How to Measure Brand Awareness for Success
By Julia Koh & Syira Junaidi
May 2019
How do you know if your brand campaign is a success? Specifically, do you know the quantifiable measurements that indicate a successful branding? As a marketer, you might be tasked with overseeing a brand awareness campaign. You would need to measure its effectiveness. In this article, we’re going to look at some ways you can measure and track your brand awareness.
We’ve talked about brand awareness before. Basically, it’s the first step towards getting your customers interested in your product. It’s an essential marketing stage because it will determine how much reception your brand will get.
By knowing how your brand awareness efforts are going, you will get crucial information that can help you make better decisions about the next phases of your marketing strategy. Which brand awareness channel got you the best results? Should you change or improve on the least-performing one? How should you engage the customers and further convert them down the marketing funnel?
That’s why it helps to know how these 5 methods can measure brand awareness for you to plan and understand your customers better:
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- Website Traffic
Your company website is the gateway to your brand where all essential information should be accessible to your customers. But, do you also know that you can measure brand awareness by looking at the traffic on your website? Using Google Analytics, you are able to see how many visitors came, which page they visited, how long they stayed and many more observations.Perhaps the most relevant brand awareness metric would be the number of new users that visited. This shows that there are new people who came to your website for the first time, which is an essential metric to prove an increase in exposure and awareness.
Picture credit: Optimize Smart
By tracking website traffic and performance, you can also improve brand awareness. For example, if the bounce rate is shown too high, it means that most of your visitors leave the website without reading or scrolling anything. And that hurts your brand because you’re driving customers away without letting them know who you are.
Therefore, you have to identify what causes the high bounce rate. It could be that your web pages are loading too slowly. Fixing it will ensure your website runs smoothly to serve your customers and helps with your brand awareness.
- Blog Performance
Blogging should be a part of your content marketing strategy. It is a great way to generate traffic into your website and introduce your brand without being too ‘salesy’. Similar to websites, blogging platforms like WordPress allow you to measure brand awareness by looking at the number of visitors, the number of views, and which blog post got the most attention.
Picture credit: wordpress.org
Good blogging also improves SEO, which helps make your brand more visible on search engines. The best blogs would appear on the first page of a Google search whenever the keyword is entered. So you can imagine how that would greatly help with brand awareness.
- Social Media Engagement
Social media is one of the most powerful brand awareness tools, thanks to its sheer number of users. In fact, it is still used by even the biggest brands like AIA and General Electric to maintain brand recognition.If you have a company Facebook page and have admin access, you can go to Facebook Insights and observe your audience behaviour. Things like ‘Page Views’ are helpful to track how far your social media posts had reached out.But perhaps the most helpful measurement of brand awareness would be the amount of ‘Shares’ and ‘Reach’ of each post. ‘Reach’ is how many people come across your post while ‘Shares’ is, as you can guess, how many times your post is shared. These two metrics are valuable to track how much exposure your brand is getting on social media.
- Website Traffic
Picture Credit: Sprout Social
- Keyword Search Volume
Keyword search volume refers to the volume (or number) of searches for a particular keyword in a given timeframe. Keywords are the fuel on which SEO runs. It can be brand names like ‘Lazada’ but it’s also search-related keywords like ‘women’s shirt’ or ‘office renovation’. Things that people type in search bars to look for answers online.To measure how much awareness your brand receives, you can use tools like Keywords Everywhere, BuzzSumo, and Google Trends. Especially for Google Trends, you can track how popular a certain keyword or brand name is. You can even compare it with other keywords to see which of them are searched more online.
In the above example, Lazada is shown to be more popular than Shopee between March and April. Lazada had more exposure in that timeframe, perhaps because they had a big sale in late March. So we can say that Lazada’s campaign had garnered extra attention based on what Google Trends is showing.
- Email Newsletter
Last but not least, email newsletters can be a great way to measure brand awareness. Done right, emails can retain brand recognition by keeping your customers engaged with content, promos, and announcements.So how do you measure brand awareness using emails? MailChimp, SendInBlue, Emma and other email marketing software would usually provide reports of ongoing and completed email campaigns. You can observe the open rates, bounce rates, click rates, and other bits of data relating to the behaviour of your email recipients.
Picture Credit: sendinblue.com
Ideally, you want to see a high amount of opens and a minimal amount of bounces. Open rates are when people clicked on the email to read it. If your email is engaging enough, they might even click on the CTAs or links you have inside. So you have to make sure your newsletters are well-written, attractively-designed, and timely delivered.
