Brand awareness is an intangible asset in human subconsciousness, and it is heightened every moment we make purchase decisions. The brand is nothing without audiences. The more attractive your company is in the marketplace, the more likely it is that consumers will make a purchase. Data is therefore is a crucial resource for every company, as is brand tracking.
Brand tracking gathers insights on your brand’s health and customer feedback. It analyses the data and identifies the aspects of your products and services that need change and those that are in line with your customers' needs and wants.
Beyond the capability to advance marketing campaigns, brand tracking has some rational advantages that ultimately translate to business growth.
1. Customer Insights– Tracking your brand allows you to generate insights and behaviour patterns of your customers. The data generated will help you build customized marketing campaigns that resonate with the consumer thus developing brand awareness.
2. Customer Loyalty and Retention – By analysing buyer personas, you can ensure your brand message is connecting with your target audience on an emotional level. Brand tracking helps you extend customer loyalty and adjust the existing strategy to address the needs of the user.
3. Premium Brand Positioning – By tracking brand awareness you can gauge customer loyalty and acknowledge when you achieve a premium brand position. By highlight these wins you can establish credibility and subsequently increase sales.
4. Product Innovation - By continuously tracking your brand, you can assess its performance over time and be more receptive to trends that can aid future product releases.
How to measure brand awareness?
You’re right — brand awareness can’t be explicitly measured through data and statistics when you depend on traditional marketing activity. But luckily, on the digital advertisement side, you can review feedback and mix data that’ll help you discover patterns in terms of market position and consumer engagement. Further, raw data is available in plenty, from mobile devices, social media, and other sources, channels and touchpoints.
There are two data collection methodologies, qualitative and quantitative data, to assess brand health constantly and gauge your brand awareness accordingly.
Quantitative Brand Awareness Metrics
These are the types of metrics focused on numerical figures, directly indicating growth for easy to understand scenarios
1. Direct traffic. Firstly, direct traffic is the number of people who intentionally typed the URL of your website in the search bar and visited directly. Your direct traffic number shows you how many people know about your brand and whether your marketing is prompting people to visit your website. You can use Google Analytics to measure direct traffic over time, see referral sources and break down your visitors by specific demographics and behaviours.
2. Site traffic numbers. Site traffic is a valuable tool to gauge how many people are visiting your website, checking your content and for how long are they spending time on your website. The site traffic number does not give you an idea of where people are coming from, but it allows you to understand what campaigns generated the traffic. Online tools like Keywords and Google Analytics allow you to analyse what keywords people are searching, their rating and how you can capitalize on them in your brand awareness campaigns.
3. Social engagement. Engagement is known by the number of followers, likes, retweets, comments, and reach. The engagement allows you to analyse how your content is being received by the consumers, are they socializing with it and are they wanting to follow your brand. Each social platform has analytic tools to observe the performance of your posts and that you can leverage to strengthen your social engagement strategy.
Qualitative Brand Awareness Metrics
These metrics look inside customer behaviour and their voice toward the subject matter or company value drivers. It measures customer satisfaction and where brands are successfully connecting with consumers.
1. Searching Google and setting up Google Alerts. Especially when you are using PR techniques, third-party media news or press mention, you will get a swift response to how your brand is performing online through social conversations.
2. Social listening. Along with social media management tools, apps are available to monitor organic mentions and engagement. This activity monitors the tagging of your brand, mentions in audience comments, or hashtag usage of your brand on posts.
3. Surveys. Capturing interaction data and feedback from your customers and audience is key to gaining insights on their behaviour and buying patterns. Surveys data can be gathered by adopting a focus group or leveraging digital survey tools. Surveys are beneficial to get an understanding of what consumers think of your brand, do they know of it, do they purchase it. You can use online survey tools and share the links on on social media or directly with your customers to get a good number of responses.
Follow these quantitative and qualitative metrics to equip yourself with data to understand your brands' awareness amongst the target audience.
Net Promoter Score to form single survey questions
The rating scale knowns as Net Promoter Score or NPS can easily measure responses to questions by groups of people on the scale of 0-10. For example, by asking how likely consumers are to recommend a brand to family and friends. Or why consumers are not buying your product? By conducting surveys or interviews you can find out what features of your product are popular, if the pricing is working, is the product placement working?
Final Thoughts
In general, a brand tracker’s primary purpose is to measure your brand's delta in the market over time, across marketing campaigns, and during market evolutions.
Most companies run their tracker annually or semi-annually to decipher advantages and get a snapshot of brands performance against a competitor or the shift in consumer behaviour.
Measuring brand awareness is like a puzzle, and a bi-annual or annual frequency allows enough time to allocate research resourcing and budgets, and harvest enough data to action with proper guidance.
Brand awareness doesn't have to be an alarming KPI or require permutations combinations to determine results. A good brand awareness plan should deliver success that will ensure that your business is recognised.
Next Increasing brand awareness to achieve CX success. Read on.
