Brand awareness is one of the most important aspects of any business. If people don’t know about your brand, they’re not going to buy from you. It’s a highly useful KPI for measuring marketing campaign success, and a simple metric to track over time.
So how do you measure brand awareness? And how can you tell if your efforts are working? In this blog post, we will discuss 5 different ways to measure brand awareness. These methods are straightforward and easy to implement, so you can start tracking your progress right away.
How to Measure Brand Awareness
1. Followers on social media
One of the most common ways to measure brand awareness is by looking at the number of followers on social media. This metric can be useful in a couple of ways. First, it can give you an idea of how many people are exposed to your brand. If you’re seeing a steady increase in followers, that’s a good sign that your brand awareness is growing. This metric is the simplest to track, and it’s also simple to compare growth with that of your main competitors.
However, it’s important to keep in mind that the number of followers is not always an accurate measure of brand awareness. In some cases, people may follow your brand without actually knowing much about it. If, for example, you post entertaining content that isn’t relevant to your business, or if your content is inconsistent, people may follow you because they enjoy your content, but they may not be aware of your brand or what you do.
So while the number of followers is a good metric to track, it’s important to look at other measures as well.
2. Brand mentions online
Another common way to measure brand awareness is by tracking how often your brand is mentioned online. This can be done using a tool like Google Alerts, which will notify you whenever your brand is mentioned on the internet, but this is not a viable option for big brands who get many mentions per day.
Larger brands can use Symanto to track brand mentions over time. Symanto generates a graph to show you where mentions peak and trough. With this graph you can assess which brand awareness raising campaigns were most effective. You can also compare your brand mentions against those of your competitors and see which campaigns were most effective for them.
3. Track direct traffic to your website
The third way to measure brand awareness is by tracking how much direct traffic you’re getting to your website. This metric shows how many people are typing your URL into their browser, which generally means they’re familiar with your brand.
You can track this metric using Google Analytics. Go to the “Acquisition” tab and then click “Overview.” This will show you how much traffic your website is getting, and how it’s coming to your site. If you see a lot of direct traffic, that’s an indicator that people are aware of your brand.
Track this metric over time to see if the number is growing or diminishing. A spurt in direct traffic following a marketing campaign can be a good indicator that the campaign was successful in raising awareness.
Several tools enable you to look at competitor traffic statistics. For example, SEMRush shows how much traffic a website is getting, and how that traffic breaks down by source. This can be useful for benchmarking your brand against competitors and seeing how you stack up.
4. Brand awareness surveys
Another way to measure brand awareness is by conducting surveys. This can be a time and resource-consuming method, but it can give you valuable insights into how people perceive your brand. It can also enable you to ask more specific questions.
When creating a brand awareness survey, there are a few key questions to ask:
- Do people know your brand?
- What do they think of your brand?
- What words do they associate with your brand?
- When was the first time they heard about your brand?
- When was the last time they heard about your brand?
- Are they likely to recommend your brand to others?
You can use an online survey tool like SurveyMonkey, Typeform or Google Forms to create and distribute your survey.
You can expand your questionnaire to include open-ended questions so that respondents can write freely about their experiences or perceptions of the brand. With Symanto technologies you process hundreds of responses within just a few steps. Symanto’s cutting-edge natural language processing (NLP) technology analyses unstructured data in written form to decipher meaning and sentiment. It then transforms its findings into intuitive data visualisations so that you can clearly see, for example, which topics are mentioned most and people’s sentiment behind each topic.
5. Social media and review sentiment analysis
Just because people are talking about your brand, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re saying nice things. You need to track whether or not the general sentiment around your brand is positive, neutral or negative.
Social media channels and review sites are all fertile ground for sentiment data. Customers and people mentioning your brand online are sharing their opinions organically. You can parse through this data manually, but there are several main issues with this.
- Human error. This task is repetitive and as a result, human researchers may skim over comments without thoroughly reading them.
- Researcher bias. If they want a certain outcome they may unwittingly skew the analysis.
- Time-consuming. If you’re dealing with large volumes of data, manual analysis just doesn’t make sense.
Thankfully, NLP technology is rapidly advancing and it’s now possible for AI to read, process and analyse thousands of comments in a matter of minutes, and extract accurate insights into the sentiments of your customers and people talking about your brand online.
In Summary
There are several ways to measure brand awareness. The most important thing is to track how it changes over time, and to compare it against competitors. Use a combination of methods to get the most accurate picture possible of how well known your brand is, and how people feel about it.
Symanto’s NLP technology can help you automate sentiment analysis so that you can quickly and easily glean insights from social media data and review sites. This can save you time and resources, and give you a more accurate picture of how people feel about your brand. Get in touch to find out more and get started with Symanto today.
