 

You can measure the impact that your marketing is having on your direct traffic numbers to see if you are going in the right direction with any new approaches or ideas. 

Should you see these numbers drop off to a great extent, that will be a clear indication that your brand awareness levels are dropping and you need to address things quickly.

Social media marketing

There is no denying that social media platforms are one of the most important routes for building brand recognition and trust.

According to information gathered by Brandwatch.com, women use social media less often than men for business reasons. However, when it comes to sharing more personal information, social networking and looking up information on brands, products and services, women dominate here.

Depending on whether your target audience is male or female, or both, it helps to know that men use social media to perform research, make contacts and to use information to boost their status.

However, more than half of women are actively using social media to follow their favourite brands, and to access special deals or offers from brand names, compared to only 36% of men.

Social media listening 

Your social media statistics are one of the most important sources to measure your brand awareness. It is easy to simply ‘listen’ to online conversations where your brand is being discussed.

It is a great way to gather information about your customer’s opinions and experiences with your product or service and gives you a good overall view of what impression your brand is giving off. 

You can look at the following social media metrics:

Brand mentions

This is where you will see customers using your brand name in their posts. You can gather useful customer feedback about the quality, functionality and any possible issues that customers are having that you are not aware of.

Track your brand mentions using useful tools such as ‘Mention‘ or ‘Google Alerts‘ using specific keywords, brand name, product name etc.

Social media reach

You can find out how far your social media message is reaching by using a sharing counting tool like SharedCount. This handy tool tracks your web address shares, social likes, Pinterest pin shares, and more.

Google Analytics

As already mentioned before to find your direct web traffic numbers, Google Analytics is ideal for measuring your brand awareness as it reveals all of your traffic sources. 

You can use it to dig deep and find how engaged your audience is with your brand and narrows down the user demographics to give you better insights.

Using Google Analytics, click on ‘Acquisition.’ Click on ‘All Traffic’ and then ‘Channels’. This will generate data showing you where your traffic is coming from. 

It is extremely helpful to know where the bulk of your web traffic is originating from. The easiest way to narrow down your biggest source of traffic is to use Google Analytics.

• Click on ‘Acquisition’ 
• Go to ‘All Traffic’
• Find and click on ‘Sources/Medium’

You will see a display of statistics showing exactly which sources are where your brand awareness is strongest. 

Be vigilant

It would be wise to keep an eye on these statistics as you can measure changes easily. Should you launch a new social media marketing campaign then you would expect to see the top sources of traffic coming from the social platforms that you used. 

If you do at least one fresh analysis per week then you will be able to build up a picture about what marketing approaches work the best over time. 

By carefully watching to see if your direct traffic numbers suddenly peak, then you will know that you have hit on a marketing strategy that is effectively boosting your brand awareness.

If you need more help or guidance with your digital business, please don’t hesitate to contact us.