You can measure your brand awareness through surveys, web traffic, search volume, and social listening.
The marketing world is divided on the value of measuring brand awareness. Some consider it a pointless accumulation of vain data that does not improve an organization’s marketing ROI.
However, another school of thought disagrees, insisting that one way to attract consumers to buy a product is the company’s ability to recall the product.
Bryan sharp one of the proponents of measuring brand awareness highlights that you can improve brand recall with consistent logo and tagline display, traditional mass marketing, and celebrity endorsements.
If your goal is to convert prospective customers into loyal customers and defenders of your brand, you do well to invest in brand awareness.
Several companies are willing to pay lots of money to enhance their product recall and brand awareness.
For instance, Standard Chartered Bank and Nike are spending millions of dollars to sponsor Liverpool’s kit, though you do not expect all Liverpool fans to buy from these corporations.
The value of these sponsorships is that when a potential client thinks of buying boots or investing in a bank, the Liverpool deal heightens their chance to recall the brand and buy their products.
Therefore, increasing brand awareness helps sales, meaning that measuring it to determine what works and what doesn’t is also important. Nevertheless, it is not easy to measure brand awareness.
What is brand awareness?
Brand awareness describes how familiar your target audience is with your product or service. It is not similar to customer attraction and retention, though they are related.
Some brands confuse brand awareness with marketing strategies, and they launch failed products. You do not want to make brand awareness mistakes and fail to differentiate your products from the competition.
If potential customers don’t know you, they may not enter your sales funnel. Brand awareness quickly grabs the buyer’s attention when they see something similar to your logo or brand name. Therefore, it enables you to acquire new customers and retain old ones to keep competition at bay.
The next phase on how to increase brand awareness after a customer learns about your business name is to educate them about the product. You want your customers to have an in-depth understanding of your product, services, and other aspects of your business.
For example, you will agree that you can recognize Coca-Cola’s or Google’s logo from a distance. Though these brands have regretted some products, many of their products have struck accord with many people.
Building brand awareness can propel your customer to brand recognition, allowing you to generate leads. Eventually, it enables you to increase sales.
Ways of Measuring brand awareness
You do not need to invest in research agencies to measure brand awareness. Though it is not easy to track your brand, you can use these simple ways to measure brand awareness successfully.
1. Surveys
You can conduct a survey using telephone calls, email, or a website and ask your customer what they have heard about your brand. You can also ask random people if they know your brand. This way, you understand how potential customers hear and recall your brand.
2. Examine your website traffic
You can also measure your brand awareness by examining your website traffic for some time; however, be sure to look in the right place. Data from Google Analytica, especially those clicking your link or typing your web address on their search engines, can help you measure your brand awareness.
Of course, not all brands sell their products online. Some rely on supermarkets; thus, website data may give an inaccurate brand awareness measurement.
3. Consider search volume data.
You can also measure brand awareness by looking at Google Trends and Google Adwords Keyword Planner to examine your brand name search volume. You can track this data over a period to see whether it increases.
4. Employ social listening
Social media pages can help you know if people are already talking about you. Social listening enables your team to listen to organic conversations on social media about your brand.
Social listening allows you to know consumers’ naturally expressed thoughts. These responses overcome one of the survey’s problems- response bias- meaning you get a true picture of your brand awareness.
Some metrics you can measure in determining the effectiveness of your brand awareness include:
- Volume of mentions
- Customer engagement
- Reach
- Video metrics
- Overall lead increase
How to build brand awareness
You should remember that it takes time to build brand awareness. You may reach a point where people know your logo and brand, but they are not connected to your products. Effective brand awareness should create a strategic bond that connects your customers to your brand.
You first need to establish a proven strategy. To beat the competition and make your brand memorable, ensure your strategy is creative and unique. Additionally, you do well to focus on customer engagement, brand recall, and define the target market, especially if you are a newbie. Focusing on the audience will significantly promote brand awareness.
Tip: Begin focusing on brand recall before you start to build brand awareness and ensure your marketing tactics suit your brand.
