Brand awareness is a crucial element of the buyers’ journey that helps them identify and connect with your business. It allows marketers to understand how well their audience understands their brand, products, and services. Businesses with impactful brand awareness witness a boost in their revenue and improved customer retention.
But, the KPI is often undervalued because it’s a bit difficult to measure. However, if you want to transform your business into a well-identified brand, you need to track the business’s growth regularly. By monitoring the right brand awareness KPI, you’ll have better control over your growth strategy.
Now, the crucial question is, how to create an effective brand awareness KPI? Let’s enlighten you further on it.
1. Sentiment matters
Sentiment can convey the overall brand health by providing insights into what people know and feel about your brand. You can track this KPI in terms of the opinions of your consumers about the brand. This will let you adjust your marketing efforts and specific product messaging to better align with your campaign goal.
For instance, KFC managed to do this by tuning in to the unique positioning of their brand. They made optimum utilization of the meme trends and pop culture references to distinguish their brand from other fast-food chains that seemed to focus on the feel-good emotions of consumers. Unsurprisingly, knowing their customers respond positively to their sometimes-quirky brand activations has only encouraged them to continue with this practice.
2. Website traffic
This metric indicates how many people are visiting your website, either by clicking on it through a native, search, or social ad or by typing it into the search bar. Simply put, if that traffic boosts over time, particularly right after you launch a campaign — that’s a good sign that brand awareness is on the rise.
To know where this traffic is coming from, it’s vital to check your referral sources. These show you which platforms generate the most traffic and which don’t.
Website traffic reveals people are not only becoming aware of your brand but are also intrigued by learning more. They noticed your messaging and clicked through to read further, or they remembered your brand and checked out your products.
3. Monitor your backlink success
Track the volume of the backlinks you have gained organically and also the backlinks you have accumulated as part of your PR and marketing strategy.
These two different types of backlinks provide you with different information. A sharp increase in your organically gained backlinks indicates your content is well-received and valuable to consumers, and your website seems like a reliable place to refer to.
However, if your backlink rate without any backlink effort is low, it’s possible that the right audience hasn’t found you yet. So, you may have an issue with your SEO or social media marketing instead of how well or poorly people receive your brand.
But how successful are you in getting the backlinks you go for? If it seems few people are interested in pursuing a link strategy with you, you might be offering the wrong type of content, or your website seems unreliable.
This might indicate problems in your market positioning and inabilities to communicate your brand in a clear way, which makes brand promotion much more difficult.
4. Social mentions and interactions
Social mentions are another crucial metric that reveals how well your campaigns are doing to drive more conversation around your brand. Explore the channels where your consumers are found frequently and monitor what they’re saying about you. Also, take note of the number of times your brand is mentioned as much as the subject or comments about you.
You’ll also probably uncover important insights about your brand in the eyes of customers. What do these mentions convey about the role of your brand in consumers’ lives? Remember seeing no brand mentions is also important feedback.
5. Purchase intent
Purchase intent simply highlights whether or not the potential customers would buy from your brand. You’ll have to follow up their responses by getting to know why or why not to check how you can keep improving your product or service.
Also, double-check these responses as opposed to the actual purchase history. A consumer can assure they would buy from your brand, but when it comes to making the purchase, they buy something different.
6. Surveys
One way to create your brand awareness is to survey and interview people. You can have a set of questionnaires on your website, asking how visitors found you or if they had heard of you from someone.
You can also ask your existing consumers when they become aware of your brand. But remember not to pester the prospects or consumers, and keep the customer questionnaires simple, short, and rewarding.
Another survey type could be asking a random set of people if they have heard of your brand and what impression they create in their minds. You can do this with the help of a PR agency or by hosting a social media campaign.
Carry out research at regular intervals while keeping your target group and geographical location the same. This way, you’ll gain valid details on your brand awareness growth. This type of brand awareness research may take the most time and money, but you’ll receive valuable information out of it.
7. Top-of-mind brand recall
Being top-of-mind should be the gold standard for your brand. Brand recall conveys to you whether or not consumers remember your brand among the sea of competition – and the order by which they remember is also quite important.
For instance, if you were to ask a consumer which brand they think of when you say “e-commerce store builder,” chances are they’ll say Shopify over WordPress.
Brand recall is ideally measured with surveys or focus group discussions. It’s also best if you don’t plaster your brand name or elements all over the study to ensure there hasn’t been prior conditioning that may sway results.
8. Brand impressions
This is the rawest metric you’ll adopt to define brand awareness. Impressions tell you how many times your content displays. They provide a solid foundation for learning about your brand-awareness campaign’s performance.
Impressions may not highlight how many people actually saw or grasped your content, but they will let you know how many people were shown the content. From here, you can check metrics like engagement, clicks, and website traffic to better understand how your audience received your content.
You can measure impressions in your chosen distribution channel, be it a social platform like Facebook or a search platform like Google AdWords.
Endnote,
These are the pertinent ways to create brand awareness KPIs. Once you know the appropriate key metrics to monitor, the work becomes more manageable. Monitor the important metrics mentioned above diligently.
Author – Clara Smith is a senior marketing professional working for a noted organization in the UK. Clara has pursued her MBA in marketing from Glasgow University. She possesses an extensive understanding of marketing automation and research. She’s also a member of Myessayhelp.co.uk and provides essay help to students.