Making the Most of Your Brand Awareness Campaigns
Part of growing your business means building brand awareness for your company. That includes multi-faceted plans of attack, like using blog posts, social media, and marketing campaigns. All of these efforts combined help increase the number of people that your brand reaches. Of course, all of these efforts take time, money, and resources. So you want to make sure that they’re actually working to increase brand awareness. But how exactly do you measure that? Let’s take a look at some ways you can measure your brand awareness.
Feelings of Familiarity: How To Measure Brand Awareness
So your company is spending money to increase brand awareness. But how can we prove that it’s working? Here are some of our bottom line metrics we’re going to take a look at.
Measuring Direct Traffic
Direct traffic measures the folks who are actively searching for your brand. Direct traffic comes from the people who type your URL into their browser and intentionally visit your website. This is one of our most important metrics of brand awareness and search volume.
Direct traffic means that a customer has learned of your product through social media, advertisements or by typing keywords into a search engine. Direct traffic is a result of previous brand awareness, making it an excellent metric for your brand.
Measuring Referral Traffic
Using Google Analytics you can also track your referral traffic. This is traffic that comes from outside of Google’s search engine. This could include things like hyperlinks from other websites. Every time someone clicks a link that leads to your website, Google tracks this as a referral.
So why is referral traffic important? This is a measure of how your brand looks to the world. It will increase mentions of your brand and brand recall by positioning yourself as an authority in your industry. Increasing referral traffic often leads to an increase in organic traffic as more people become aware of your brand.
Measuring Social Media
Social media is one of the most important tools we have for spreading brand awareness. It’s your chance to show your potential customers who you are and what your company is about. You can use your own personal flair of values and politics to help reach the people your brand wants to find.
But it also creates a great opportunity for measuring our brand awareness. Your social media presence allows you to monitor your earned media. This is the free publicity that your brand gets without paying for advertising or forms.
You can track the number of mentions your brand gets, who is talking about your brand, and how they feel. It’s a great way to get unfiltered opinions without any bias about your brand.
From this one place, you can view your brand awareness in the forms of:
- Your brand’s reach
- Your @ mentions
- Untagged mentions
- Hashtag use
- Traffic from social media to your website
That’s a whole heck of a lot of information from just one source! You do have to spend time and money to create your social media presence, of course. However, when you get the train rolling, your brand awareness in social media can snowball quickly!
Brand Awareness Surveys
We talked above about how social media gains us access to unbiased opinions. However, those unbiased opinions aren’t always the most constructive. There are certain questions that you can ask your customers, or potential customers, about your brand that can be incredibly helpful.
- How did you become aware of our brand?
- What made you choose our product over the competition?
- What could we do to make our brand even more appealing?
This is just the tip of the iceberg, of course. You want to tailor-make your questions to your audience. The most important thing to keep in mind is to not pester your customers. Make it a simple and rewarding experience for them. Remember, brand awareness can also be negative. Make sure you’re giving customers something to enjoy even in the mundane, like taking a survey.
Comparing Brand Awareness
So now we have a firm grip on some different metrics for our brand awareness. However, your company does not exist in a vacuum. You have competitors out there. So let’s see how we can compare our own brand awareness against competitors.
Share of Voice
One great way to see how your brand is actually doing is looking at your Share of Voice (SOV). Your brand’s SOV is the amount of space in your industry that your brand and advertising take up.
What percentage of ads that come up for your industry are for your brand? How much of the social media sphere is dominated by your brand’s voice? The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and that’s true for brand awareness, too. The louder your voice is, and the bigger your share of voice, the more brand awareness you gain.
Personal Benchmarks
You’re not only trying to beat your competitors. You also want to best yourself! That’s why it’s so important to keep track of your own personal benchmarks with these metrics. Knowing how you’ve been doing will reveal natural peaks and valleys for your brand awareness.
What kinds of social media campaigns are working for your brand? When do you notice the lulls in product mentions? Your goal is to always keep moving forward. But part of being able to do that means recognizing where you are moving backward and correcting that.
Staying on Top of Google Trends with Brand Awareness
Everyone wants to see their name in lights. Especially if you’ve been putting in so much hard work to increase your brand awareness. But getting to the top of the Google trends list doesn’t happen by accident. It takes a lot of hard work, dedication, and commitment.
It also means that you have to understand how to properly measure your brand awareness. Understanding where your following comes from, how they feel about you, and why they like your product is your key to finding more folks like them!
Dan Bosco
Content Writer & Editor
dan at heartbrain dot marketing
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