What is Brand Awareness and Why It’s Important?
Why do some brands stand out more than others, what makes your brand better than your competitors? The value of your brand lies in how aware people are of it.
Brand awareness:
Refers to the degree to which your brand is recognized by the public when considering products or services within your industry.
In brief, it’s how often individuals perceive and remember your company’s brand. Your brand awareness is critical because you want your business to come top of mind to individuals when preparing to buy your product or service.
Can you measure your brand awareness?
Knowing where your brand stands in the public’s eye is essential to effectively build your brand and company success. When formulating a marketing strategy, measuring your brand awareness will provide useful insight on what tactics could work best, and how to portray your efforts to the public. These are three simple ways you can measure your brand awareness.
- Brand Engagement
Does your brand come to top of mind when prospect think about your industry? Achieving this level of brand awareness requires a multi-layered approach. However, while you try to achieve this status, to measure your efforts you can start by examining your brand engagement. Here’s a couple ways you can do this:
- Social Media
Examining the number of comments, likes, shares and hashtags will help you learn if people positively speak about your brand and how often they engage with your brand. Social media platforms like Facebook and twitter provide free page or account insights, providing you with real numbers to compare and analyze your performance.
- Links
Knowing your digital footprint will help you determine if the online community is aware of your business. Using online tools such as Open Link Profiler and Rank Signals will give you data on who is linking to your website and the amount of traffic generated from these links. Link building is another great method to increase your brand’s digital footprint. Be sure to share your company's links liberal through social media outlets like Facebook and twitter.
- Referrals
This approach is less tangible and cannot be measured like digital strategies. However, by looking at your business’ walk-in referral traffic you can pinpoint your biggest supporters. Referrals help you understand how your past consumers engage with your brand offline, a good word-of-mouth referral is the greatest measure for local SMBs.
- Conduct Surveys
Surveys will help you quantify how prospects learn about your business and how well your brand is recognized. Include a variety of questions in your survey to determine exactly what about your brand consumers connect to and why. Asking specific questions about your brand recall, company trust, and company details will benefit you and demonstrate how effectively your brand is portrayed to the public.
- Website Traffic
Online traffic insights provide data on how prospects find you, the products they're interested in and so much more! If you’re advertising your business online, this information will determine the effectiveness of your campaigns. Tools such as Google Analytics provide free data on these metrics. The robust information this tool provides will help you improve your online marketing efforts using keyword analytics and benchmarking.
The best brands connect emotionally to their audience.
The stronger your brand speaks to your audience the better your brand will stand out from its competitors. Whether it’s anger, joy, sadness, or trust, how these emotions resonate with your customers will determine the value of your brand awareness. We all remember the company that scammed us, but we also recall the business that gave us immense happiness. The key to have the greatest brand awareness is to speak to these emotional points, and ideally speaking to the positive ones.
For an in-depth look at brand reputation watch our podcast interview with the founder of Reputation.com, Michael Fertik. Fertik comprehensively addresses the challenges that small and medium businesses encounter when promoting their brand reputation.
