Keeping track of how your brand is perceived and received is critical. And there are 15 key areas you need for measuring brand awareness, and to understand the impact your brand has on consumers.
These stats reveal show how important brand awareness is:
And why is measuring brand awareness important? We’re glad you asked!
Brand awareness describes how familiar or “aware” consumers are with a brand and its products. But it’s more than finding out if they’ve heard of you before or not. Measuring brand awareness takes into account:
That’s a good overview to get us started, but we have 15 specific metrics to detail, so let’s dig in!
Consumers make decisions on purchases based on their feelings. This is why understanding consumer sentiment is an important metric when measuring brand awareness. It provides intel on where you stand in the eyes, and hearts, of your audience.
Below, our sentiment analysis tool reveals top emotions expressed over an entertainment brand. Green indicates positive sentiment, while red showcases negative, and the size of the word reveals the popularity of the term, by volume. Words like favorite and talented jump off the page, with the negative words taking up a small, yet intel-rich percentage. They should still be investigated, as what’s small today, may become large tomorrow.
Clicking through on secondary problem and it’s discovered that many feel this company has brought old expectations for women onto the future – and into their products. This is an issue they may want to closely examine and address ahead of this conversation gaining momentum and threatening brand health.
Your share of voice (SOV) weighs how you’re doing against other big players at the table. It tracks mentions, posts, engagements, potential impressions and sentiments, comparing them with others in your category. Understanding SOV allows your brand to uncover not only how consumers see you, but which factors brought them to their decision. For example, in our social media industry report for beauty brands, we found it was Fenty ranking number one this year in SOV for beauty brands, garnering 150,849,455 engagements, with buzz from their lip-gloss and makeup box collabs specifically. Measuring brand awareness will uncover how you measure up in your category and in the industry as a whole.
The same consumers who loved you in 1995 may not be as taken with your brand right now. And that’s because consumers change over time. To create targeted messaging and campaigns, brands need to know where their consumers live, their ages, and ethnicity – and lots more.
For example, you wouldn’t use the same language and imagery in an ad intended to appeal to boomers as you would to capture the attention of Gen Z. So, it’s critical to understand your brand’s ever-evolving consumer base. And tracking these changes keeps your strategy aligned with emerging concerns or desires, instead of chasing them.
Beyond demographics, there are psychographics to consider. These are the interests, hobbies, professions and behaviors consumers have self-identified – and they’re telling. Measuring brand awareness by way of these little traits could mean big rewards.
Below, we see indexed interests of an audience belonging to a top entertainment company. We see creative arts looms large, which isn’t surprising. But education and science and research could offer new avenues to explore from a campaign creation perspective:
And keeping an eye on how these categories may change will be integral to getting your messaging right every time.
People are relatively similar, but they have subtle nuances that need to be understood if you plan to lure them in. To speak the language of the consumer, you need to know what separates consumers in Louisiana from those in Illinois, for example. If you’re advertising a ‘Pop’ in Louisiana, you may be losing out, as the ad will feel alien to them. But using that term in Illinois would feel like home.
Regional differences play a big part in how consumers see you. And if your share of voice is lacking in an area, your brand voice must be on-point, or you’ll be viewed as an outsider, and it will stay that way! Don’t worry, AI-powered social media analytics reveal these distinctions so you can communicate on a more personal level with your audience and create ads that resonate.
Measuring brand awareness reveals how you’re trending on different social media channels. This is advantageous for discovering untapped opportunities. You may be putting a lot of effort into Twitter, but there may be a large amount of interaction about your brand or its products on Tumblr or Reddit. Locating which channels are chatting about your offerings helps refine your marketing strategy and conversation is different on each channel. You can then apply what you’ve learned about your audiences to target them more precisely.
Consumers are less loyal to brands since the pandemic and this has made retaining consumers a little more challenging. Keeping an eye on your competition can help you understand what they’re doing right, or wrong.
One of the best ways to uncover these specifics is by using thematic analysis layered on top of searches for mentions of both your brand and theirs. You can use themes to track various intel – it’s all in how you define the criteria. There are quick templates to capture everything from quality to customer service, and it reveals details which might be missed otherwise.
As an example, we see Brand One and Two have similar standing in Quality, and both brands are suffering in Customer Care. But when it comes to price, Brand One is clearly winning. Why? We could then dig into the analytics to sort that out, tracking it back to the posts about it.
