One of my clients asked me a few days ago how they can measure their brand awareness ROI. It doesn’t matter if you’re a B2B brand, a healthcare manufacturer or a multinational brand, measuring your brand awareness is an issue. Marketers across all industries are trying to figure out how to measure brand awareness for their company, while simultaneously having to justify their budgets with ROI.
Many businesses measure the success of their marketing campaigns and other efforts by calculating ROI. Even though the impact of brand awareness can’t be directly measured, brand awareness does affect the success and the outcome of every marketing effort that has an impact on revenue.
Importance of brand awareness for businesses
No one will engage with a brand if they don’t know that it exists in the first place. In the modern digital world, it’s important to understand that online consumers want to know who they are dealing with before they decide to make a purchase. That’s why brand awareness plays a vital role in a brand’s marketing efforts.
Building a brand helps businesses stand out from the competition and establish more personal relationships with their target audience. The more your audience knows about your brand, products or services, the more willing they will be to embrace your marketing promotions, engage with your brand and make a purchase.
If your brand delivers on your customers’ needs and expectations, you ensure customer loyalty and retention which leads to a reduction in the cost of customer acquisition. Moreover, those loyal customers will often become brand ambassadors and further recommend your brand to their friends, family and other online consumers.
It’s really challenging to connect investment in brand awareness to business revenue. But by measuring brand awareness with the right metrics, you can prove the ROI of brand equity.
Brand awareness metrics and KPIs
Direct traffic
Direct traffic is a good metric to keep an eye on in order to measure the impact of the recall on your audience. Reviewing the growth over a specific time period gives you information on your brand awareness growth. The more people remember your brand, the more likely they would go directly to your site.
Search volume
If people are searching for your brand, specific products or services, that’s a good indicator of brand awareness. By monitoring search volumes on your branded terms and watching for fluctuations, you can see if your branding efforts are paying off.
Social engagement
Tracking your social media activities and engagement is one of the ways to measure your brand awareness. Keep a track on followers, shares, likes, comments, etc. Remember to regularly post useful content in order to increase your social media reach and increase engagement.
External Backlinks
When it comes to brand awareness, external links can improve your brand’s visibility and recognition of your website and offerings. To measure your brand’s external link performance, you should monitor the number and quality of external links to your site as well as referral traffic.
Social listening/brand monitoring
One of the most important elements of brand awareness is to track what your customers are saying about your brand. Tracking what’s being said about your brand, by who and in what tone (positive, neutral, negative) provides both qualitative and quantitative insights into the success of your marketing campaigns.
Competition
While monitoring your competitors might not be seen as a priority, it can be a useful tactic to better plan, budget and execute your marketing campaigns. That will help you understand key channels/platforms on which your competitors are active, as well as track advocates and influencers working with them. It might also help you understand their weak points as well as why customers might be choosing them over you.
Surveys
One way to measure your brand awareness is to survey and interview people. You can have short surveys on the website asking e.g. how visitors found you or if they had heard of you before. You can also ask your current customers when they became aware of your brand.
Conversions
Don’t forget to track and monitor conversions and engagement on your website, ideally with a CRM system. Measuring the impact of direct, referral or social media traffic on business outcomes will help you to prove the ROI of brand awareness. It’s one of the best ways to demonstrate the ROI of a marketing campaign by directly linking a campaign to opportunities and sales.
Measuring brand awareness is crucial to the success of your company growth. When reporting on any marketing campaign, remember that benchmarking is key. It’s important to monitor the kind of impact your campaign has. Having the right tools at your disposal to measure these metrics easily enables you to prove the effectiveness of your campaign and will help you budget for future campaigns.
Struggling with measuring the effectiveness of your brand awareness or marketing campaigns? Read our article on measuring the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns or get in touch!
