How much does your audience really know about your brand? How familiar are they with your products and services? The only way to answer these questions is to measure brand awareness. Also referred to as customer awareness, it represents the extent to which customers recognize your brand and associate with specific goods or services. Besides generating revenue, your marketing campaigns can help increase brand awareness and boost your reputation online and offline.

Why Is Brand Awareness Important?

Measuring brand awareness can give you valuable insights into your target audience and how they perceive your products or services. Startups and established companies alike communicate through their logos, names and other branding elements that make their products instantly recognizable to customers. In fact, up to 37 percent of people are loyal to their favorite brands and make repeat purchases from them.

Brand awareness builds brand equity, which translates into higher revenue. It also helps customers associate specific products with your business. For example, when most people hear the term "search engine," they think of Google. Copiers are associated with Xerox. Premium coffee is often associated with Starbucks.

Once a customer gets to know your brand, they're more likely to purchase your products. Brand awareness also builds trust and gives your business a unique identity. Furthermore, it can help you establish yourself as an industry leader and strengthen your reputation.

Since over 80 percent of customers are more likely to purchase from brands they follow on social networks, it's important that you build social media brand awareness. Don't limit yourself to traditional media outlets; leverage the power of technology to spread the word about your brand. Everything from your website and blog to email newsletters should blend seamlessly with your existing brand image.

Measuring Brand Awareness

Establishing and measuring brand awareness should be at the core of your marketing efforts. This can be done in various ways, such as tracking the number of brand mentions and blog shares, monitoring website traffic, using analytics tools and more. There are a few different metrics you can use for measuring brand recognition and awareness. These include but are not limited to:

  • Impressions
  • Brand recall.
  • New website visitors.
  • Social media reach.
  • Social shares.
  • Media mentions.
  • Branded searches.
  • Click-through rate.
  • Signups
  • Relevance scores on PPC.

What if you run a brick-and-mortar store or a local business? Besides measuring brand awareness online, there are a couple of things you can do to determine how much your offline audience knows about your brand.

Consider giving away custom discount codes for each marketing channel you're using. The number of QR code scans will indicate how successful your campaign is. For example, you can create a coupon code for each newspaper or magazine where you're promoting your business. This way, you'll know how your campaign is performing regarding brand awareness.

Another option is to use analytics tools to find out where your website visitors are coming from. Direct traffic, for instance, indicates the number of users who type your URL into their browser’s address bar. They might have seen your website address on a business card or in a flyer. Even though this isn’t the most reliable indicator, it still helps.

You can also create branded links to your website and print them on posts, leaflets, billboards and other marketing materials. Next, use Google Analytics to track the number of visitors coming to your site or blogs from each link.

If you prefer a more traditional approach, measure how many in-store, mail and phone inquiries are made regarding your products. Track the number of sales following an advertising campaign, create polls and surveys or conduct an in-store study.

Don't hesitate to request customer feedback. Ask business awareness questions, such as how they feel about your company and products, what they expect, how likely they are to recommend your services and how they would rate their experience with your brand. Include these questions in your emails, surveys, customer feedback forms and other communication channels.

Tools to Measure Customer Awareness

In this digital era, measuring brand awareness is no longer challenging. From online analytics to social media management software, there are lots of different tools you can use to determine how customers feel about your brand.

Tweetreach, for example, displays the number of social media users who are seeing your tweets. Google Analytics provides accurate insights into your audience and their actions on your website or blog. It can help you understand how people use your site and interact with your content, how much time they spend on each page and what keeps them engaged.

Another useful tool is Mentionlytics, which tracks your brand’s mentions in real time. It's ideal for measuring social media brand awareness. You can also use HowSociable to monitor your online reputation and see how visible your brand is on the Web.