Much of digital marketing comes down to a motivation of being seen or fund on the internet. You want the name of your company to be the first that comes to mind when a potential customer discovers a need for the service or product you provide. Getting out ahead of this first sense of need in the customer can be referred to as Brand Awareness. This Brand Awareness continues through the customer journey as well as you convert a one-time customer to a loyal advocate in the digital space.
But for as much talk as there is about Brand Awareness, there is often much too little measurement of the success of digital marketing efforts when it comes to this illusive value. Can we measure Brand Awareness. Yes we can! The following is by no means an exhaustive list of metrics, but a starting point that might be of use to you.
3 Essential Measures of Brand Awareness for Businesses of All Sizes
- Web Traffic – The total number of direct visitors to your website can be considered a good metric to track regarding brand awareness. Whether they read your name in the paper, heard it on the news, or saw it on a blog, the number of people intentionally typing your web address into their browser demonstrates brand awareness. You might broaded this number to include some search based on branded terms to reflect the way most users enter the web these days, through a search interface.
- Social Mentions – Are people talking about you? Did you know that you can do social listening in order to track the volume of this discussion in social media? There are great tools out there like Brandwatch for tracking those discussions and putting some metrics around it. Social mentions can lead directly to a metric like ‘Share of Voice’ where you divide the number of brand mentions by the number of total discussions around your service or product area. This percentage gives you a market share of social discussion around in your market space.
- Reach – Whether folks are talking about you or not, if you do your job well, you can get your brand in front of digital audiences. Measuring the potential audience of your social media activity is usually referred to as ‘reach’ since you have the exponential opportunities of reaching the friends and followers of your own friends and followers through social media. Track your reach statistics through various platforms to see if your efforts are getting to as many eyeballs as you thought.
So next time the Marketing Director justifies their expenditures as furthering Brand Awareness, ask for the measurements of their outcomes with these metrics.
