Not sure how to measure brand awareness most effectively? While the concept might seem vague, brand awareness metrics are important. Brand awareness is a measure of how familiar your target customer is with your brand, and how well they recognize it. Establishing good brand awareness with your target market is incredibly valuable, helping you market your products and services more effectively. It also fosters trust and creates association between customers and your brand.
Now that you have a better understanding of what brand awareness is and why it’s important, read on to discover how to measure brand awareness and get ready to cultivate key insights you can use to spread the good word about your products, services, and the company behind them.
Create a customer survey
The best way to measure brand awareness is by going directly to the source: your target audience. Brands in all industries create and distribute customer surveys to gain insight into how customers found you, as well as the places they recall seeing your company. As you craft your customer survey, decide whether you’re assessing brand recall or unprompted brand recognition. Do you want to see if your target customer knows exactly what your brand does and better understand their sentiments towards you? Use your goals to guide you as you craft questions for your survey.
Also, consider how you will distribute your survey. Today’s consumers are different—with attention spans shorter than ever, traditional surveys don’t get the engagement level you need to get honest, actionable brand awareness metrics. Many brands are turning to alternative survey tools and distribution methods, like Voiceform’s voice surveys. These surveys help brands hear their customers’ true opinions and feelings, collecting data that feels more like a conversation. It’s the best way to cultivate honest, thoughtful data that can help you accurately measure brand awareness, among many other key insights.
Examine social media for brand awareness metrics
If your brand is on social media platforms—and it should be—you have access to a wealth of metrics and robust analytics tools that can provide you with significant brand awareness insights. Whether you’re using organic or paid methods to spread the word about your brand, look to social metrics for information about your target audience.
Social platforms can deliver several useful KPIs for brand awareness, including impressions, likes, shares, comments, and more. You can also determine whether your brand awareness is positive or negative, and whether that awareness is motivating people to follow your accounts and engage. Some key brand awareness metrics to look at on social media include:
- Tracking how much your content is viewed, including repeat views.
- Monitoring the number of likes, comments, and shares your posts receive.
- Checking the number of times people hashtag your brand in their posts.
Look at search volume data
If you’re working to build brand awareness on Google or other search engines, look at the search volume around your business and your target industry keywords. With this insight, you can discover how many people are searching for your company by name, as well as the products or solutions you offer.
There are several online tools at your disposal to measure these searches, including Google Trends, Google Keyword Planner, MOZ, and SEMrush. By plugging in your business name and your target keywords, you can see how your search volume ranks against your competitors. This data is useful for creating targeted, informed campaigns that help you build awareness around specific keywords.
Check referral traffic and backlinks
You can strengthen your brand awareness with more than just your customers—building awareness with other businesses and industry publications helps, too. By measuring the number of your brand’s referral links, you can determine the extent to which other brands are acquainted with you and are willing to share your name with their visitors.
You can discover key insights into referral traffic and backlinks in Google Analytics, but make sure to look at your bounce rates, since inappropriate referral links can sometimes do more harm than good. Look at links that generate real traffic—visitors who are actually interested in your products and services—and build better relationships with those brands or publications through guest posting, commenting on blogs, or any other strategy that works for you.
Look at website traffic
If you want to use your website traffic to measure brand awareness, make sure you’re looking in the right places. It’s easy with the help of Google Analytics—it tracks the number of people who typed your URL into their address bar or used a browser bookmark. While you can’t determine what proportion of visitors arrived through search already knowing your brand, over time you can measure the following:
- Increase in website sessions for new vs. returning users.
- Increase of organic vs. paid search traffic.
- Increase in email traffic.
Research your mentions
A “mention” refers to any place where your brand name appears, including blogs, publications, social media pages, websites, and more. Many brands invest in automated software that constantly scans the internet for mentions—they simplify the process of finding and applying these mentions to your current brand awareness campaigns.
In general, the more people are talking about your brand, the better your brand recall is. When you understand who is talking about your brand, how often they’re doing it, and who makes up their audience, you can make more informed decisions about your future campaigns.
Measure KPIs for brand awareness with Voiceform
Branding in general is not an exact science, and neither is learning how to measure brand awareness. Luckily, there are some tools that make the process easier, like Voiceform. Voiceform’s innovative platform helps brands collect honest, direct and insightful information and opinions from their target audience. There’s no better way to measure brand awareness or any other metric you need to gauge to push your brand further. Get in touch with our team to schedule your free demo and see Voiceform’s unique data collection capabilities in action.
