When you can’t remember the name of an actor or a musician, what do you do? You “Google” it, right? (And if you’re anything like me, you proceed to their Wikipedia entry and go down a rabbit hole for a minimum of 20 minutes.) What do you do when you need to amend a photo? You “Photoshop” it! What about when you need to blow your nose? You grab a “Kleenex”. This is the power of brand awareness. Google, Photoshop, and Uber are brand names that have become so common, they are now verbs. They all have competitors that could deliver a better experience, but the active verb still stands in our minds.
How does this level of awareness happen? It doesn’t happen overnight. Building brand awareness is a long-term process that should be included in every company’s strategic plan. Nothing else will matter if your brand is not strong. Why? Because positive brand awareness instills trust and brings value to committed customers. Those customers become ambassadors for your brand.
Building Brand Awareness
So, what do companies do to build brand awareness? Storytelling is a very effective tactic. An impactful story can humanize your brand and make it relatable. Using a narrative approach in your marketing and sales tactics not only sells your products and services but also uplifts your brand. People remember authentic stories. This is why content marketing is a critical marketing strategy for most brands. Blog posts, social media campaigns, whitepapers, podcasts, and other forms of content marketing offer you the opportunity to share your story in a very accessible way.
Measuring Brand Awareness
Brand awareness campaigns often get a bad rap in comparison to their demand generation and inbound/outbound marketing counterparts. Many executives overlook their value because they don’t come across as data-driven. The truth is that brand awareness, like every other piece of your sales and marketing campaign, can and should be measured. And, honestly, those fancy demand generation campaigns simply won’t work unless your brand has a solid awareness strategy in place first.
While it may be simple to measure the ROI of a social campaign in terms of engagement and reach, you may be wondering how to measure your brand awareness. Aside from making your brand a verb, there are other ways to measure your company’s brand awareness and the ROI of your brand messaging strategies. Most of these measures are indirect metrics, meaning the metric is used to calculate something else but can also infer a certain level or sentiment of brand awareness and/or ROI. Let’s talk about a few examples.
Digital Channels
Website traffic is easy to measure and track over time. If traffic increases after you’ve deployed a content marketing or social media campaign, you can infer more brand awareness from any new traffic to your site. Decreased bounce rate and increased session time can also infer more brand awareness from both new and return traffic. Engagement rates on social media channels are another good example of a successful marketing campaign and a commitment to your brand (actually, according to this MarketerHire article, it’s the #1 KPI to pay attention to in 2022). Of course, for e-commerce, increasing your online conversion rate is the best ROI of all.
Return Customers
This is both obvious and often overlooked as a brand awareness metric. Customers who purchase from you regularly are the most committed ambassadors of your brand. And they can be incredibly lucrative. It costs five times more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing customer. That means if you increase customer retention by 5%, you can raise your profits from 25-95%. That is an excellent return on investment. And you’ve retained a brand advocate who will hopefully shout your message from the rooftops.
Share of Voice (SOV)
This metric will measure how much of the conversation your brand is involved in compared to other brands in your market. If you run a Greek restaurant in a town with many Greek restaurants, how many people are talking about your restaurant compared to your competitors? If 100 people out of 500 are talking about yours, you have earned 20% SOV. You want that percentage to be as high as possible.
SOV can be measured across various online channels. Organic search and your Google My Business profile is a good place to start, followed by review sites like Yelp. Measuring SOV on social media is also useful because it will show you how often you are mentioned in online conversations that are not on your brand’s profiles. You can also measure your marketing spend as a percentage of the total market spend if you are privy to that information. Whichever metric you think is important to your brand, find the same metric for your market, and you’ve got a powerful metric to guide your brand awareness strategies.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
NPS is such a pristine and efficient metric for calculating engagement with a brand. You measure an NPS by asking one simple question: “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend YOUR BRAND’s product or service to a family member or friend?”
- If a customer answered with a 0 to 6, they are Detractors, which means they are unlikely to purchase again, and could actually damage your reputation.
- If a customer answered with a 7 or 8, they are Passives, which means they are not inclined to say negative comments about your brand, but they are not inclined to recommend it either.
- If a customer answered 9 or 10, they are Promoters, which means they will repeatedly buy your product or service and are extremely likely to recommend it. These are your brand evangelists. Treat them well.
To calculate an NPS out of a group of scores, subtract the number of detractors from the number of promoters, leaving out the passives. Your final number will be somewhere between -100 to +100, the higher the better. The closer the number is to 100, the higher your positive brand loyalty and awareness are. The NPS becomes even more powerful over time because you can see ebbs and flows in your score and attribute marketing campaigns or other events to it. It’s an excellent learning tool and a powerful metric.
These are just a few possible KPIs you can use to measure your company’s brand awareness. The metrics you choose should depend on both your goals and the strategies you use to build that awareness. I am an expert at not only building a brand but also measuring the success of its efforts. Should you need guidance, send me a message to set up a time to chat.