“What’s measured improves.” Peter Drucker, a leading management consultant and author who shaped the modern business landscape, knew what he was talking about. His words, familiar to every marketer, are especially apt when thinking about brand awareness. Without measuring the progress of your campaign, there’s little chance it will prove a long-term success.
But how do you measure brand awareness? That’s where things get a little more complicated. There is no one brand awareness metric which can be measured across every medium and the things you might need to measure vary from business to business.
That said, measurement is essential to every single campaign. Without it, there’s no way of knowing if you’re reaching the right people, if your efforts are actually working and if the process is worth the investment.
So you know how to implement a great brand awareness campaign, but how do you know if it's working? Like all the best strategies, assessing your brand awareness campaign begins at the very start and here are some great tips to help you measure before and after.
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Set your goals
Measuring success at the end of a campaign becomes much simpler when you put goals in place at the very beginning. Every brand awareness campaign will naturally aim to increase recognition and knowledge of your business among a target audience, but it’s important to go deeper than that.
Think about the function of your broader goal. Do you want to increase visibility on social media? Or more closely align your brand with your product offering? Then, consider what success in that area will look like. Will it be increased social media engagement, or increased recognition, perhaps via a rise in branded searches? Defining these goals in absolute terms puts your team in a great position for measuring success further down the line.
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Invest in research
Summoning your goals, target audience and the preferred media for your campaign from just your own insight will rarely lead to impressive results. It’s true that no one knows your business like you, but a dedicated research team will be able to dig deeper and find new routes to success.
Our own Research & Insights team are used to getting involved in big projects from the start. They carry out social listening, conduct surveys and get stuck into the big issues at any business to uncover which strategies could be big game changers for you and your brand. Investing in this type of research early on allows you to target your campaign for better results.
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Start social listening
Around 48% of the world’s population now use social media, so it’s the perfect place to listen in on real people’s opinions of your brand. Social listening essentially grants us access to all those posts where brands are mentioned, but perhaps aren’t tagged or linked. This gives real insight into what your audience are responding to and, combined with analysis of your social reach, shares, likes and impressions, can provide clarity on what’s working and what’s not.
Set up Google Alerts for your brand name, along with any common misspellings, or let our Research & Insight team do the hard work for you and simply read the detailed report to understand what your customers really think.
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Consider your competition
Brand awareness is built on the basis that your audience should be able to distinguish you from your competition. Share of voice is a vital metric for this as it compares the number of times one brand is mentioned in comparison to the same figures from competitors.
In this way, it’s the go-to for measuring brand awareness and reflects both how often your seen and how well your audience is engaging. Our Digital Marketing team are experts when it comes to these metrics – why not ask them about your social share of voice?
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Keep track of web traffic
It’s easy to get hung up on social stats, but web traffic is just as important and can be a key indicator of great brand awareness. Compare direct and referral traffic and look at where your audience linger online. Direct traffic will show how many users know you well enough to head straight to your site, and referral traffic may reveal which activations are proving particularly popular. If people are seeking out your website, they’re already invested, so this kind of traffic is a key measurement for brand awareness.
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Measure the media
Online media might be easier to measure, but it’s important to think beyond social and web traffic. Totting up media mentions may seem a little low-tech, but it can reveal important details about the reach of your brand awareness campaign. Any media coverage by a third party, often known as earned media, proves that your campaign is reaching the right people, in this case journalists. Plus, that coverage means it is being shared with an even larger audience via an outlet they trust.
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Ask your audience
To best measure your success, you need to gather as much data as possible. Every step so far will provide you with proof of your success and even new directions to pursue with any subsequent campaigns. However, the most valuable data comes directly from your audience.
Audience surveys provide invaluable insight into not only the level of brand awareness – a simple ‘How did you hear about us?’ pop up can answer that – but your customers’ opinions on the brand, your products or services and your marketing too.
Measuring the success of any campaign can prove tricky and brand awareness is no different. But it becomes a little simpler when it is a consideration from the very start of your campaign. Begin with the data, and a mix of data, in mind.
Where qualitative data, that you might gather with customer surveys, reveals emotional connections and brand recognition, quantitative data provides more solid confirmation of reach and, ultimately, success. Together, they should provide all the information you need.
Finding all that data can be hard work and it takes a team with know-how to measure campaign success effectively. Our dedicated Research & Insight team take on that challenge every single day – get in touch to see what they could do for you at anythingspossible@drpgroup.com or for some great examples of brand awareness campaigns that push the boundaries check out our latest blog on How to increase your brand awareness by thinking outside the box.
