Brand awareness is key to any business growth. Companies with higher brand awareness tend to be bought more frequently and favored more by consumers. But how exactly do we measure brand awareness?
In this article and guide, we’ll dive into what is brand awareness, why it’s important, and how you can measure it.
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What is Brand awareness?
Brand awareness is an overall term that describes consumers’ familiarity with a brand and it’s products/services. Brand awareness is the degree to which a brand is memorable and identifiable to its intended audience, under various circumstances.
Brands with strong brand awareness mean they have unique, salient, and positive mental associations with consumers.
Brand awareness is a very effective marketing tactic that causes customers to acquire a natural preference for a brand and its products. It is at the core of most marketing strategies to make a brand recognized and memorable, as it is a primary driver of brand trust and, eventually, sales generation.
Why do we need to measure brand awareness?
Brand recognition familiarizes the public with a product and distinguishes it from competing brands. Businesses with a high level of brand recognition are likely to earn more profits, as consumers are more likely to purchase recognizable brands than unfamiliar ones. 59% of people prefer to purchase from well-known brands.
Brand recognition leads to trust, thus the more our brand is recognized, the more successful your brand or business will be. It is the basis for attracting a client audience and assisting them in understanding and becoming accustomed to your products and services, hence growing your brand’s equity.
Is brand awareness the same as brand equity?
Brand awareness and brand equity are two independent but linked marketing concepts. Brand awareness is the degree to which consumers are familiar with and able to identify a brand. Brand equity, on the other hand, refers to the commercial value of a brand. Consumers’ positive or negative view of a brand is based on their interactions with and experiences with the brand.
Brand awareness measures how well-known a brand is, but brand equity measures the value people place on a brand. Other elements, such as the quality of the product or service and the customer experience, can also play a part in developing brand equity, in addition to brand recognition.
Simply put, Brand awareness is dependent on the strength of the brand node or trace in memory, which can be measured as the consumer’s ability to recognise the brand under various circumstances. It is an essential but not necessarily sufficient step in the process of constructing brand equity.
How to measure awareness with social media
You may assess brand awareness on social media using a range of tools and techniques, such as the following:
- Track the number of social media followers, engagements, and engagement rates on your social profiles and handles. This can give you a sense of whether the interest level of your brand is growing.
- Monitor social media mentions of your brand. This can be accomplished manually by searching for your brand name and relevant terms, or automatically by employing a social media monitoring program that can track brand mentions across several social platforms.
- Track the conversations surrounding your brand with hashtags. Encourage your followers to use a branded hashtag when they publish brand-related material or mention your brand. Then, you can search for that hashtag to determine how many people are using it and what they’re saying about your brand.
- Analyze the sentiment of brand-related social media posts. This can help you determine whether individuals have favorable or unfavorable connections with your brand, as well as what variables may be impacting their impressions.
- Measure the share of feed and share of impressions on various platforms. This data is sometimes only available through the platform reps. For e.g. Only a LinkedIn rep will be able to inform you about the share of feed/impressions.
In general, the key to evaluating brand awareness on social media is to routinely track and evaluate key data and communicate with your audience to comprehend their impressions of your company. This can assist you in identifying possibilities to enhance the exposure and reputation of your brand on social media.
How to measure brand awareness with qualitative research
You can use a range of qualitative research methodologies, including as focus groups, interviews, and surveys, to gauge brand awareness. These techniques can provide important insight into consumers’ perceptions and interactions with your brand.
- Conduct focus groups with a representative group of your target market’s consumers. This can provide significant insights regarding your brand’s recognition and the elements that may be impacting consumers’ perceptions of it.
- Conduct one-on-one interviews with knowledgeable consumers of your brand. Inquire about their familiarity with your brand and their previous interactions with it. This can provide in-depth insights into how consumers view your brand and the elements that may be impacting their perceptions.
- Utilize surveys to collect input from a greater number of consumers. Surveys can be conducted in-person or online and might contain questions regarding consumers’ brand awareness and perceptions. This can provide a wide picture of your brand’s recognition and the elements that may be impacting consumer opinions.
Overall, the key to measuring brand awareness using qualitative research methods is to ask the correct questions and carefully examine the responses to acquire insight into how customers perceive your brand. This might help you uncover possibilities to enhance the exposure and reputation of your brand.
What important questions to ask in an awareness survey
Here are 3 important questions to include in your brand awareness surveys:
- What brand of [the category class] comes to your mind first? – This helps you to measure top-of-mind brand awareness
- What are all the brands of [the category class] that come to your mind? – This is also referred to as unaided awareness.
- Here’s a list of brands in [the category class], which one do you know? – This is also known as aided or prompted.
16 key metrics and KPIs to measure brand awareness
Here’s a consolidated, exhaustive list of metrics and KPIs you can use to measure your brand awareness efforts.
- Brand lift studies on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok.
- Engagement rates on social media
- Number of followers on social media handles
- Website traffic growth
- Branded search term growth
- Impression share
- Share of feed
- Media Mentions
- Social media shares and mentions
- Increase in hashtag followers and usage
- Increase in referrals (self-reported)
- Increase in direct source traffic in web analytics
- Increase in the number of backlinks
- Number of mentions from analyst and news coverage
- Number of positive reviews on review sites
- Qualitative studies and user research.
- Views of content
Conclusion
Brand recognition is crucial to the overall success of a business. It can aid in establishing your brand in the industry, creating favorable associations with it, and boosting client trust and loyalty. Intangible assets, such as brand equity and awareness, now account for 90% of the total assets in S&P500. Investing in a brand and measuring it over a mid-long term is the key growth driver for companies today. Brand building needs to be paired with performance marketing. If you’re a B2B marketer, we’ve written about how you can build brand awareness for B2B industries here. Don’t miss out, include brand awareness in your 2023 marketing strategy.
