Brand awareness refers to an audience’s awareness, or lack thereof, of your brand, product or service. Often referred to as brand recognition, it’s a common concept used to assess audience familiarity and brand exposure.

In today’s digitalised, interconnected world, brands and products exist in a more competitive and saturated environment than ever before. A factor that makes brand awareness all the more important as a concept.

Building awareness helps to secure your brand and to build trust, as audiences become more familiar with what it is you’re offering and with the reasons they might opt for your product. When potential customers then come round to making purchase decisions, you’re among the first in mind.

But how do you know if your brand awareness efforts are paying off? This blog explores exactly that – examining common measurements, the different ways to interpret them, and the ways in which key improvement tactics can be implemented – all to help you better understand both your level of brand awareness, and to provide actionable insights that evaluate your brand’s visibility and impact.

Understanding Brand Awareness: Why It Matters

Why is brand awareness important? So much of marketing centres around improving results, and assessing the impact of your campaigns. That’s why, without a proper understanding of your brand awareness, it’s hard to interpret how well your campaigns and branding are performing.

Measuring awareness helps you to gauge customer trust and loyalty. This is crucial for determining the messaging you want to aim at your audience, and plays a pivotal part in driving strategic decisions. Are your audience looking for more info about your brand, for example, or are they at risk of overexposure? 

Gaining an understanding of your competitive positioning is another reason why it’s worth measuring brand awareness. Competition impacts everything from sales to strategy, so learning how your brand stacks up is important.

Measuring brand awareness also helps to inform your strategic partnerships and alliances, helping you to identify any potential partnerships that align with your brand’s positioning and objectives, and, in doing so, reach your specific target audience.

In turn, each of these reasons will inform your marketing strategy in some way, and help you accurately assess how to best move forward.

How To Measure Brand Awareness: A multi-faceted approach

There’s a simple answer to the question “Is brand awareness measurable?” – yes.

However, it requires a multi-faceted approach, tailored to your unique objectives – and there are a number of techniques and tools you can use here.

One tool is a survey. Conducting targeted surveys can help to gauge brand recall, recognition, and perception among your target audience. Pair this with social media analysis, to monitor brand mentions, follower growth, and engagement metrics across social media platforms.

For a measurement of online activity, you can conduct an analysis of your direct website traffic. You can also assess audience interest through Google Trends, to track changes in search interest for your brand and relevant keywords over time.

The specific tools and techniques you use should depend on both your specific business goals and your target audience demographics.

Essential KPIs for Brand Awareness 

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) serve as benchmarks for assessing brand awareness, and are a go-to for brand awareness metrics. 

Common Brand Awareness KPIs include:

Share of Voice

Essentially, this is a measure of how much say your brand has in the market, and takes into account factors such as how often your brand is mentioned in online conversations. Share of voice can be assessed through social listening.

Sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis refers to the process of analysing text and messages to better understand the emotion and meaning within it. That means all of the talk about your brand online – whether it’s through social media, commentary, or reviews – can be analysed.

Essentially, it’s all about reading and interpreting messages. Sounds simple, right?

Well, sentiment analysis takes the process a touch further. In fact, it often makes use of advanced tools and techniques such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). These help to deepen the level of analysis, making an assessment of everything that lies outside the obvious way of wording.

Brand recall

Brand recall refers to the probability of someone being able to remember your brand, and different aspects of your brand. There are a number of different levels to it – whether its prompted recall, partially prompted, or unaided recall. It differs from awareness in that brand recall relates to the likelihood of an audience specifically being able to remember details about your brand.

This is where factors such as brand personality, image and purpose come into play. A unique, exciting or playful brand is more likely to be recalled than a standard, run of the mill identity. Just take a look at our work for car selling service Flip It, for instance. With a refreshed, exciting identity, we managed to transform their place in a competitive market.

How Brand Awareness Measurement Fuels Success

Measuring brand awareness is not just about quantifying presence; it’s about driving growth and competitiveness. With use of the right metrics and strategies, you can elevate your brand’s presence and influence.If you’re ready to enhance your brand’s visibility, you can explore our services across Branding and Creative, Social and Paid Media, or Get in touch today.