Brand awareness tracking is used to measure the effects of brand building campaigns. Essentially, it is used to find out what consumers think about your brand, your products and your services and how to improve them. Learning how your customers feel about your brand itself is just as important as how they feel about what you sell. Find out how we can help you do that with our Spark Flexi-Track service.
Building a good brand can lead to excellent, long-term results. Consumers want to buy from brands that they believe align with their values. When you have a clear and strong brand, it can encourage people to buy from you even if your price point is higher than those of your competitors selling equivalent products.
Brand tracking helps developing businesses establish themselves in the market. It can also help reinvigorate a brand that may have slipped in the eyes of the consumers, in general sales and performance. An expert market research agency such as Spark can help guide you.
Brand tracking helps marketers understand what is working and what isn’t to elevate your brand in the minds of consumers. It can help them see what has impacted sales, and where they can make improvements. This contributes to the long-term growth of your company and continued customer loyalty.
What is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness, at its core, is people’s ability to recognise and recall your business. It is vital to success as it is the very first step in the marketing funnel, a foundation that you can build on to acquire more customers and ultimately drive sales. It can include aspects such as:
- Brand Name: What comes to mind when people think of your brand name? There are various techniques to employ in naming a brand. It could be your own name, or a word you have made up that helps to convey your brand’s values.
- Product Offering: Great brand awareness means customers will know what kind of products you sell. They will know what quality to expect, as well as the general price points and how vast your product range is.
- Brand Voice: Your brand’s voice is the way that you communicate with your customers. Another way of thinking about this is: if your brand was a person, how would it talk? What kind of language would it use?
- Brand attributes: Brand attributes describe the characteristics of your brand, without describing what products you sell or services you offer. This can be anything from your logo to your packaging and content. At its simplest, it describes how people feel when they think of your brand because of these associations.
Why is brand awareness important?
Brand awareness helps drive customers’ decisions when making a purchase decision. It helps each consumer differentiate between different brands in the same market.
- Driving repeat purchases and improving customer loyalty: If a customer is aware of and likes the value of your brand, they may be inclined to repeatedly purchase from you which leads to an increase in your market share. Other aspects that affect how a customer perceives you include their experience of your customer service and the quality of the products themselves.
- Improve ROI: You want to make sure your budget is being well spent, so in order to do that you need to see a good ROI. A good level of brand awareness can also affect your ROI, and can be measured in ways such as website traffic and social media engagement. Regularly tracking your brand awareness naturally assists you in measuring brand performance, and you can see what is going well and what needs to be improved.
Speak to one of our experts today to find out more.
The benefits of tracking brand awareness
We mentioned above that it is possible to track brand awareness. But how can doing so benefit you and your organisation? Tracking your brand awareness through things like surveys and face to face interviews has a whole host of benefits.
- Measure performance over time
Regularly measuring your brand awareness can help you see whether your brand’s health is improving. It gives you specific areas to work on and means decision makers in your organisation can make the necessary changes to the marketing strategies. From measurement, you can see how the changes are affecting how your brand is being perceived. - Staying connected to consumers
How the public perceives a brand is always changing. As a result of these changes, brands need to monitor continually how they are being perceived in order to keep appealing to their target audience. For example, if your brand appeals to teenagers now, what can you be doing to continue this as they mature into adults? Tracking your brand can help you work out what changes you need to make to stay relevant - Gauging campaign effectiveness
Putting a budget behind a marketing campaign or a new product is a risky business, so you want to make sure it is successful. Through tracking you can find out what the public think/thought of the messaging or the product. You can also find out whether sales are coming from a new audience or if it is your original audience just buying more. - Gauging ROI of marketing initiatives
Maintaining or improving brand awareness should be a key initiative of your overall marketing campaign. Tracking such awareness can enlighten you as to whether your new initiative affected your brand in any way, and can therefore help guide future initiatives such as campaigns and product launches. - Comparing your brand to competitors
You want customers to choose you over your competitors. Brand tracking can help you see how you measure up to others. For example, if they keep beating you when it comes to brand awareness, you can find out what they are doing differently. From this you can work out whether to emulate them or how to differentiate your brand from theirs.
