An identifiable brand is vital to an organization’s success. Before people trust your brand, they need to become familiar with it. Brand awareness helps people to recognize your business as a familiar presence that they may turn to next time your products or services are needed.
But cultivating brand awareness isn’t necessarily a simple process. It requires real structure, planning, and access to relevant data to create a brand awareness strategy that makes a significant impact.
Tracking metrics is one of the most advantageous things any business can do to expand its target audience and generate organic awareness. Metrics provide measurable clarity about the performance of your strategy and help you create an identity around your brand that people recognize and trust. These are essential factors in facilitating growth and engaging new and existing customers.
Why Metrics Matter
A metric is a standard of measurement that enables us to understand the true effectiveness of a strategy. They serve as guiding points for us to perceive how successfully certain processes are being implemented, and provide necessary insight into what can be changed or improved.
There are many advantages to using metrics in business, especially for something as intangible as brand awareness, which can be somewhat nuanced without proper structure. Some advantages include:
- Improves employee productivity – When your goals and objectives are clearer, people can target them with more exactitude. This can drive employee performance and inspire productivity.
- Reduces stress – It’s not necessary (or helpful) to base serious business decisions on estimations. Metrics are a more reliable source of data, giving you and your company peace of mind.
- Alerts you to problems in advance – Metrics can help you to identify patterns or trends in your audience behavior that may be difficult to pick up on otherwise.
- More efficient strategies – The more information people have access to, the more tactical they can be about their decisions. This leads to the development of sharper, more efficient strategies.
When it comes to measuring brand awareness, you need to have a keen understanding of consumer behavior and ways of thinking, which can be tricky to gauge without clear metrics. By setting and tracking the following metrics, you can stimulate brand awareness that pushes your business forward.
- Website Traffic
Website activity is a strong indicator for how popular your brand is with consumers. This metric shows you how many people are visiting and using your website, whether it’s via targeted ads or organic searching. Website traffic also gives you a better idea of which parts of your site get the most traction.
By tracking your brand’s website traffic, you also gain the advantage of peeping into consumer behavior and pinpointing the strengths and weaknesses of the site layout. This helps you to determine how to attract more traffic and convert it into customers.
- Customer Feedback
Your customer’s perspectives and opinions can provide you with key insights into how to improve or adjust your brand campaign, making customer feedback one of the most crucial brand awareness metrics to track. Brands need to know what customers directly think and feel about them.
You can gather this information in a variety of ways. Just some of your options include hosting polls on social media, providing simple surveys for people to fill in, and speaking to customers directly. If you struggle to extract enough feedback, consider incentivizing it with discounts or other attractive deals.
- Social Media Mentions
One of the many great things about social media is that you can connect and collaborate with a vast number of other users around the world. When your brand gets mentioned or tagged on some platforms by another brand or a happy customer, it amplifies positive awareness.
Tracking the amount of social media mentions your brand receives can offer insight into how popular it is and how many people want to be associated with it.
- Referral Traffic
One clear way to tell how aware the public is of your brand is to look at referral traffic metrics. Referral traffic relates to social media mentions and the path customers take to reach your website. This data lets you know what kind of content is most effective in driving sales and website traffic.
- Brand Impressions
An impression is a term used frequently in the world of social media marketing to describe how many consumers access campaign content or any type of content that you upload. For example, impressions can tell you how many views you had on a video, how many people saw images you posted taken by a professional product photographer, and how many likes, mentions, @ and # shares your content got.
While it may not provide you with information on what people think about the content, it does demonstrate the level of visibility you have online. The more brand impressions you have, the more people are viewing your content, which is great for cultivating brand awareness.
- Brand Reach
Brand reach is a broad term that relates to the overall level of engagement your brand has with consumers and other brands on social media. Everything from impressions to comments to tags fall into the category of brand reach, which makes it a powerful metric that every business should be tracking.
Brand reach gives you a clear, well-rounded perspective on how many people are engaging with your brand, and what the trajectory of growth looks like over a set period of time.
How To Track Metrics
Knowing which metrics are important to track is all well and good, but they’re of little use unless you have an actual method for tracking them. To track brand awareness metrics and any other type of metric, your business needs access to a data analytics program.
- Datapad
- Klipfolio
- Databox
- Geckoboard
Some of these programs are paid, others are completely free. You can also find basic data analytics tools on some social media sites for tracking rudimentary brand awareness and reach metrics.
Conclusion
Brand awareness can tell you a lot about where your business stands within the public eye and how it stacks up next to competitors.
Using metrics to track the progress of your relationship with consumers can put your brand in a better position to cultivate customer loyalty and better meet their needs. With all the data tracking and analysis tools we have access to today, tracking metrics has never been easier or more important.