7 proven ways to boost your business’ brand awareness
When a business lacks brand awareness, it may be focusing its efforts on irrelevant options or using the wrong tools.
Building brand awareness requires tools such as relevant exposure and repetition. You want your business name edged in the minds of your target audience.
However, you want to exercise caution so that your brand awareness strategies do not irritate your target audience. Now with this knowledge, let’s discuss the top 7 proven strategies to increase your business brand awareness.
1. Networking
Networking brings marketing to your business’ doorstep. You can effectively use your network to create or host events, thus improving your visibility. How can you do networking? Here are some ways:
· Guest blogging
Guest blogging grants you access to a new customer base. Your blog can be shared on various social media pages if you include it as a social media post, thus expanding your audience.
· Industry partnerships and referral programs
Referral marketing can help you increase your products’ sales ratio. You could create a reward system like a coupon code for every two friends a customer leads to your site. Customers are likely to trust what their friends say more than what the business says about itself.
· Press release
Sharing press releases highlighting updates and launches of your business can help you reach an untapped audience. Furthermore, many publications have social media accounts where they share your press release as a blog or news on their page. They get the content; you get the promotion and viewership, hence a win-win situation.
2. Content Marketing
You have probably the expression “content is king.” That is also true about what content can do for your brand awareness. You will likely attract more customers to your purchase chain if you produce several optimized contents.
How to create converting content:
- Regularly produce interactive and shareable content
- Use informative and eye-catching infographics and multimedia
- Remarket your content and use email taglines
Search engines reward regularity, so ensure you post regularly and that your content is SEO friendly.
3. Invest in social media
Whether your company is B2C or B2B, social media platforms offer you an ideal opportunity to target your audience. Sites such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, LinkedIn, and WhatsApp provide companies with a free-of-charge platform to build their brand awareness.
People spend an unprecedented amount of time on social media every day. Your company can capture this audience by regularly posting engaging content. Check out the social media activities of leading brands such as Starbucks and Chanel and emulate them.
Other ways to improve your brand awareness via social media include:
- Social posting and publishing
- Social media contests and giveaways
- Content repurposing
- Creative commenting
4. Hold an event
Live events are an exciting way to capture your customers’ and prospective customers’ attention. You can host a live event for a Christmas or summer party. It could also benefit your business when launching or promoting new products.
Live events give you face time with prospective clients since they can see your brand’s look and personality. You could also run a workshop demonstrating your professional expertise.
5. Exhibit Yourself
This method could be expensive and requires careful planning to ensure a return on investment. Exhibiting requires creativity to draw people to your stand and offer them value. This way, visitors will discover your brand and what it stands for.
One way to successful exhibit is to organize a competition with giveaway prizes. People love getting free things and competition. Ensure the giveaway prizes are branded with your name and logo.
6. Do a PR campaign
PR campaign requires that you develop newsworthy information that local or national media are likely to pick. Press coverage is free advertising with editorials drawing potential customers to visit your website.
The PR campaign could be centered on a unique product launch, new sales trend, or an interesting personal story about why you established the business. You could catch the relevant journalists’ attention by conducting a credible study in your field and publishing its result.
7. Launch promotional merchandise
Giving your customers small corporate gifts to thank them for their support can help you to improve your brand awareness. Some gifts to promote your brand include branded pens, reminding your customers about your business contact detail and name as long as they use the gift.
However, do not provide cheap gifts; cheap and cheerful is a false economy. Giving out cheap gifts can be counter-productive, presenting your brand as low-quality and short-lived.
You simply need creativity to make your promotional merchandise strategy effective. Make the gifts unique and personalized. Your customers will be posting these products online, thus giving you additional publicity.
Conclusion
It is possible to measure brand awareness and gain insight into what strategy works and what does not work. Once you know what is giving greater publicity, you want to invest there and promote your products. If customers can easily recall your products, you have a higher chance of selling to them.
Do you think it is worth investing in measuring brand awareness?