Consumers talk, a lot. They talk about what they had for lunch, who they are crushing on – and they talk about you. Brands will want to use these positive brand shout-outs to their advantage, but they can’t if they don’t know where they are. Having social listening tools that reveal and separates out the paid, owned and earned mentions is critical to understanding where your efforts are paying off, and where you’re naturally succeeding.
Influencer marketing has more than doubled since 2019, and in 2021 it was valued at 13.8 billion U.S. dollars. And partnering with the right social influencers is a great way to grow brand awareness. The challenge here is two-fold: selecting the right influencer and tracking his/her engagement levels to make sure it’s worth the investment. And you don’t want to reach just any traffic, but your target audience, and in a way that aligns with your company’s values. Measuring brand awareness before and after you kick off your influencer marketing efforts will be imperative, and it’s something you can manage fairly simply in Quid.
Where does your brand stand in consumer conversations around top trends such as sustainability and equity? Measuring brand awareness for ongoing and emerging trends matters if you brand wants to keep its head above water.
Take, for example, sustainability. This is a current trend in all thing, with 73% of global consumers saying they would change their consumption behavior to reduce their impact on the environment. Be sure to track brand perception in this and other hot button areas, as we saw one CPG brand being referred to as ‘global warming in a can,” and that’s not a good look for any brand these days!
Did you know that consumers expect a response from brands within 24 hours? And 39% expect a response in 60 minutes. So, a question or complaint left unattended can do a lot of harm, as we know that bad experiences are more likely to be shared. And these little posts and comments can spread like wildfire on social media.
On the flip side, locating positive brand reviews can be very helpful, as a little consumer generated content can do wonders for encouraging your consumer base to believe in you. It’s out there, but will you see it when most brand mentions aren’t tagged? You will if you’re using social media analytics that has robust imagery analysis capabilities! And measuring brand awareness really isn’t complete without it.
So, you’ve done your due diligence and are tracking engagements to ensure that your brand is chugging along the social web highway, with lots of engagements to power your trip. But what do those engagements mean? Without knowing what’s behind that metric, you’re really not seeing the full picture.
You may have a high engagement rate but is it all positive? Do consumers love your new ad, or does it fall short? How passionate are they – and has this changed from the previous quarter, or even the past month? Measuring brand awareness means making sense of the specific details that are at the heart of these engagement rates. It is how savvy brands use this actionable insight to strategize ongoing work.
Tracking throughout the purchase path is a necessity. It ensures that your approach is connecting at each point along the way. It’s one thing to lure consumers in, but the taste test is what ultimately matters. If a consumer doesn’t appreciate some part of the experience or if they do not like the end product, it will sour them on buying from your brand again. And you may never know, as only 1 in 26 consumers will tell a brand about their negative experience; the rest will just leave.
Following though on your customers’ experiences is smart business – and you’ll find most category leaders have this part locked up.
Measuring brand awareness gets really interesting when it comes time for logo recognition. Oftentimes, consumers don’t actually mention your brand, but they’ll post a picture with your product or logo in view. Maybe they are showcasing their new look, and your drink is sitting on the table next to them.
This offers a snapshot of your consumers’ lives, which is ultra-valuable intel, as it can result in unearthing surprising new ways to market your drink – ways that you’d never consider otherwise. And logo and image tracking also alerts you to any misuse of your trademark image, keeping those who would misrepresent your company in check.
Key Opinion Leaders (KOL) often get confused with influencers. However, there is a distinct difference. Influencers are paid for their endorsement, and KOLs are experts in their field who are earn accolades and speaking engagements because of their expertise but aren’t necessarily seeking any endorsement deals. This scientists versus celebrities, though some celebrities are KOLs due to their mega-stardom.
The point is their reach is vast and their opinions can move markets. So, if your brand message aligns with KOL conversations, you can make connections with your audience and improve brand awareness in that space. Identifying and monitoring KOL conversation makes sense, as brands can tweak campaigns to align with KOL topics and greatly enhance brand awareness with little effort.
Success in business doesn’t begin and end with selling a product. The efforts behind the scenes make all the difference and measuring brand awareness is critical at every step of the way. Take a moment to reach out for a demo and we’ll show you how!
