Can You Measure Brand Awareness? Yes!

Measuring brand awareness has been notoriously difficult. But these 4 metrics can help you evaluate if potential customers are encountering your content.

Companies work hard to get their products and services out into the world. It’s a key step in gaining exposure among potential customers and earning new business. This process is called brand awareness, the extent to which consumers are familiar with your brand.

Heightening the public’s knowledge of your business will generate leads, some of which will turn into sales. But this knowledge, or brand awareness, has proven difficult to measure. Do potential customers know your name, what you sell, and where to contact you? Creating ways to measure how recognizable your business is will show you what people think of your company, as well as where you should be focusing your time and money to help grow your exposure.

Here are 4 metrics to measure your brand awareness.

1. Social media reach

The larger your social media reach, the larger the potential audience. The reach of your social media content has a big impact on your brand awareness. Tracking engagements on each network will help you measure progress, build a greater following, and, ultimately, generate more site visits.

Use tools like Sharedcount, a free online tool that tracks the number of times a piece of content has been shared on the most popular social media sites — including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn — to easily keep track of your social reach.

2. Blog shares

Your blog content is the perfect fodder for organic brand awareness, especially if sharing your posts is easy. Create a share bar on your blog to allow your readers to quickly share your content through social media networks. Measure your number of shares to track your most popular blogs, monitor your growing brand awareness, and help guide the topics of your future blog posts.

3. Brand mentions

Are customers talking about your brand online? There’s a great deal of value in knowing what they’re saying. Monitoring brand mentions online can provide honest feedback and objective insight from current and potential customers.

There are several tools to help you track brand mentions online. Here at Fronetics, we prefer the ease of Google Alerts, which allows you to set up custom alerts when your brand is mentioned online. We also use Hootsuite, where you can track brand mentions, as well as keywords and phrases across all of your social media platforms.

4. Website traffic

Every visit to your website represents someone who is familiar with your brand. The question is: How are people finding your website? Think of web traffic in terms of sources:

Organic traffic – users come across your website from search engines
Direct traffic – users type in the name of your website or brand directly
Referral traffic – users find your website from links on other websites
Social traffic – users come across your website from social media content
Paid search/social – users click on one of your paid digital ads, which drives them to your site
Email traffic – users click through one of your marketing emails

You’ll want a healthy balance of each source to ensure your brand awareness campaign is diversified. Measure each of these metrics using a platform like Google Analytics or HubSpot. As each grows, you’ll know your brand awareness is growing alongside.

Use these 4 metrics to measure your brand awareness and track your progress as you work to grow your exposure. See where you’re having the most success and where you need improvement, and adjust your strategy accordingly.