Brand Awareness Measurement and Metrics for Efficient Campaigns

Brand awareness is essential for a healthy business. However, to avoid spending money on pointless marketing activities, you need to integrate clear brand awareness measurement metrics and KPIs into your strategy. 

Building a successful brand awareness campaign may seem challenging, especially if you want it to be efficient. However, do not stress it out; it is not impossible or hard. 

In this article, we will emphasize the importance of brand awareness and show you some metrics and tools for measuring efficiency and evaluating the real impact of a brand’s campaign. 

What is Brand Awareness? 

“Brand awareness” is a marketing term that describes how much an individual can recall a specific brand, its products, and/or services. A business must build strong brand awareness, as this will ultimately increase sales and revenue.     

For example, think of all the cereals available on the market. Although various brands taste great, most consumers will choose a popular brand thanks to its awareness. And even if renowned businesses have got to a point where they may not need to invest much in advertising, we can assure you: it is the exact opposite. 

They need to run ads; otherwise, the consumers will not recall them as much as they do now, decreasing their revenue. 

Since it takes only 5 to 7 interactions for an individual to remember a specific brand, increasing brand awareness may not seem complicated. However, these interactions must be relevant and worth remembering. Otherwise, your target audience may continue passing over your business. 

Brand Awareness Campaigns 

Brand awareness campaigns help businesses across all industries raise awareness around their products or services. In the online space, they can run on channels such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, and many more. Depending on a brand’s industry, the marketing team can decide on which platforms they will run ads.   

Although online advertising has become a reasonable alternative to offline brand awareness campaigns, there have been times when advertisers could promote a business offline only. And even now, practices such as TV and radio advertisements, posters or banners, and promotional products can significantly increase a brand’s popularity.  

But nowadays, advertisers’ leading advantage comes from combining online and offline marketing. And while many businesses decide to use both channels to communicate with their customers, making constant efforts to improve their campaigns is the critical strategy. 

Setting a Brand Awareness Objective 

Brand awareness campaigns have the ultimate goal of increasing a business’s popularity. But a company can set several objectives regarding brand awareness. Depending on a team’s target, advertisers can follow some practices to reach the desired outcome.    

Some of the brand awareness objectives can be increasing the website’s traffic, promoting the products or services, or improving the brand’s reputation.   

However, a brand awareness objective should not be set based only on an advertiser’s sentiment but by following some steps, too. 

Define the Audience 

A compound audience will help a brand set suitable objectives. Moreso, based on the audience created for a specific campaign, advertisers can create a strategy for how they will make the brand appealing to specific users.    

Defining the right audience may also be helpful when strategizing how you will advertise your brand to various consumer groups. For example, an ad designed for loyal customers should not be similar to one for potential buyers. 

Tie the Objectives to the Marketing Strategy

Setting brand awareness objectives can help marketers divide their strategies into smaller goals. This way, achieving them one step at a time will be easier. For instance, if your primary target is to sell more products, you can set an objective to share some samples with potential clients.   

Design Objectives to Be Measurable

Nothing is more disappointing than not being able to analyze if your goals have been achieved. Therefore, create measurable objectives. Moreover, some measurable goals will help your team members work more effectively and quickly. 

Work-Based on a Timeline

Whenever building a brand awareness campaign, it is essential that you set some deadlines for each task. This way, your team will be well–organized, and you will make sure that each task is completed on time.   

Track the Results

Only building a brand awareness campaign will not get you to the end of the whole process. It is essential to constantly track the results of your ads, not only at the end of the campaign but during, too.   

Brand Awareness KPIs and Metrics 

As mentioned before, one of the main activities when running a campaign is tracking its results. And to do that, you can follow some basic KPIs and metrics that will tell you how your campaigns are doing.  

But first, let’s talk about what is the difference between the two. 

KPIs vs. Metrics  

While both KPIs and metrics are a significant help when measuring a campaign’s results, they work differently. Simply put, KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) measure the overall evolution of a marketing campaign towards a set goal, and metrics work on various related actions included in the strategy.  

