3 Ways to Measure the Brand Awareness of Your Small Business

Brand awareness is a marketing term that is used to describe the degree of consumer recognition of your business and/or product. Building brand awareness is critical, whether you are reviving an older brand or promoting a new product. 

From social media campaigns to PPC advertisements, there are many strategies companies use to promote brand awareness. No matter your strategy, you need to have an effective approach when it comes to measuring your efforts so you can determine just how aware consumers are of your brand.

Below, we will take a look at why brand awareness is critical, as well as revealing how to measure brand awareness at your business. 

What is brand awareness?

Brand awareness generally refers to how familiar people are with your company and your products or services. How many customers have heard of your name before? How many people understand the products and services you provide?

Having a brand awareness strategy enables you to:

• Avoid becoming obsolete
• Engage better with your customers
• Build brand credibility 

Why brand awareness is important

It is vital that consumers remain familiar with your business so that they consider your service or product whenever they make purchase decisions. Even if your brand is not yet at the top of your consumers’ minds, they will think of your service or product when shopping if they are aware of your brand.

Brand awareness is the fuel that ensures new leads keep coming into your company so that you can ultimately convert them into paying customers and, hopefully, ambassadors of your brand. 

Aside from generating a stable stream of possible leads, brand awareness can assist in creating advocates of your brand that will use word of mouth to advertise your company. In this manner, brand awareness can have a snowball effect, causing your audience to grow exponentially. 

How do you measure brand awareness?

There are a number of different ways that you can measure brand awareness, and we will take a look at three of the best approaches below:

1. Social media reach

There is only one place to begin, and this is with social media reach. Reach on social is the total number of people who see your content. This can be interpreted in a number of ways, with the following being among the most common measurements:

• The total number of people who see a piece of content
• Average impression frequency per user
• Average impression frequency per user over 7 days
• Average impression frequency per user over 30 days

As of July 2021, there are 4.48 billion social media users. This represents 57 percent of the population, which is quite remarkable really.

Most likely, you are already using at least one social media platform to share details about your brand. If this is the case, using social media reach to get an understanding of your brand awareness is critical. 

Reach is especially beneficial on platforms like Instagram and TikTok

If you want to use social media to measure brand awareness spread, reach is a great metric to look at. Reach is especially important for Instagram, but it is also vital in terms of measuring TikTok growth.

When likes and other interactions are publicly visible, engagement rates are incredibly insightful. However, TikTok and Instagram users do not feel the pressure to interact with content anymore. This is why reach can be so powerful and accurate when it comes to measuring brand awareness. 

Check the reach of all of your social media posts

As a consequence, it is advisable to check the reach for each and every post you publish. Analyze the performance of your posts so you can establish key trends and shape your best practices according to your most successful results. Knowing this data can be critical in terms of boosting your brand awareness on social media. 

Once you understand your current reach, you can begin to dig deeper into your statistics. This will help you determine what content is resonating, the best performing hashtags, and the best hours to post.

2. Use Google Search Console

The most effective way of measuring brand awareness is to collate data from Google Search Console. Let’s say that you do a television campaign to promote your business. If your impressions and clicks are increasing on Google Search Console, it likely means that your brand awareness has gone up.

This is a highly effective way of measuring offline campaigns especially. Typically, if offline campaigns are increasing the performance of your brand, you will notice a boost in terms of your SEO performance as well. 

The click and impression data you get from Google Search Console is critical. According to Google, measuring impressions is significant in terms of your brand campaigns because it reveals how many people actually viewed your campaign.

Combine with CTR to maximize impact

When considered together with click-through rate, this is important in terms of seeing whether your campaigns are making the impact you had hoped for. You can leverage Google ads with search console to run an awareness campaign, refine your ad performance, and measure overall brand awareness.

Should you decide to use Google Search Console for measuring brand awareness, Google advises that you create a cost-per-thousand-impressions campaign. This means you will pay based on impressions instead of paying based on clicks. 

You get brand data searches just one day after they have been performed 

A crucial benefit of using Google Search Console is that it will provide you with brand data searches just one day after. For instance, let’s say you have encountered a decrease in organic traffic compared to the same month in 2020. As you poke around, you may discover that your branded search numbers were a lot higher this time last year. Why? Well, maybe you launched a significant social media or email campaign at the time? If you have not done the same this year, your brand searches and traffic may be down. 

3. Make the most of brand tracking software

The final option that we recommend when it comes to measuring brand awareness is to use brand tracking software. After all, one of the biggest problems we see in brand marketing today is that everyone is guessing! 

It is crazy to think that consumer businesses invest in excess of one trillion dollars every year in advertising and marketing, but they still base a lot of their campaigns on gut feeling as opposed to hard facts. 

Businesses do not want to guess anymore, and nor should they. They want to know how their brand is performing in all critical areas. 

Using brand tracking software presents you with the hard facts

This is why we recommend looking for a brand analytics tool that will supply you with a features stack similar to what Google Analytics provides for digital markets.

These platforms come with intuitive dashboards where you can find great insights about your brand performance. You will be able to learn about how your competition is performing, the impact of your brand campaigns, how your target audience is reacting to your brand, and so on.

Here is a summary of the benefits associated with brand tracking software:

• Measure and monitor brand performance over time
• Tap into new audiences to further business growth
• Pinpoint the segments of your audience that drive your business forward
• Track the performance of your competitors with precision

Different types of brand tracking tools

There are different categories of brand awareness tools. For example, you have analytics tools, which focus on assessing what times are best for engaging, whether this is sending an email or posting a message on social media. These tools can also provide you with insights regarding interactions with your brand, most-used hashtags, and user demographics.

You then have social mention tools, which track everywhere your name has been mentioned. This helps you to delve into brand interactions, as well as determining what platforms are performing the best for your business.

Some of the different tools that businesses use to track brand awareness include:

• BuzzSumo
• SproutSocial
• Ahrefs
• Qualtrics
• Brandwatch
• Brand24
• Netvibes
• Mention
• Shortstack

Think about the different features you are looking for and the platforms you want to track when determining which brand awareness tool is going to be the best for you. 

Make sure you tailor your tracker to suit the needs of your brand

There are a lot of different methodologies you can use to track your brand. For example, you may focus on trends in secondary or primary data. You could use qualitative market research or quantitative market research. Either way, the methodologies you select must be fully tailored to your brand. 

You need to consider the milestones you are aiming to achieve in order to ensure you’re tracking the right things and assessing data in the correct manner. For example, is your objective to have as many social shares as possible? Or, do you care more about paid ad performance?

To determine the optimal approach when using brand tracking software, you need to consider market dynamics, expected market changes, your core strategies, and your brand’s value proposition. You will typically find that all of your needs cannot be met with one approach alone. Combination approaches tend to be the most effective. 

Final words on measuring brand awareness

As you can see, brand awareness is critical when it comes to building a steady stream of leads and a team of brand advocates. The only way you are going to determine how aware people are of your brand is by measuring this. Use the three approaches that we have mentioned above to do so, and continue to implement fresh strategies to build brand awareness.