Measuring brand awareness is essential for understanding your brand's market presence and how effectively you're reaching potential customers. In today's competitive marketplace, a strong brand is a powerful asset. From increased sales and market share to customer loyalty and advocacy, knowing how to successfully build and track brand awareness presents a strong foundation for reaching marketing and business goals.
In this article, we delve into how you can measure, track, and leverage brand awareness to your advantage:
Brand awareness refers to the degree to which consumers recognize and remember your brand. It's not just about knowing you exist; it's about being top-of-mind when it matters most, and the associations and emotions consumers have with your brand. Imagine someone needing a lift to the airport. If 'Uber' immediately pops into mind, that's brand awareness in action.
It can present itself in different forms:
Building strong brand awareness isn't just about vanity metrics; it's a strategic investment that fuels your marketing and sales initiatives, impacting efforts across various stages of the conversion funnel.
There are a variety of methods to measure brand awareness, and we've compiled a list of the most important ones to help you understand your brand's reach and impact.
Social listening allows you to monitor online conversations about your brand, providing insights into public sentiment, recognition, and the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
How to measure:
Branded search volume refers to the number of times people search for your brand name or specific branded keywords (e.g., "[your brand name] + discount code"). This metric is a strong indicator of brand awareness because it shows how many people are actively looking for you online.
How to measure:
By examining your website traffic, you can understand how many people are finding your website, how they're getting there, and how well your website is engaging them. This information can be crucial for refining your website's design and content to better attract and convert visitors who are aware of your brand.
How to measure:
Brand awareness surveys directly measure consumer recognition and perception of your brand. Through targeted questions, these surveys evaluate how familiar your audience is with your brand, what attributes or values they associate with it, and their likelihood of choosing your brand over competitors.
How to measure:
The responses gathered during brand awareness surveys offer direct look into what customers truly know and think about your brand.
Share of Voice (SOV) measures your brand's visibility and presence within the market compared to competitors. It shows how much of the conversation your brand owns across various channels, including social media, search engines, and traditional media.
How to measure:
Earned media coverage refers to publicity your brand receives without directly paying for it. This can include mentions in news articles, customer reviews, influencer content, and social media mentions from non-paid sources. Positive earned media coverage can significantly boost brand awareness and credibility.
How to measure:
There are several ways to measure and track your earned media coverage:
Referral traffic measures the visitors to your website coming from direct links on other websites, not through direct searches or social media. It reflects the extent to which other sites find your content valuable enough to link to it.
Most website analytics platforms, like Google Analytics, allow you to track referral traffic.
Here's what you can measure:
Content marketing is a strategic approach to creating and distributing valuable, informative content that attracts a defined target audience and drives profitable customer action.
By consistently providing high-quality content, you establish your brand as a thought leader in your industry, educate potential customers, and ultimately increase brand awareness.
Tracking the performance of your content marketing efforts allows you to measure its impact on achieving this goal.
How to measure:
By monitoring these key metrics, you can adjust your strategy to better target new audiences, affirm your brand's authority, and increase brand recognition.
Tracking your brand awareness with YouGov is easy. Whether through a one-time survey to your audience, a custom brand awareness tracker, or connecting to our daily brand tracking tool - YouGov BrandIndex - for continuous brand awareness tracking. This flexibility ensures that you always have the right tools at your fingertips for measuring brand awareness effectively.
YouGov BrandIndex is our syndicated daily brand tracking tool, drawing on the thoughts and opinions of our panel of over 26 million registered panel members globally. With YouGov BrandIndex, we assess a wide range of key metrics daily, providing a complete picture of what people see, hear, and think about your brand along their consumer journey.
YouGov’s brand tracking tool also offers the ability to place your brand in a broader context. By comparing your brand to thousands of others across hundreds of categories, YouGov BrandIndex allows you to identify sector-specific trends and global market movements.
Tracking over 27,000+ brands every day across more than 55 major markets, YouGov BrandIndex provides a nuanced view of brand awareness across all sectors. Insights are delivered to through an easy-to-access and always-on dashboard, ensuring you’re constantly up to date on your brand’s awareness and market position.
Know what is happening to your brand, all the time.
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Being able to tap into YouGov’s suite of products allowed us to evaluate and directly attribute the increase in brand awareness for Coors Banquet to its exposure in the Cobra Kai series on Netflix.