Brand Awareness: The Invisible Marketing Metric
This article is part of the Take-Away series; where AI is applied to the Puddding database of marketing stories to identify key insights and learnings from our community of professional marketers. These insights are then summarized with clear actions for you to apply to your marketing efforts.
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Awareness is one of the most important things a brand can build, yet it is also one of the most difficult things to measure. How do you truly determine how aware your potential customers are of you? One can examine metrics, such as increases in new users and site visits, in order to see if brand awareness has been improved. But even then, most metrics still feel speculative.
This week, our Puddding AI searched through thousands of marketing stories from the Puddding community of market professionals and identified key insights for awareness’s role in brand development, and how it can be measured.
Measure awareness by comparing with competitors in your industry.
Brand awareness is about building connection and association, whether with an industry, a problem, or even an entire state (see our article that featured the Arizona Office of Tourism). Intimately understanding the industry your brand is a part of is the first step in seeing how aware your audience is to your brand and the value you offer.
By extension, a key way to measure awareness is to compare with other brands in your industry. Click-through-rate, increase in new users, and also measuring site visits are excellent ways to measure individual growth, but to see how these numbers relate to brand awareness, an agency should compare the numbers to competitors in the industry.
DuBose Web Group worked with Home Pest Control to build brand awareness. With the help of detailed web analytics, they were able to find they had increased site visits by over 538%. By comparing that to others in their industry, they were able to identify that this was a significant increase in brand awareness - making them a staple in their industry!
Measure awareness by comparing to yourself!
Though, awareness can be all about comparison and competition within an industry, sometimes the one you are comparing yourself to most IS yourself. Especially when you’re the brand with the most market share. Measuring performance metrics and comparing to past time periods is just as important as comparing to your competitors.
For example, Overdrive Interactive developed and launched an advertising program to reintroduce Physician’s Post-Grad Press (PPP) to the physician community. In doing so, they had to not only plan for success within a competitive market, but also aim to do better than past versions of the Physician’s Press. The campaign involved numerous tactics including a website rebuild, search engine optimization, and a real focus on improving user experience. By going into a campaign with the goal of doing better than past versions of the site, they consistently looked back to past performance to see how successful their reintroduction of PPP was through brand awareness, and saw an increase in their site visits by over 210%!
“Your brand is a story unfolding across all customer touch points.” – Jonah Sachs
Take-Aways
- Are your website metrics reflecting consistent traffic growth by new users?
- Does your marketing strategy consistently include new tactics and channels - driving awareness to new groups of people?
- Are you clear on what industry you’re in - and who your competitors are??
- Who are the top 20 brands in your industry - where do you rank?
- What differentiates you from other brands in the minds of your consumers?
References
https://puddding.com/overdriveinteractive.com/new-trajectory-for-physicians-post-grad-press
https://puddding.com/duboseweb.com/home-pest-control
https://puddding.com/tentcollective.com/transforming-a-retail-brand-into-a-lifestyle-destination
https://puddding.com/suits-sandals.com/seo-management-for-lifestyle-brand
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/brand-awareness