Marketing
Marketing
Brand awareness is one of the most essential parts of running a business in a highly competitive world. The internet has made it perhaps more challenging to stay relevant so branding is something that businesses should be very aware of.
Over 70% of brand managers will tell you that building up an audience is much more important than converting sales – and they’re right! Without proper branding and awareness of how your brand is performing, you will find it more challenging to maintain your customer’s loyalty and attract more sales in general.
But how do we measure a brand’s awareness? We’ve put together some helpful tips and guidance to help strengthen your branding and the understanding you have regarding successfully targeting your audience.
When looking at how to measure brand awareness, one of the most valuable things to have is data. The best way to gather data for this is specifically through surveys and feedback forms. Admittedly, not everyone likes the idea of filling in a survey, so you might want to attach a little incentive to this where possible.
However, if you’re structuring the surveys correctly and asking the right questions, you can gather a lot of information from your audience on how well your brand is performing. When distributing these surveys, it’s worth doing so via agencies and platforms that provide them to the masses.
It’s much more productive to have it go out to everyone, rather than only your existing customers. Why? Well, your customers are already aware you exist, so you might not be getting so much rich data off the back of it. A few examples of questions you might want to include in these surveys are:
Feedback forms are also handy to understand your branding and how much of an influence it had on making the customer buy your product or service. For feedback forms, you might ask any of the following questions:
These questions will provide you with data on what drives the customers to buy products and how well-known your brand is to those providing sales.
Regardless of how many social media platforms you’re on, it’s beneficial to monitor each one closely for clarity on your audience. It was found by Global Web Index in 2018 that 54% of social browsers will use social media to research products.
Therefore, targeting your audience is essential to making sure your product or services are showing up at the right moment and in the right place. But how do you see who is following you and who is engaging with your content? There’s certainly a difference between the two because although you may have followers, not all of them will be your target audience.
There are many great platforms and tools that you can utilize to see how well your social media platforms are performing. We’ve put together a few of the best that can help you keep track of your social media following.
Social media reach can help shed some light on how well your brand is performing. Hootsuite is one of the OG’s when it comes to social media monitoring, and it offers a variety of features that can assist with this.
Not only does it allow you to set up any number of social media platforms, but you can see the relevancy and performance of hashtags and keywords that you’ve used. It’s also good for checking the locations of your audience as well as how much reach and engagement each post is getting.
Google Analytics is a classic and a great one to help gather more intel on your target audience. As your brand grows, your target audience can also shift and change, depending on what you offer.
With Google Analytics, you can discover more about who your audience is, how they’ve come across your content, and what content they prefer over others.
One that’s good specifically for Pinterest and Instagram, two very visual platforms, is Tailwind. Tailwind is great for providing in-depth analytics, helping to monitor the accounts you have, and managing the feeds of each account.
It’s also helpful for understanding your competitors’ performance too.
Brand mentions are useful to understand how much buzz around your brand is happening in general and during marketing campaigns. By tracking how many brand mentions you have can help understand the effectiveness of your marketing overall.
There are plenty of software options to choose from when tracking brand mentions, so here is a couple to try out.
For locating brand mentions, Mention is a good option because it allows you to set up alerts so you never miss any. This can be important during bigger marketing campaigns where you’re on the lookout for mentions from influential individuals and companies.
Interaction and engagement are important and it can be good to set alerts to pick up on who you need to respond to. With this tool it lets you monitor exactly what you want, whilst also giving you an insight into every commenter’s level of influence. This is useful when you’re looking to retweet or share stories that your audience has posted on their platforms.
Awario is likely one of the best for brand monitoring. It helps to monitor brand mentions on the most popular social media platforms and all of the websites that exist online, whether it’s an official news site or an amateur blog site.
With millions of sources to monitor, you have your digital finger on the pulse. This will ensure you don’t miss critical mentions of your brand. It allows you to interact and engage with all the meaningful mentions that are out there.
Determ gives you real-time AI-powered media monitoring on articles, hashtags or comments from all around the world wherever they are.
Sign up for alerts so you don’t miss anything and interact and engage with the people mentioning your business.
Content is king, and it’s something that can be impressionable for your brand. If you’re churning out consistent and high-quality content, then it will get plenty of engagement. That engagement is going to keep your brand relevant and will influence your customers resulting in more sales for your business. Every time customers will search for your brand’s logo design thanks to this awareness.
It’s worth taking a look at what’s performing well and what isn’t when it comes to your content to tailor what you create next. It’s better to elevate and improve your content to fit the customer’s needs and wants.
A valuable way of keeping an eye on your content performance is to look at the engagement on each post. If it’s on a social media platform, take advantage of the free analytics that these platforms provide. There’s a lot that you can get when it comes to these analytics from the reach, the percentage in genders, shares, and any saves.
Where necessary, you might want to look at outsourcing your content requirements if you feel as though the quality is not quite there in-house. Not every business has the resources to hire professional writers and content creators so outsourcing can be useful.
Even though it’s not always productive to be too focused on your competitors, it’s worth examining how well they’re doing.
Sometimes a bit of competitor research can be good for figuring out how to better your branding decisions. Semrush is an excellent platform to use when taking a deep dive into your competitors’ performance on the internet. You can study your rival’s traffic and see which pages on their website are doing the best.
By having this information, you can implement some of their methods into your own when branding. Dissecting their tactics and strategies can certainly be helpful to do when sharing the spotlight with your competitors.
Brand awareness is essential to any business because it’s part of that initial step into the marketing funnel. It helps your marketing team understand your customers and your target demographic. It’s a foundation that you can’t afford to skip when it comes to building your business.
In order to measure your brand awareness, follow these tips and utilize some of the software and tools mentioned. It can help to give you more success for your brand going forward.
Natalie Redman
Freelance writer for many clients including Skale, Natalie has two years of copywriting experience. Natalie has a wide range of experience copywriting for web pages for businesses across many industries. She’s also an owner of two blog websites and a Youtube content creator.