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Yes, brand awareness has an ROI. No one will buy from a business they don't know exists.
Brand awareness has always been one of the trickiest KPIs to measure—but is one of the most important ones. Building a great brand takes work. You want to develop a product or service that satisfies a need, and along the way, you need to grow your brand equity and build trust with your customers.
But none of this matters if your target audience cannot identify your brand. With awareness, consumers are able to identify your brand, its tone of voice on social media, and how your products or services fit their needs. Measuring brand awareness helps you determine what marketing tactics work for your brand and those that don't.
Here are three effective strategies for measuring brand awareness.
1. Use Social Listening
Social media channels are an effective way to increase and measure brand awareness. Tracking social media followers is one thing: the more your followers, the better your brand awareness. However, you should go a step further and monitor social channels for mentions of your brand, products, and competitors.
Social listening involves looking into online, organic conversations about your brand across the internet. People discuss brands on social media, forums, and other websites. Listening in on these unsolicited opinions is a crucial component of audience research.
There are three social listening metrics you should pay particular attention to:
- The volume of mentions – Tally the number of times your brand is mentioned over time and track any changes over time.
- Reach – This is the potential number of people who will hear your brand from a specific mention. For instance, someone with a million followers on Instagram has a higher reach than someone with a thousand followers.
- Engagement – Keep track of the number of people actively engaging with your brand. This will give you an idea of how effective your reach is
2. Measure and Study Referral Traffic
Brand awareness increases with every new referral. When you get a link from somewhere, be it an authoritative site in your niche or a friend's blog, how does the traffic perform? Studying the quantity and quality of referral traffic allows you to adjust your marketing strategy for better conversations and more signups.
Google Analytics provides a convenient set of tools to monitor referral traffic from links you build. You should pay attention to:
- Your website's total traffic
- Pageviews per visitor to see how you're engaging your site's visitors
- Time on site
- Percentage of new visitors
When looking at referrals, you'll want to evaluate how much total traffic other sites are driving to your own and how much this traffic adds to your engagement levels.
3. Track Share of Voice
Share of voice (SOV) is one of the most popular PR and marketing metrics. And for a good reason. To measure your SOV is to track your share of the total market engagement. Essentially, it determines the buzz around your brand in comparison to your competitors.
SOV is the fraction of media coverage plus conversations around your brand, such as the number of online mentions, website traffic, pay-per-click, and social media mentions. It helps you understand how popular your brand is within your niche.
You'll have to calculate SOV for different channels of your digital marketing strategy to determine the most effective channels. Using these data analytics gives you an in-depth look at your industry and how your brand is performing.
Build Your Brand Equity
Increasing brand awareness brings you one step closer to becoming a household name. Having a recognizable brand fosters trust and creates communities of loyal customers who talk about your brand and increase its awareness. Measuring brand awareness enables you to improve your digital marketing strategies and grow your audience.
Want to learn how you can measure brand awareness?