How to Track Brand Awareness and Measure Your Marketing Efforts
Reading Time: 4 minutes What are your entire marketing efforts focused on? You want people to think of your brand whenever they need a product or service that you offer, right? If, for example, someone wants to eat a burger, McDonald’s wants them to think of their burgers.
That’s called brand awareness, and it’s something that all business owners should focus on.
At this point, we’ll assume you already started a brand awareness development campaign. You already have a brand and the purpose of your marketing campaign is to increase the likelihood of people recognizing that brand.
Are those efforts effective?
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How do you measure these marketing efforts and how do you track the actual brand awareness? That’s what we’ll focus on today.
How to Track Brand Awareness
1. Track the Activity on Social Media
A huge portion of your past, current, and potential customers are on social media. Are they talking about your brand?
To measure the effectiveness of your branding efforts, you must set a baseline. Start by choosing a period (you may focus on weekly or monthly measures) and gather the most important metrics that allow you to measure awareness:
- Followers (how many new ones did you gain?)
- Reach (how many people saw your posts?)
- Engagement (how many likes, shares, and comments did your posts get?)
- Mentions (how many times was your brand mentioned through relevant hashtags?)
All social media platforms have their own analytics tools. You may rely on those, but you may also use a tool like Hootsuite Analytics if you want to combine metrics from all social media platforms in a single place.
2. Track What People Say About Your Business Online
Josh Simpson, part of the marketing team at EssayOnTime, explains: “When you invest in boosting your brand’s awareness, you should expect people to mention it on blogs, websites, and forums. Reddit and Quora, in particular, are places where people ask questions and get answers related to all sorts of products and services. Plus, there are reviewing websites, where the users will share their experience with your brand. You want to track all these activities.”
The online discussions related to your brand will pave the way towards its status as an influencer in the industry. Google Alerts is probably the simplest way to track all brand mentions – you’ll get email messages that inform you about new blog posts, conversations, news articles, and more types of online content that mention your brand.
Why is this important? Simple – so you can track the rise or fall of the level of brand awareness. If you see a negative review, you may react to it with a suggestion for a refund or product replacement. You may also respond to positive mentions, so your customers will see you care about their experience.
3. Are People Searching for Your Brand?
If people use Google to find information about your brand, it means that awareness is growing. If, for example, you become aware of a new brand of TV sets, you’ll definitely search Google to see if you can find any reviews and information that could help your buying decision. That’s what most people do when they become interested in a particular brand.
You have to keep track of the searches, so you’ll know what questions to address and what information to provide to your potential customers.
How do you do that? Google AdWords and Google Keyword Planner will help you see how many people use your brand’s name in their searches. You’ll get many insights from these tools, including the location of the searches.
Then, you can start developing a more effective content marketing campaign, which will further elevate brand awareness.
4. Track the Media Coverage
Did you publish a press release with the hope that newspapers, blogs, and magazines from your niche would feature the information about your new product or service in their latest editions? You did that with the intention to boost brand awareness, but did the strategy work? You have to check and see.
BuzzSumo is a great tool to use when you want to see how your brand is being mentioned in online publications. It helps you track the coverage, and you can see how much engagement each of those articles attracted.
5. Track the Website Traffic
Are you getting enough organic, referral, and direct traffic to your website? These metrics show how effective your branding efforts are. They tell you if your blog posts, social media efforts, and press releases are bringing people towards your website, where the real action happens.
Clearly, you’ll use Google Analytics to get this information. When you notice a spike in the traffic, it means you’re doing something right. When there’s not much happening, it means you should change something in your branding campaign, so you’ll create more awareness.
React to the Information You Collect
The five methods we listed above will surely give you enough information that helps you analyze the level of brand awareness. Remember: you’re not measuring just for the sake of measuring. You’re doing this so you can react in the right way. Keep an eye on all these metrics and adjust your marketing campaign according to the hints you get!
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