Good brand awareness is one of the most precious assets your business could have. Strong brand awareness is a guarantee stamp for a solid business built on a community of loyal and engaged consumers. So, how exactly can you confirm whether your branding strategy is moving you in the right direction? Stick with us and you’ll learn how to measure your brand awareness so that you can make the best decisions.
OVERVIEW
Brand awareness: A major asset for businesses
Reputation and awareness are key elements when it comes to achieving a business’ marketing and sales goals.
The same goes for the internet and social media, which can very quickly make or break brand reputations in a very short space of time.
Consumers are an evolving breed and they pay a lot more attention now when it comes to making choices, both for themselves and for their social circle. Over the past few years, ethical, social and environmental considerations have emerged as increasingly important factors in purchasing decisions.
Brand image has become a real marketing and sales point. There are now opportunities out there for brands to really boost their awareness, but there are also the risks of new deviations (poorly executed newsjacking, buzz race, greenwashing, etc.).
More than ever, your image needs to be measured and monitored with scrutiny.
Excellent brand awareness pretty much guarantees acceleration and the shortening of the sales tunnel. Studies have indeed shown that, when making a purchase, 1 in 3 consumers already have a brand in mind.
Why? Well, because they know that they can trust that brand, that it aligns with their values, and that the product quality is guaranteed and up-to-scratch.
Neglecting your brand awareness, however, is one of the worst mistakes you can make at a time when your future customers are guided by Instagram, Twitter and Google reviews.
Once you’ve taken note of it, you can act on it. How to measure your brand awareness Here are the 3 steps that will get you there!
#1 – Measure your brand awareness by analyzing your web traffic
If you have a website, whether it’s for e-commerce or not, you can measure a whole bunch of indicators using online tools.
Some of them give you access to particularly interesting indicators for measuring your online awareness.
How many people visit your website?
This initial element of information can give you a good idea of your online presence. A high and regular number of visits indicates that your site is well-referenced on search engines.
Good natural referencing (SEO) is an excellent gauge for online web awareness. For example, Google will be more likely to suggest your page first to users who enter searches associated with your market.
Your online audience will therefore view your content more regularly and your brand will be more securely anchored in their mind.
You can see how many visits your website is getting thanks to tools like Google Analytics or pretty much any web tracking tool.
What is the search volume for your brand online?
Sometimes, your brand’s prospects or consumers will directly enter your company’s name or your product’s name into their search engine.
The higher this search volume, the more you can be sure that your brand is known on the market.
Overall, if your brand is directly searched for, you can deduce that the internet user is sure of their decision and that they’re turning to your brand as a first choice.
You can find out how many times your brand name has been searched by using tools like Google Search Console or Semrush.
How many backlinks are there for your website?
In simple terms, a backlink is a link originating from a third-party website, leading to one of your website’s pages.
Beyond being a very good point for improving your natural referencing, it’s also a good indicator of awareness.
Of course, if a website decides to put a link on their website, it shows that it has a certain level of trust in your brand, as it’ll potentially redirect some of its own visitors to your website. The stronger your brand awareness, the more chance you have of generating backlinks.
Plus, multiplying the links and mentions of your brand on other websites also contributes to distributing your image to all four corners of the web.
You can find out and analyze the originating points of your backlinks using tools such as Ahref or Semrush.
Social media is an incredible opportunity for giving your brand more visibility. With a good social media strategy, you can drastically boost your awareness.
So, which indicators will allow you to measure this awareness on social media?
How many followers do your pages have?
The logic is sound: The number of followers you have on social media will reflect your level of awareness.
These days, we spend a lot of our time on our favorite networks. That said, attention spans are limited and users tend to follow trends more quickly now.
That’s why following one of your pages show a sense of trust and appreciation that a user has towards your brand. This contributes to giving you an idea of your awareness on the network.
Watch out! A follower isn’t necessarily forever, and they can always hit the unfollow button! So, it’s important to regularly analyze the evolution of your follower base.
