How to Measure Brand Awareness in Modern Marketing Environments

When awareness of your brand enters the conversation in any marketing campaign, it revolves around only one thing: how impactfully is my brand resonating with my target audience? It sounds simple, but it’s a challenging question to answer without the correct metrics and techniques in your corner. Here’s an A to Z coverage of the subject.

What is brand awareness in marketing?

Brand awareness begins with marketplace participants knowing your company is active with products and services to meet customer needs. It’s a vital ingredient that stamps your position as attention-getting, even if you can’t merge that into interest and buyer conviction. It’s a sales catalyst and sales driver, provided it contains:

• A recognizable brand name and logo
• Customer perceptions pointing to the product as a viable option
• Easy understanding of the brand’s core values

Brand awareness involves numerous KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) in two metric arenas:

• Assisted brand awareness (with prompts and probes to create visualization)
• Unassisted brand awareness, widely regarded as the ultimate brand recognition and development – the industry-best way to build brand awareness

How to measure brand awareness campaign components

Is there a difference between brand awareness, brand recognition, and brand perception? As you might expect, there’s a lot to unpack here.

Part 1: How to measure B2B brand awareness (what you need to know)

Brand awareness is crucial in both B2C and B2B environments. Indeed, customer awareness is at stake no matter how you look at things. The only difference is that a B2B client intends to sell your brand to its customers. So, when marketing on a B2B platform, you may have to assume a two-dimensional responsibility to:

1. Create brand awareness with the B2B customer (the middleman entity or MM)
2. Establish brand awareness in the MM’s marketplace

The 1-2-punch is known as the “push-pull effect.” The following example demonstrates this point:

• Suppose you’re the producer of a running shoe—let’s call it ChampionSpeed RX—distributed through brick-and-mortar and online sports apparel stores.
• You compete against Nike, Adidas, and other universal brands with massive promotional funding behind them.
• The MMs – your B2B customers – are unlikely to give your brand extra attention above the mainstream competitors. Why? They take the line of least resistance – looking for the fastest offtake with the least hassle.
• So, MMs generally rely on you to create end-user awareness – a “pull-effect” on inventory in the store that the owner’s team is trying to push to the buying cart fast and furiously. In short, user brand awareness is a critical incentive for the MM to allocate space and time to your brand.
• In some B2B marketing situations, you can finance in-store promotions or pay for shelf prominence to grab consumer attention (the MM’s following).

There are exceptions to the above. Your connection with the B2B customer may be selling a part that goes into a more extensive product proposition. For example, you produce and sell axles for Volvo SUVs. In this case:

• Volvo is your customer, selling to its captured auto driver market.
• In such instances, the consumer has little interest in the axle brand and most other parts of the car they purchase.
• On the other hand, as your direct customer, Volvo will likely compare your product (brand) to other axle manufacturers in the arena, going the extra mile to ensure its buying according to industry-best standards.

Part 2: How to measure brand recognition

To begin with, a question that always arises is, “What’s the difference between brand recognition and brand awareness?” Brand recognition is an aspect of brand awareness where the logo and name register with the prospect and customer but not necessarily the context that builds brand value around it. What context? Much deeper meaning, like your brand vision, mission, and story.

To put it in perspective, brand recognition is the “assisted cue” that the brand needs to keep the market momentum moving, whereas brand awareness campaigns take things much further. However, brand awareness is only possible with brand recognition (as described). In short, it’s a fundamental prerequisite for brand awareness to succeed in the target market.

Measuring brand recognition relies on surveys, observing website traffic, and appraising social media using tactics such as aided and unaided recall, also known as unprompted and prompted recall questions.

Well-constructed surveys across a representative sample are comprehensive and searching and, from a “brand recognition” viewpoint, easy to quantify. Why? Recognition investigation doesn’t extend to emotional insights, thinking, or inner motivations. In other words, qualitative data isn’t a factor in assessing brand recognition.

The dividing line between brand awareness and recognition is thin, so one should avoid mixing the two with probes around motivational drivers (like trust and loyalty). Recognition metrics only ascertain whether the respondent recognizes the brand without investigating whether it evokes positive or negative feelings.

Outside of surveys, analyzing search engines for brand searches, market share readings, Google trend reviews, website traffic metrics, and social media escalation are all windows into brand recognition dynamics. If you want to learn more about this, read on.

Part 3: Understanding brand perception as a way to build brand awareness

This is the Yang of brand awareness, following the part that brand recognition plays (the Ying) – a much deeper one. That’s because perception gets into thoughts, feelings, opinion leader influences, and behavior patterns. It demonstrates that brand awareness is a complicated transitional dynamic that requires qualitative measuring to add to quantitative recognition results.

Why is measuring brand awareness important?

From the above, we’ve learned that measuring brand awareness involves assessing brand recognition (quantitatively) and then doing the same with perceptions (qualitatively). It would help if you had brand metrics to define crucial milestones and benchmarks. Why? Brand awareness metrics are gauges of how your brand-building efforts are working. They deliver market context in the aided and unaided brand awareness realms and your strength in selected segments.

How to build brand awareness with brand metrics

Measuring brand awareness will throw you into a world of questions, challenging your team to find the answers. For example:

• Do customers think of you or your competitor first?
• Do they know how your product works?
• Even if many are brand aware, are they your targeted audience?
• Do customers get to you unprompted?
• If prompted, must your cues be continuous or lightly generated?
• Is the awareness long- or short-term (i.e., memorability appraisal)?

