Arguments in Support of Brand Awareness Measures
Brand recognition fueled by social media, content marketing, and public relations is more crucial to businesses than ever in today’s digitally connected world. It’s not enough to just carry out these tasks; you also need to establish KPIs that match your company’s objectives and monitor performance using accurate measures. Otherwise, you can’t tell if your efforts are successful. Or which initiatives are failing. But don’t be deceived—not it’s simple to measure their efforts.
Brand awareness is the outcome of cross-functional cooperation inside the marketing organization; it does not occur in a vacuum. We gauge brand awareness by combining the efforts of the social media, content marketing, and public relations teams.
The content marketing team goes over our objectives, metrics, key findings, and next-action quarter’s items at the conclusion of each quarter. We don’t only look at stats; we also discuss what we learnt from them and the next steps to take in order to maintain the momentum into the following quarter.
Learn how we define brand awareness in the post that follows, as well as how we concentrate our PR, content, and social media efforts to raise it.
What Is Awareness of a Brand?
Brand awareness measures how well-known your company is to your target market. It is typically regarded as the first and most crucial step in the purchasing process because without awareness, customers won’t think about buying your brand.
Brand Awareness vs. Perception
Brand perception refers to the audience’s feelings about your brand, whereas brand awareness refers to how familiar your target audience is with your brand. Criteria including customer service, quality, value, features, and the sales process are frequently taken into account when determining brand perception. Customers are far more likely to stay engaged with you if they think highly of you and regard your brand as reliable.
Another name for brand recall is “top-of-mind awareness.” It gauges the likelihood that a consumer will recall your brand even in the absence of any cues. A customer is more likely to talk about, recommend, and lean toward your brand when making a purchase if they are more inclined to remember it.
Measure the proportion of media coverage and voice.
1. Protection
Each quarter, we examine total coverage, broken down into feature articles, bylines, mentions, and syndicated coverage. This makes it easier for us to keep tabs on the kind of coverage we are securing, whether it’s a complete feature article about or a byline we put. Every item of press is tracked using Sprout Social, which also tracks social media shares.
2. Voice Share
One of the most used metrics in the field of public relations is share of voice. It is described as the ratio of your brand’s media and social media mentions to those of your rivals (news, blogs, and Twitter). The quality of coverage is not measured by SOV; only the quantity of coverage is. In order to solve this, we look at the share of impressions, or the proportion of people who were exposed to coverage of your business compared to that of your rivals. You can gauge the caliber of coverage by comparing the two side by side. If your company has a low SOV but a high SOI, it may not be securing as much coverage as its rivals, but it is securing pieces in higher-quality, journals with larger readerships. We use Onclusive to assess SOV and determine what they refer to as Power of Voice, a statistic that integrates sentiment, publication authority, content relevancy, and social media amplification into a single number. This gives us the ability to gauge the impact of our media coverage rather than just the volume of it.
3. Remarks
Mentions can occur when a reporter mentions our company in a larger story or when we offer them an article or a reporter. To measure awareness and buzz, we track the number of mentions throughout the course of the quarters. Our mentions have grown over the quarters mostly as a result of the rapport we have established with reporters, the proprietary data reports we have released, and more joint ventures with other tech organizations.
4.Pull-Through of Messages
Measurement of message pull-through enables us to assess the level of coverage. The company benefits both directly and indirectly when important company statements are included in media coverage. If your messages are not being noticed, they may not be resonating with the media or they may not be the kinds of pieces you want to be included in.
Tracking Brand Awareness with Blogs and Web Traffic
5. Online Traffic
To track organic, direct, and referral traffic to our website, we utilize Google Analytics. This helps us determine whether or not our efforts in PR and social media are bringing visitors to our website. We notice increases in our organic and referral traffic in the months after significant PR announcements and significant media coverage. For instance, funding announcements, announcements at the end of the year, and the introduction of new products sometimes cause increases. We can investigate precisely which articles are bringing visitors to our website and the caliber of those visits by looking at the referral traffic.
6. Volume of branded searches
Another vital measure of brand awareness is the amount of branded searches. This statistic illustrates the volume of actual name-based searches for your brand. These searchers are among your most valuable ones since they remember you and are quite likely to buy the particular goods or services you are offering.
7. Blog Visits
Every month, we track the total and organic blog traffic and analyze the blog posts, advertisements, and social media referrals that generated the most traffic. To identify the best sources generating visitors and focus more effort on promotion there, we analyze the organic and direct blog referral sources (LinkedIn, Facebook, direct, email, and organic). In order to determine how many new users we are bringing to the site through each channel, we also compare unique pageviews to pageviews.
8.Blog Conversions
We examine the most popular blog entries that are downloaded as well as the links and call-to-actions (CTAs) that led to those conversions. This helps us understand the most popular types of content and the most effective strategies for promoting them.
We also examine the blogs that are generating the most valuable conversions, namely demo requests. Then, we may develop blogs of a similar nature that direct website users down the sales funnel and spark interest in our offerings.
9. Social Media Posts
We can decide the most effective strategy to promote posts and gain more knowledge about the more well-liked post subjects by taking a look at the amount of social shares and the social media platforms the blog posts are being shared on. It’s typically a hint that we need to produce more information around a topic if it generates a lot of talk on social media.
10. Hyperlinks
Backlinks are a crucial component of brand recognition since they demonstrate that other websites are making references to you and your goods or services. Strong backlinks are important for search engine rankings as well as for attracting visitors from other websites. More backlinks increase both referral and organic search traffic to your website.
