Today’s marketers are increasingly pressed to find the right tools and techniques to measure their efforts. That’s especially true when it comes to assessing brand awareness, as this concept is essential to consumers’ decision-making processes and sales.
Awareness is not an abstract or vanity metric, but one that plays a significant role in your company’s ROI: 89% of marketers say brand awareness is their top goal, and 82% of investors want the companies they invest in to have a strong brand. In fact, 66% of marketers believe their companies will sacrifice growth instead of hurting the brand.
Brand awareness is an important quantification for companies across the board. Here are some key metrics to use when measuring brand awareness.
More from PostFunnel on brand awareness:
What We Can Learn From: A YouTuber Launching A D2C Coffee Brand
What Makes a Brand Voice and How it Affects Your Customers
Building Your Brand Personae
Web traffic
Website visitors have proven they are (at least minimally) interested in learning more about your company. They’ve landed there either by searching for your site or by clicking on an ad or CTA. There are plenty of things you can learn from your web traffic data, but regarding brand awareness, traffic can be studied for increases after a campaign, contest, event, or other marketing initiative.
Whether it’s a CRM, a service like Google Analytics, or a combination thereof, find the tools that can help keep track of your site traffic. You’ll also be able to see where the traffic came from to figure out which pages, search terms, or campaigns are enhancing brand awareness. If you want to better qualify those visitors, look at direct traffic.
Social interactions
There are several types of social interactions useful for measuring brand awareness, including your brand’s social presence. That means using tools to calculate how often people are talking about your brand across social sites. You’ll not only be able to see how many people are discussing your brand and how frequently, but you’ll also get real insight into their opinions of it.
Social mentions, shares, and reach are some of the best metrics to track for brand awareness. The first covers any time a consumer mentions the brand, with or without tagging the company. Those can be more difficult to track, especially if they don’t tag your page. Social shares are easier to measure and include shares of your company’s post, as well as mentions in posts from others. Finally, the reach tells you how many people have seen those mentions and shares based on the original poster’s audience. The bigger their audience/followers, the broader the reach.
You’ll need to rely on more than @mentions or discussions on your brand’s official channels to track all of the above, according to Brandwatch, which says that 96% of conversation take place outside these official media channels. To track all interactions, you can use services like Brandwatch, Talkwalker and Linkfluence. For the most accurate results, be sure to set benchmarks before trying to measure brand awareness — including common dips or increases you’ve begun to see during an extended amount of time.
Media coverage
Beyond social media, you should also be tracking what other media outlets are saying about your brand. The overall accuracy of the old adage “all press is good press” is another discussion, but when it comes to brand awareness, everything counts.
It’s easy to track any article mentioning your brand, whether a bylined piece written by your team or an editorial article from a news outlet. Also, monitor pieces about any influencers or important staff members of your company.
Plenty of online platforms are out there to help you track your media mentions. Tools like Sprout Social, LexisNexis and Google Alerts will let you know when there’s news about your brand.
Backlinks
In addition to being useful for boosting SEO, backlinks are also a good metric to watch in terms of brand awareness. The site or author that added the link to your site must consider your company (or at least the content it’s linking to) important, helping build your brand authority.
When visitors click the links, they will start to associate your brand with topics related to your product. Backlinks will also help drive web traffic, which we’ve already mentioned is an important metric.
You can use tools like Neil Patel’s site, SE Ranking, Google Analytics, and Ahrefs to track your backlinks. These will show you not only which sites are linking to you, but also allow you to calculate the size of the audience being reached.
Video views
This metric is pretty straightforward, but it can tell you a great deal about your level of achieved brand awareness. With a million hours of video being watched on Facebook alone daily, this type of media is clearly popular with consumers. Checking your video views is one of the most cost-effective ways of measuring brand awareness, and videos also have the highest potential for bringing in reach and impressions.
To track this one, simply look at the number of views your videos are earning. You can host video directly on your site, or use a video sharing platform like YouTube. Be sure to optimize the video and share it on social media and email campaigns.
Do consumers know about your brand?
The only way to know how you’re performing with brand awareness is to track metrics that point to that goal. Anything that shows consumer engagement and interest is a key indicator that your efforts are leading to awareness.