Answering all these questions guides your next steps, which include implementing an action plan to repair weak touchpoints and accelerate robust ones. This is where KPIs kick into the picture.

Determining the measurement factors that open the arena is crucial because they create the insights you can depend on to improve the customer experience around your brand. Then, use these to measure your brand awareness continuously (not sporadically), judging your action impact and accurately gauging how far you’ve moved the needle.

Brand awareness metrics that work

The old-fashioned way of tracking brand awareness embraces monthly, quarterly, or annual surveys, applied manually and arduously, limiting the type of data one can accumulate and losing the advantage of real-time insights. How new AI technologies have changed things!

Companies like Sogolytics can lead you to discoveries in brand awareness metric tools that will help you beyond expectations, doing the heavy lifting in a fraction of human time with continuous monitoring processes. Why is this crucial?

• Brand loyalty is highly volatile, shifting at the slightest obstructive touch points.
• Reviewing customer churn issues weeks (even days) after the event may be fruitless.
• Savvy marketers believe real-time cause-and-effect insights are the only ones that count.
• Accurately predicting how today’s results will impact the future involves seamlessly connecting with currently generated data and discarding outdated information.
• Real-time data tracking reduces the distance between highs and lows, allowing your team to manage without knee-jerk reactions to unexpected data jumps or drops. This results in less disruptive and costly remedies by a calm and balanced team approach.

In short, brand awareness campaigns structured around today’s insights emerge with more penetration versus those driven by legacy data.

Also, define the data field you expect to reveal the brand awareness insights that best serve your purposes. Deriving accurate feedback in areas outside your segments (although in the general area) is a commonly noticed error. It wastes time and resources.

For example, if a brand covering B2C customer experiences in the fast food restaurant segment includes casual, leisurely family eateries, it will significantly distort awareness results. Therefore, accurately pinpointing where to apply your metrics is an essential planning protocol.

So, let’s get to the metrics that work best. Note that it’s important to consider two aspects:

• The brand awareness metrics (KPIs) to track
• The methods you can use to measure them

#1: Method – Surveys | Metrics – Quantitative and qualitative feedback

Surveys conducted frequently across representative samples are extraordinary brand awareness metric generators and methods. Quantitative probes (as described above) combined with qualitative “why” questions create deeper insights as a “finger on the pulse of brand awareness.” Designing survey questionnaires and evaluating sample quality require the professional guidance of companies like Sogolytics.

For example:

• Unaided
  • 30% of respondents recognized the logo.
  • Of those who recognized the logo, 40% (12% of all respondents) recalled the logo message (i.e., like Nike’s “Just do it.)
• Aided
  • Another 18% of the respondents recognized the logo (48% when added to unaided respondents).
  • Of these respondents, 0% recalled the logo message, leaving 12% of all respondents who recalled the message (i.e., prompting never added to the unaided recognition).

#2: Methods – Google Analytics and Trends | Metrics: Search volume brand awareness

• Google Trends allows you to compare:
  • Search terms on Google or YouTube.
  • Fast and “no-argument” insights into how branded search terms work in a competitive environment.
• Google Analytics takes insights to elevated levels on several plains.

For example: A recent case study of an anonymous client on coffee machine searches highlighted that:

• 20% of search terms included “Nestle coffee machines” or “Nestle.”
• 45% of search terms included other coffee machine brand names.
• 35% of search terms included “coffee machines” but no brand names (category awareness).

#3: Methods – Share of Voice and Social Listening | Metrics: Primarily quantitative

This option s only achievable with dedicated software tracking the internet in news outlets, blog posts, videos, searches, and social media platforms to see how your brand fares versus competitors in mentions. One can direct these scans to cover:

• All the verticals above in general.
• All or specific verticals above by:
  • Time (e.g., a month, week, day).
  • Industry (e.g., residential real estate, decorating, mobile devices).
  • Demographics (e.g., adult females in Atlanta)
  • Search impressions.
  • Individual platform or app (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc.)

As a result, you may review situations where you observe:

• High voice share, low impressions (talk about your brand a lot, but don’t search it much).
• Sound brand awareness
• Not translating to motivated customer market activity, perhaps through inadequate SEO and promotional impetus.
• Low impressions, High voice share (talk little about your brand, but search it extensively).
• Good market activity through robust SEO and promotional strategies.
• Not yet translating into brand memorability.
• High on both (Undisputed superb brand awareness).
• Low on both (Undisputed sub-par brand awareness).

Conclusion and FAQs

Measuring and building brand awareness depends on skillfully deploying brand tracking software for a comprehensive solution that can scan every relevant touchpoint and connect the latter to straightforward metrics and actionable ideas. Sogolytics is a professional resource covering all the essential bases to provide the guidance to make a difference. Our real-time brand tracking suites generate brand awareness surveys that fit your audience parameters like a hand in a glove. Contact us today to answer your most urgent brand measurement questions.

Prefer quick answers? Let’s get right down to the FAQs on this subject!

1. What is brand awareness? Marketplace participants know your company is active with products and services to meet customer needs.

2. Why should I measure brand awareness? To gauge how your brand-building efforts are working.

3. How can I measure brand awareness and assess the results? Rely on a broad and deep resource pool of software-centric methods and insightful metrics. (Want more details? See these sections above!)