Speak to one of our experts today to find out more.
8 methods of tracking brand awareness
So you know you want to track your brand awareness, but how exactly do you go about it?
1. Brand awareness survey
This is one of the most popular ways to find out how your brand is perceived. You select your target audience (the people who you want to be most aware of your brand) and find out what they think.
To specifically measure brand awareness, you want to get opinions from overall consumers rather than your existing customers. This is because your existing customers are already aware of and value your brand.
You will need a clear strategy before you launch your brand awareness surveys. First of all, you will need to make sure you nail down what it is you want to find out. Are you trying to find out if your audience can remember your brand and its values? Or perhaps you are assessing consumers’ feelings towards your brand?
You will also need to work out the structure of your survey. For example, how many questions will it have? Will it be multiple choice answers or open ended where consumers can write as much as they want? An expert brand tracking agency such as Spark can assist you with this so you can get the most out of your surveys – find out how we can help.
2. Check your socials and reach
You can utilise your social media channels to find out how far and wide your audience is spread. This is because you can assume people follow you because they like and are interested in your brand and products.
In addition to your followers on each platform, you can also see how much reach your posts are getting. This can help you nail down the optimum metric for planning your posts and ergo boosting your brand awareness. For example, if you have found that posting at a certain time of day has better reach, this can inform you for future posts.
3. Use Google trends data or set up a brand mentions tracker
Brand mentions trackers give you valuable information on when and where your brand is being mentioned across the internet. Importantly, you can also compare it against your competitors.
Google Trends is one of the lesser known Google tools but is an excellent resource for tracking brand awareness. It allows you to compare interest by region, so you can see where in the world people are engaging with your brand and your competitors. You can then hone in and see what marketing efforts your competitors are using in this area and what is driving their success.
4. Look at branded search traffic volume in Google Analytics or Google Search Console.
When it comes to brand awareness, search data is incredibly important. Tracking your search data through tools such as Google Analytics or Google Search Console can be incredibly helpful.
It’s great if your website traffic is going up, but what’s important to look into is what keywords are driving traffic to your site. The more that people search your actual brand name to find you, the better the level of awareness. It means people are looking specifically for you and the products or services that you offer, rather than finding you from a more generic search term.
5. Check your share of voice and share of impressions
Measuring your share of impressions can show you how well your brand is performing in terms of generating both organic traffic and SEA (search engine advertisements AKA PPC). Measuring this can show you how much people are talking about your brand versus the brands of your competitors.
This is important to look at because even if your brand awareness is being boosted by your actions, but your competitors are growing at twice the rate, you know you need to step it up.
6. Check your referral traffic statistics
Referral links contain unique IDs that allow your brand to promote itself or its product via another website. The link contains something called an affiliate ID that tracks how customers arrive at your website.
Having other brands knowing about you and willing to shout about you is fantastic for your brand awareness. This is especially effective the more reputable the other brands and websites are.
You can check your referral traffic statistics through platforms such as Google Analytics. Watch out for links that cause high bounce rates: you only want to keep tabs on the ones that generate real traffic.
7. Measure how well your content performs in terms of likes, comments, and shares.
Content is vital to your brand awareness. You need to make sure that it is relevant and exciting. You want to keep a track of how well your content is performing and then you can track how it is affecting your brand awareness.
For example, have you had high levels of engagement on video content? Or perhaps you are getting a lot of likes on a recent blog article you posted on Facebook? Each social media platform is well equipped to help you track engagement over time so you can continue to put out excellent, high quality content that will be liked and shared across the web.
8. Get in an expert
Measuring your brand awareness is multi-layered, and can sometimes seem confusing. As brand is such an intangible concept, it’s important to get in experts to help you so you can make the right decisions for your business.
An expert market research agency such as Spark can help you identify what’s working well and what isn’t. We can help you find out what you need to do to elevate your brand to the next level, to improve your brand awareness and ultimately drive sales and success.
