Why It's Important To Learn How to Measure Brand Awareness

Knowing how to measure brand awareness is a useful metric to track, but it's also one of the trickiest. When it comes to evaluating its ROI, a firm figure can be very challenging to identify. While increasing brand awareness is always of benefit, and ensuring that you measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns is critical, knowing how to measure brand awareness can be a lot harder to pin down.

The good news is that there are ways to get a better idea of when you're increasing brand awareness, which makes monitoring significantly easier. If you're looking to gain insights into how to measure brand awareness more effectively, here's everything that you need to know.

Why Should You Measure Brand Awareness?

Business branding needs to be aligned at all times. That means consistency across all of your channels while representing your brand's vision to your target audience.

One of the best ways to learn how to measure brand awareness is to look at the most common mistakes that businesses make when it comes to knowing how to measure brand value and impact. These mistakes are all too common:

● No defining concept of brand awareness: By not defining what you mean by brand awareness, you make it impossible to measure. Are you looking at brand mentions, referral traffic, or social media mentions?

The goal should be to have a defined goal that can be measured and tracked. In a lot of cases, especially for those business owners struggling to work out branding and brand value measurement, outsourcing to a branding agency is often an easy choice to make.

● High content expectations: Content marketing is one of the single most valuable ways to increase brand awareness, but too many businesses have highly unrealistic goals for that content.

Content marketing takes time to have an effect, and no two pieces of content should serve the same goal. Define your content's goal, remain content relevant, and don't panic if the content isn't always driving conversions. Building brand awareness takes time.

● Failure to recognize that awareness affects sales: All marketing campaigns should watch conversion rates. How much conversions grow throughout a campaign will provide you with a defined value. However, campaigns may not have an immediate effect and could lead to conversions weeks or months later. That's why measuring and monitoring are so vital.

Lack of a defined goal and being impatient are the two major mistakes made when working out how to measure brand awareness, but by avoiding these mistakes, you can measure brand awareness far more effectively.

How to Measure Brand Awareness Effectively

You've defined the goals of your brand awareness-raising campaigns and strategies. You're prepared to monitor the results over time. So what are the best ways to monitor and measure brand awareness?

Measure Your Website Traffic

There's always something to be gained by more closely watching your website traffic, but brand awareness is one of the most useful. If you launch a new campaign, strategy, or even a new blog post, watching to see if your website traffic increases can be useful for measuring its effectiveness at raising your brand profile. If site visits go up, then brand awareness is rising.

If your website traffic appears to have plateaued, that could be a sign that you need to start looking at some branding agency services. Google Analytics is the best tool for monitoring website traffic, so make sure that you integrate it into your website so that you have a better idea of how well you're performing.

Monitor Referral Traffic

Referral traffic is always a good indicator that brand awareness is going up. If another website is linking to your web pages, then that's a good sign that your latest campaigns and strategies are increasing your brand reach.

You can then compare your strategies, campaigns, and content to see which is providing you with the most referral traffic. There are lots of software tools that can do this for you automatically, but Google Analytics offers a basic service that is more than up to the task.

Track the Value of Earned Media

If you assign a monetary value to different kinds of earned media mentions (as opposed to paid media), you can clearly define a certain measure of brand awareness. There are tools that will do this for you, such as Smarp, Sociabble, EveryoneSocial, and Kudos.

Tracking earned media can very easily give you a good idea of how brand awareness is growing as the result of specific actions. Ultimately, by tracking the value of your earned media, you can develop a better idea of how discussed and recognized your brand is compared to competitors (although you should remember to look at the context of mentions rather than just the number). Another useful Google resource is Google Trends, which can help ensure that you have a better idea of cross-industry consumer behavior.

Tracking Organic Backlinks

These are fantastic news for your brand, so they should be tracked at all times. Backlinks that you have earned are proof of brand reputation and an indication that your site and your content are offering value.

Backlinks and referral traffic earned through outreach and PR should also be monitored. If traffic from those backlinks is low, it could be an indication that your audience is yet to find you or that there are issues with your social media marketing or your SEO.

Social Media Metrics

Of course, you need to monitor all of the activity on your socials. The number of people following your pages can be an indication of brand awareness, but only if those numbers are engaging (via likes, shares, or comments).

While your follower numbers are an indication of brand value, if you're not getting engagement or conversions, then they are often nothing more than a vanity metric that you need to address. You should always be monitoring any mentions of your brand.

The first step when you learn how to measure brand awareness is to establish a baseline against which you can observe rises and falls. Develop your baseline metrics, and then make sure that you are comparing how much of the industry conversation you are taking up (comparing with your competitors).

Track your share of voice, and you'll have access to a bigger view of where you stand in the market. While knowing how to measure brand awareness can be a challenge, it's a useful metric to follow with some valuable benefits.