What is your reach and impression volume?
The reach is the scope of the content that you distribute on social media. The number of impressions is the number of “views” your content has had.
It’s worth noting that the algorithms suggest content to social media users based on certain criteria that is specific to them.
We won’t go into details here, but there’s one thing to remember: Just because you have 10,000 followers on Instagram or LinkedIn, that doesn’t mean that the platforms will necessarily show your content to all of them.
It’s sad and it’s frustrating, but it is what it is!
However, if you have a high reach, your impressions will be excelling, too. This means that there’s a higher probability that users have seen your content on their feeds.
To extend it further, the better your reach and impression volume, the better the brand awareness on the social media network.
All of the indicators we’ve just covered can be obtained directly within the admin sections of your social media pages.
What is your engagement rate?
Engagement is an action completed by a user on one of your content elements (like, comment, share, etc.). The engagement rate is therefore the ratio of interactions to the number of impressions for an element of content.
On top of being the most important performance indicator to monitor for a social media strategy, the engagement rate is closely linked to your awareness.
Of course, most social media users are passive. This means that, even if they regularly view your content, it’s only a small proportion of them that engages.
Getting engagement on content is not as easy as it may sound. So, if your content is enjoying a high engagement rate, it’s a sign that your brand awareness is pretty tip-top!
#3 – Measure your awareness by surveying your market
Adopt a customer-focused approach within your business
Of course, every business thinks that they’re listening to their customers.
Yet, we’ve all been in that situation where we feel like we’ve been left to handle an issue with a product or service on our own, with no help from the company we bought it from.
The consumers of today are demanding. Not only do they want to make purchases that align with their values, but they also (and especially) want to be truly heard and taken into consideration.
It may seem obvious, but yet this vision of customer relations is relatively recent. It now needs to be built on trust and transparency.
To do this, businesses need to listen to the feedback they get from customers and, most importantly, really integrate this feedback into their development strategies.
To measure your brand awareness, adopt a customer-centric approach by regularly surveying your customers.
You’ll get results you can put into use, enabling you to gain a clearer vision of what your customers think of your brand and your products and/or services.
These results are precious when it comes to fueling your vision and overall strategy.
Directly collect your target audience’s opinion
In order to put together a successful brand awareness strategy, it’s important that you survey a broader audience than just your current and past customers.
The individuals included within your target and who have never bought your product, or those who don’t know your brand, also have a lot that they can teach you.
Their opinion on your brand will enable you to get an idea of where you stand in relation to your direct competitors.
Is your brand included in the “top-of-mind” selection for your market? Which competitor brands have better awareness than your brand? Are you recognizable enough in your market?
The answers to all of these questions will allow you to evaluate brand popularity indicators, such as:
Top-of-mind awareness: Is your brand the first that comes to consumers’ mind for your market? Aided awareness: Can your brand be recognized among competitor brands? Brand memorization: Does your target audience remember having seen, read or heard about your brand recently? Consideration: To what degree do consumers see your brand as a potential response to their need
👉 Purchase intent: To what degree are consumers prepared to make a purchase from your brand?
Having an overall vision of your brand awareness will obviously help you with putting together your overall strategy, not to mention in building your marketing campaign.
Use Happydemics to measure your brand awareness in real time
If you’ve made it this far, you’ve understood that measuring your brand awareness is a major stake. Getting opinions from your market and effectively measuring your awareness indicators is a task that requires the right tools.
Here at Happydemics, we make it easier to measure your brand awareness thanks to our platform which enables you to collect and analyze your performance indicators in real time.
Evaluate your awareness with your target audience, whatever the market or geographical scope your brands operate in.
Discover the ability to monitor the evolution of your popularity at a glance on a daily basis (and keep an eye on your competitors, too).
Quickly identify opportunities or risks for your brand, so that you can make informed decisions and get the results you want.
Customize your reports in line with your specific needs and collaborate with your team directly within the platform.
Want to know more? Book your slot to get a 30 minutes’ presentation of our platform!
