Brand awareness is something that all businesses have – it can be a logo, a slogan, or even a particular colour – it’s what makes you instantly recognisable to your audience. Many businesses want to know how they’re perceived, yet they don’t have the knowledge on how to measure brand awareness.
You may be surprised to learn that measuring brand awareness is not as difficult as you think. In this blog, we answer the question of exactly how to measure brand awareness by sharing five strategies that actually work. First, let’s look at what brand awareness is.
What is brand awareness?
Brand awareness is all about the recognition of your brand from your target audience. However, it’s not just about whether or not they’ve heard of your business, it’s also about their knowledge of your offering. More specifically what your product or service is, and what they do.
For example, when you think of a clothing brand, what brands first come to mind? There might be a select few brands that instantly pop in your head and that’s because these brands have a high level of brand awareness as you instantly recognise their name and the products they offer.
Ideally, you want your brand to be at the top level of your industry. To get to a level which puts you as the primary source of knowledge to your target audience, can take a fair amount of work. However, the hard work will pay off in the long run.
How to measure brand awareness
There are multiple ways to measure brand awareness and the key to successfully measuring brand awareness is to follow strategies that are in tandem with each other. This will allow you to paint the best possible picture of your brand.
1. Use Google Trends
Google Trends is the broadest metric for identifying brand awareness because it has complete knowledge of the internet. It can provide information on what topics are trending in real time and what people are searching for specifically in your industry. With knowledge of this scale at your fingertips, you can get a complete picture of your brand’s perception in the eyes of the public.
Although Google Trends can give you the most wide scale analysis of your brand awareness, it’s important to note that the data doesn’t give you any reasoning behind your brand’s attention. This is why Google Trends is best utilised with other strategies alongside.
2. Gather survey data
With Google Trends being the broadest analysis of your brand awareness, survey data provides perhaps the most in depth analysis of your brand awareness. This is because it gives you the insight of your brand in the eyes of your target audience.
You can use platforms such as Google Forms or SurveyMonkey to gain valuable insights about your brand from your customers. Finding out how your target audience heard about you, or what they best know you for can show you where your business currently stands with your audience. You may even learn that your brand is known for something completely different than what it actually is!
If you’d like to gather survey data on a larger scale, GWI is a valuable tool to use. They have consumer insights from almost 3 billion people worldwide and can give you sector specific insights to make it more relevant to your brand. Once you’ve gathered your data, you can then make alterations to your brand’s digital marketing strategies to hone in on its true values.
3. Utilise social listening tools
Similar to Google Trends, this strategy measures your brand awareness across multiple digital channels. Social listening tools such as Brand24 allow you to analyse the mentions your brand is getting across social media, blogs, forums, videos and much more. Not only that, but it gives you insights into where your brand is getting the most mentions and who is generating those mentions.
With these insights, you can analyse the sentiment and view the context in which your brand is being mentioned. You can also capitalise on this knowledge as you can make informed business decisions that will resonate with your audience.
4. Analyse your social media metrics
Social media provides you with valuable metrics such as the amount of followers, shares, and likes your brand is getting. This will allow you to see first hand how your brand awareness efforts are paying off as you can see the increase in the awareness of your brand in your target market right in front of your eyes.
When it comes to your individual posts, you can analyse the performance of your content in more detail. Focus the engagement, the reach and the reactions to your posts. With this knowledge, you can create similar posts which follow in the direction of your most successful ones. This will then give you a framework for achieving high outreach with your posts.
With almost 5 billion people worldwide using social media, it’s one of the best places to be when it comes to promoting brand awareness!
5. Focus on your website traffic
It’s a fact, website traffic is crucial for brand awareness. Through website traffic, not only can you analyse the amount of visitors your website is getting, but the amount of time they are spending on your website.
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is a tool which analyses the amount of traffic your business is getting, as well as measuring your conversions, engagement and so much more. You can also observe where your visitors are coming from and see if your traffic is increasing or declining. This knowledge can help you identify the reasons behind your web traffic performance and make improvements where necessary.
Want to learn how else you can measure brand awareness?
We hope we’ve answered the question of how to measure brand awareness with our five strategies above. When it comes to brand awareness, it’s important to remember there isn’t a one size fits all approach. All of the above strategies need to be used in conjunction with each other for a complete picture.
There are so many other ways you can measure brand awareness, so if you’d like to learn more, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us. Our talented digital marketing team specialise in improving brand awareness, so be sure to speak to us to learn how we can work together to create the perfect brand for your business.