Brand Awareness: How to Track It & Why It’s Important

What is Brand Awareness?

Brand awareness is the first step in the customer journey — when an individual first begins to recognize your business. It’s a crucial step in building a relationship with your customers or clients. Recognition may start with your logo followed by your business name and then eventually your offerings, but no matter the order, this first step in the journey is where an individual’s acknowledgment of your business and its offerings are formed.

This relationship can start and grow through paid, earned, or owned media. In the digital marketing space, paid brand awareness manifests in pay-per-click advertising; earned media is the engagement you receive on social or other platforms; owned media would be things like your website, app, and social accounts.

Let’s jump in and talk about why you should care about brand awareness and how you can increase it if you’re struggling to do so.

4 Reasons Brand Awareness is Important for Your Business

1. Connect with Your Audience. Without completing the first step in the customer journey, there is no consideration, transaction, retention, and so on. Awareness allows you to connect to current and future customers ensuring they continue conversations, consider your product or offering, and stick around to find out more.
2. Increased Leads. Brand awareness may have some positive effect on your leads and transactions early on, but it’s really about the long game. Not everyone will need what you offer all the time, but with great brand awareness, you will be top of mind when they are ready for your product or service. Be prepared to buckle up, be patient, and continue reaching out your hand.
3. Increases Marketing Impact. Awareness efforts allow you to share more about your business without having to focus on just selling your product. It shares your business’s mission and values as well as what you offer to consumers. The more a consumer knows about your brand, the more they trust you and see themselves using and enjoying your product or services. At AOR, we like to say, “Individuals don’t buy or consume your product because of what it says about you; they do it because of what it says about them.”
4. Builds Brand Equity. Brand Equity is “the commercial value that derives from consumer perception of the brand name of a particular product or service, rather than from the product or service itself” (via Heartland). This is important because it means you “jump the line” when a consumer is in the market for your offerings. They don’t have to think about who they’re getting their winter jacket from because your brand is already top of mind.

How Do You Increase Brand Awareness?

Everything you do as a business helps promote your brand awareness — your storefronts, advertisements, press, social media presence, website, everything.

1. Create a Great Brand. The first step to gaining this awareness is a good brand. Being consistent across all touchpoints makes it easier for your brand to be recognized.
2. Increase Touchpoints. Once your branding is established, efforts should be focused on increasing touchpoints and frequency. The more places an individual sees your brand and the more times they see it, the more likely they are to remember your brand.
3. Develop a Marketing Strategy. Use your touchpoints to your advantage. You should figure out how to leverage these newly developed assets in your paid and organic marketing. We often help our clients gain brand awareness via paid digital marketing campaigns. Digital marketing campaigns utilize both organic and paid efforts to increase touch points across the web and reach those who are looking for your products and services or will be in the future.
   1. Organic Marketing: Includes tactics like social media posts, newsletters, and word of mouth.
   2. Paid Marketing: Includes tactics like pay-per-click advertising, billboards, and commercials.

How Do You Measure Brand Awareness?

There is no true measure of brand awareness, but there are some indicators that more individuals are learning about your business.

1. Branded Search Queries: An increase in the search volume of queries containing your business (i.e. Nike) or specific product names (i.e. Air Force 1s).
2. Direct Traffic: An increase in direct traffic means more individuals are typing in your URL directly rather than getting there through Google or other referrals.
3. Share of Voice / Mentions: An increase in mentions of your business across the web (social media, blogs, articles, etc.).

In terms of a digital marketing campaign, brand awareness key performance indicators (KPIs) are:

• Impressions: The number of times your ad was served on the given platform.
• Reach: The number of unique individuals who were served your ad.
• Frequency: The average number of times a single individual has been served your ad; calculated by impressions/reach.

Next Steps: Strengthen Your Brand Awareness

If you’re truly ready to dig into your brand awareness and want to be as successful as possible, first consider your audience. Lay out personas, interview people, and dive into their interests, challenges, and motivations. Really seek to understand what they need and what they’ll get out of interacting with you. Knowing your audience will make developing a brand awareness strategy much easier.

Let us help! 

From branding to web development to marketing campaigns, AOR would love to help raise awareness for your brand. Tell us more about you and your business!