Guest posting on other websites with anchor text pointing back to important pages on your site is a terrific strategy to improve the number of backlinks to your website.
11.Google Trends
On a macro level, you occasionally want to know how well-liked your company or its goods are. We examine Google Trends data to obtain this scale. For those who are unfamiliar, Google Trends is a website that tracks how popular top search terms are in different locales and linguistic groups. It compares the volume of various queries’ searches over time using graphs.
Google Trends may provide you with a thorough picture of how the number of searches for your goods, services, or sector have evolved over time and in which geographical areas you are most well-liked. For instance, you might discover that one of your product lines has significantly better brand recognition than the others, or that one area of the world is more familiar with you than another. By adjusting your strategy in light of this, you can make sure that your main items are being searched for in the areas that are most important to you.
Social Listening and Brand Awareness Metrics
Social media listening is distinct from merely keeping an eye on online conversations and responding when customers interact with your brand. In order to effectively employ social media listening, according to Sprout Social, you must examine the trends and conversations occurring not only around your company but also throughout your sector as a whole.
You may learn from social media listening not just what people are saying about your company, but also why, where, and how these conversations are taking place. This enables you to understand the fundamentals of how consumers perceive your brand, enabling you to optimize campaigns, enhance your content strategy and messaging, and outperform your rivals. The metrics listed below should be used to guide your social listening approach.
12. Followers overall
Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are examples of social media channels. We examine the rate of growth in the number of followers. We can decide our future plan for expanding audience by contrasting this with the current activities — regular posts, paid promotion, interacting with influencers, and significant announcements.
13. Social Interaction
Engagement on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter includes shares, likes, comments, etc. We examine the most successful posts across the three channels. This aids us in figuring out how to customize content for the various social media platforms and how to keep boosting interaction. We also make use of Sprout Social to track the amount of interaction our material generates on social media.
14. Referral Traffic and Visitor Quality
Social media promotes brand awareness and serves as a useful channel for directing visitors to your website. We put a lot of effort into generating quality traffic and referral traffic from our social media channels. We examine the most popular articles that bring visitors to the website. By examining average session time and bounce rate, we can also determine which social media sites are most effective in generating traffic.
13. Social Interaction
Engagement on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter includes shares, likes, comments, etc. We examine the most successful posts across the three channels. This aids us in figuring out how to customize content for the various social media platforms and how to keep boosting interaction. We also make use of Sprout Social to track the amount of interaction our material generates on social media.
14. Referral Traffic and Visitor Quality
Social media promotes brand awareness and serves as a useful channel for directing visitors to your website. We put a lot of effort into generating quality traffic and referral traffic from our social media channels. We examine the postings that are most effective at bringing visitors to the website. By examining average session time and bounce rate, we can also determine which social media sites are most effective in generating traffic.
15.Direct Traffic
“Direct traffic” is what happens when a customer visits your website directly as opposed to discovering you on Google or through an advertisement. As an illustration, consider the case where a customer visits directly rather than conducting a Google search for “call tracking.” High levels of direct traffic are a sign of strong brand recognition and recall among your target audience because they arrive on your website unprompted and with knowledge of your identity.
To monitor the evolution of our direct traffic, we use Google Analytics. We might assume that more customers are getting aware of our brand and our items if it is expanding steadily.
16.Conversions
A social conversion occurs when a user clicks on a link to visit a landing page for a webinar, event, or gated content asset. We track conversion rates, the social network that generated them, and the kind of material that generated them.
Measurement for measurement’s sake is not a good way to increase brand awareness. Look at your measurements for critical insights that will help you achieve your objectives and provide ever-better outcomes in the future. Use your metrics to demonstrate how your efforts are having a positive financial impact and how you are generating leads and company value.
17. Support for Employees
Employee advocacy is yet another important tool you can use to raise brand awareness. To increase employee advocacy and make it simple for staff members across the company to contribute social media material, we use a technology called EveryoneSocial. The technology gamifies the process and provides specific analytics on which employees receive the most “likes,” “comments,” and interaction. We can also observe how far we’ve reached and how many impressions we’re creating within the company. With the platform, we can measure employee advocacy and determine how much brand awareness our employees are creating.
Getting Information from the Customer’s Voice
You may need more granular data if the analytics you collect from your marketing channels aren’t sufficient in some cases. You can directly ask your customers for these insights. You can use a plethora of fresh information from this to guide your marketing approach.
18.Review Websites
Customers are likely to share their experiences with your brand on review websites when they have a particularly positive or negative one. They might utilize Google Reviews or a site tailored to their industry, like G2 for software, Yelp for restaurants, and ZocDoc for doctors. Many businesses use review management software to keep track of all the evaluations they receive online.
You may learn more about how your customers feel about your products by closely monitoring reviews. Additionally, it can aid in directing your choices in order to improve customer satisfaction and brand reputation.
19. Utilize client surveys
Surveys demand work from your clients, unlike the aforementioned data sources. It’s preferable to provide something in exchange for their participation, whether it’s a discount, a voucher, or a chance to win a prize.
In order to increase survey completion rates, it’s critical to limit the questions you include in your survey to those that directly relate to your primary objective of assessing brand awareness. Remember that rating scales are your friend because they let customers select a response fast rather to writing a lengthy response. Additionally, they are simpler to gather and assemble than freeform responses.
