While there are many companies that make fast food, only a tiny percentage of them have memorable appearance and products, such as McDonald’s or KFC. Whenever you think of a specific product, you’ll most likely associate it with the company that made it.
As much as 81% of consumers look for a brand that they can trust before they make a purchase. Developing such trust with the customers isn’t an easy thing. Thankfully, with the advancement of technology, small and medium-sized enterprises can analyze their performance and create better strategies.
To help you understand how memorable your company is, I’ve compiled a list of some of the best ways of measuring brand awareness. While some of the methods from this list require specialized software, others can be conducted using free online tools or even in person.
Brand awareness explained
Customers need to be aware of a product’s existence before choosing it over competitors. This is the measurement of how customers are aware of your company and its products.
Building a reputable brand is a powerful marketing strategy that can improve your revenue and popularity in the long run. Apple is an excellent example of a brand. Everyone is aware of their devices, for example, Macbooks and iPhones, but if they released a new product people would likely purchase it because they have trust in that company.
Brand awareness isn’t something that can be measured precisely, but you can grasp it by analyzing the thoughts of your customers and certain online metrics. This includes:
- Opinion of random customers
- Social media performance
- Information gathered through market analysis
The advantage of this concept is that it’s applicable to a wide variety of digital and physical products. Whether designing t-shirts or developing software, you can benefit from increasing your brand awareness.
Of course, you can’t expect that your company’s reputation will reach the global popularity that Google or Samsung have, but you improve it to gain popularity in your niche.
1. Analyzing market
Market analysis is the practice of making an extensive research on the market size, your competitors, and other valuable attributes of the market that your business is a part of. Learning how to conduct a market analysis requires time and practice, but it can help you gain an advantage over your competitors.
This method is very effective if you want to launch a new product or penetrate a new market. Market analysis can help you comprehend how customers feel toward other companies in your industry.
For example, if the popular belief of your target audience is that another product is more useful, you can move on to doing in-depth research on that company.
Monitoring your competitors will help you understand whether they’re increasing or decreasing in popularity. Once equipped with such information, you can construct a plan that will allow you to protect your current market position or help you expand.
2. Run brand awareness surveys
You can measure your brand awareness by conducting online or traditional surveys with your audience. Depending on the type of your company, you can survey the general population or a group of people that your company targets.
While a single survey can prove helpful in understanding your audience, the best results will be gathered after running multiple surveys over longer periods. For example, if you conduct a survey on your audience quarterly, you’ll have more accurate data.
The minds of the customers change as time moves on. Grasping why such changes occur and whether your company has made some wrong decisions will help you adapt to the consumer sentiment at the time.
Before you run a brand awareness survey, you want to have a clear goal in mind. There are multiple types of surveys that include testing:
- Recognition
- Recall
- Identity
- Image of the brand
With the right questions, you’ll have an insight into how the surveyed population feels about your brand. Surveys are a more direct approach that allows you to receive honest opinions from people.
3. Branded search volume
A branded search volume shows how familiar people are with using your product to achieve a certain goal. To explain the difference between a regular and a branded search, I will give a simple example regarding computer viruses.
A regular search would include Googling “how to get rid of a Trojan virus,” while a branded search would, for example, have a “using Avast” at the end of the query. People that are familiar with the brand will look for results related to it rather than general results.
Based on the volume of searches, you can see how often people are seeking info about your products. Low search volume doesn’t necessarily mean poor brand awareness because, for example, most of the audience can engage with your company through social media.
However, after conducting a branded search audit, you can take steps that will help you increase your search volume.
4. Checking social media followers
People are following social media pages that they have an interest in, making social media following a pretty straightforward way of understanding your reach. While there can be fake or inactive profiles following you, they will only form a minority of a number of followers.
A presence on social media and frequent posts can help you attract new followers and engage with the current ones. Social media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter offer analytical tools for business accounts.
These features are helpful in monitoring the engagement that your followers have with your posts. By looking into the performance of each post, you’ll be able to understand what type of content your followers are most interested in.
On top of this, it’s useful to track during what period of the day your audience is most active.
5. Backlink profile
Backlinks are an important term in the world of search engine optimization, but understanding this concept can have some benefits for marketers as well. A backlink is a link targeted toward your website but placed on other domains.
They can be checked by a free backlink checker or with an SEO tool such as Ahrefs, Moz, or Semrush. The amount and quality of backlinks can help your website rank better on search engines.
You would like to have links placed on websites of popular websites in the industry. Mentions and links from reputable sources are a good indication of high brand awareness.
People that encounter your company’s name on impactful websites will have higher trust in your products. A product mentioned on a favorite blog of a particular consumer will often be their top choice if they decide to purchase a product from that category.
6. Earned media coverage
Earned media is commonly referred to as third-party publicity. It is an organic way of achieving popularity on the internet by being mentioned or referenced in various medium forms. Blogs, press releases, and social media posts are common platforms through which media coverage can be observed.
The main feature of third-party publicity is that it’s considered more trustworthy as it occurs organically. A sponsored post can help a product receive more views, but the audience will be aware that the benefits of the product are exaggerated.
You can track how often your brand is through social listening tools. Also, SEO tools can help you find unlinked mentions of your brand. You’re free to reach out to websites that haven’t linked to your company and ask them for a backlink.
In conclusion, third-party publicity is:
- Free
- Seen as trustworthy by customers
7. Social listening
No, social listening doesn’t include any audio. It does include tracking how often is your brand mentioned on popular social media platforms. Social listening can help you analyze whether your brand is seen in a positive or negative light and what demographics are mainly engaging with it.
To perform social listening for your brand, you need to utilize social media management tools. They can create reports and help you analyze trends.
Through social listening, you observe potential opportunities for marketing. For example, you can clear out misinformation about the product through a social media post or a video.
Market research helps measure brand awareness
Understanding what brand awareness is and how familiar the consumers are with your product can help your company increase conversions, revenue, and presence in the industry. While the mentioned concept isn’t a precise number, such as organic traffic, it represents a combination of different metrics.
No matter which method for measuring brand awareness you decide to use, there isn’t one that will give you a completely accurate representation of it. But, you can get a better insight into what are some actions that you can take to improve your company.
Through branded search and backlink profiling, you can make plans to improve your SEO strategy while analyzing social media engagement helps build a foundation for a good social media marketing campaign.
About Writer
Veljko is a student of information technology that paired his passion for technology with his writing skills. He enjoys researching topics such as robotics and programming and cultivates his knowledge in philosophy, classical literature, and fitness. Veljko’s favorite writers are Borislav Pekić, Miloš Crnjanski, and Ernest Hemingway.
Website: writerveljko.com
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/veljko-petrović-699ab0201/