And when you are to build a brand awareness campaign, you design your goal based on a KPI that you want to reach. For instance, if you own an online store and you want to raise awareness around it, one of your KPIs may be to increase your brand’s visibility by 15% in the next 12 months.  To reach this goal, you build a brand awareness campaign and set some metrics to track during the process.  

The metrics will help you measure the success of each step included in the strategy, this way being able to build your way up to the main goal of your campaign. 

Brand Awareness Metrics

Total Followers

While being present in the online space, tracking the total number of followers is essential. Among those users who decide to follow you, there will surely be people who will be interested enough to convert to your website/in your store. 

Social Shares

Social shares represent a key way of increasing popularity among lots of users. Thus, try to make your followers share the content you are posting; afterward, track the social shares to find out how many of them managed to complete this action and what is the outcome of having your content shared on multiple pages/accounts. 

Backlinks 

Not only do backlinks show you are trustworthy and worth mentioning on other websites, but it also increases awareness, thanks to being visible to more users. When you are the one who is posting, the content will reach your followers/users and those who will see the shared content. However, when other websites mention you, the visibility will increase, as those websites’ users will also be able to access your website.   

Direct Traffic

Direct traffic represents any website visit completed directly, thus not through another link or website. This KPI is important when analyzing your website’s performance and brand awareness. For example, when people are accessing your website, there is a high possibility that they have heard about your company before; thus, your brand awareness is strong enough to reach such users.   

Conversions  

The total number of conversions also shows how effective your brand awareness campaigns have been. While building such campaigns, remember that awareness is the first step of the sales funnel; thus, all your customers will get through that step to reach one of the most important steps: conversion. Always keep your conversions high, as they will bring you many customers afterward.   

Reviews 

What customers say about you may be some of the most important metrics you want to track. First, they show how users feel about your products, services, and overall user experience. Afterward, reviews can impact other customers’ buying decisions either positively or negatively. 

Brand Awareness Measurement Tools to Help You Centralize Data

When building marketing campaigns, it is extremely helpful to track the results through some platforms. Thus, let’s talk about some brand awareness measurement tools that will be by your side along the way.   

Google Analytics & Google Search Console 

Google Analytics is a tool powered by Google that helps marketing teams analyze information such as website activity, time on page, conversions, and many more. Google Analytics was launched in 2005, and, thanks to the long time it has been on the market, the platform has seen a surprising evolution and is now one of the most used measurement tools for online marketing campaigns. 

Pair up the data from Google Analytics with Google Search Console to see what happens on your website and how it is performing in SERP.  

Google Search Console will help you monitor the website’s impressions evolution over a selected period and check what keywords you get impressions and clicks for. 

Media Toolkit 

Mediatoolkit is a brand awareness-specialized tool that allows users to monitor social media activity. The platform can track online activity on channels such as Twitter, Meta, forums, websites, or YouTube, giving businesses insights about relevant mentions and what online users say about a particular brand.   

There are multiple plans available for companies, and the platform also offers a 7–day free trial for all its potential customers. 

Semrush 

Semrush is quite a helpful dashboard that comes in to help advertisers track their websites’ results. One of the main benefits of Semrush is that it provides SEO data that is easy to understand by anyone, thus making the whole tracking process remarkably easier. There are several subscriptions users can choose from, each of them coming with several benefits. The metrics you can see by using Semrush include desktop and mobile traffic, brand mentions, social media engagement, backlinks, and many more.  

In conclusion 

Brand awareness is one of the most important steps in building and raising a business. Moreso, for people to recall a brand, the company must be constantly popular among its users and competitors.   

Brand awareness campaigns help advertisers increase their company’s popularity. However, setting some goals to design the brand awareness strategy is essential. The actions, channels, audiences, and many more can differ depending on the goal.   

To build a healthy and investment-worthy brand awareness campaign, marketers should follow some steps, such as defining the audience and ensuring the brand awareness objectives are related to the overall strategy.   

Measurement is everything. A campaign without some tracked results will not lead anywhere; therefore, businesses must track the ads’ results and work on improvements where needed. When it comes to brand awareness measurement, several tools can help you track your campaign’s results.