Brand awareness might be considered a vanity metric but your customer’s ability to recall your brand is one of the biggest factors towards making them buy your product. This is why brands spend millions of dollars on celebrity endorsement as it helps with brand recall.

Brandwatch Analytics says that Chevrolet spends $71.4 million a year on Manchester United where their brand appears on the players’ shirts. According to them, the Manchester United deal increases the likelihood of a buyer to recall the Chevrolet brand when buying a car, and therefore, consider them.

“Manchester United provides us with a global stage, including here in the US, that’s rare,” says Chevrolet’s CMO Tim Mahoney.

Why measure brand awareness?

Strong brand awareness includes being able to increase your revenue in the short-term. High brand awareness is associated with increased customer retention, increased sales, business longevity, and so on. Why? Because people want to do business with companies whose products and brands they are already familiar with.

Here are some statistics on brand awareness to drive home the point about its importance:

Successful branding increases customer loyalty, gives the business an improved image and a reliable identity, says TSL Marketing
89% of B2B marketers say that brand awareness is the most important goal, followed by sales and lead generation
70% of brand managers say that building an audience is more valuable than direct sales
Content Marketing Institute says that 91% of B2B Marketers use content marketing to promote brand awareness
Consistent branding helps increase revenue by 23% .

What can Brand Awareness measure?

When you survey your customers about your product, you get to know a lot of deep insights about what they think about your brand, associations and so on. A brand awareness survey can help you measure the following:

Brand recognition:
When your audience is given a list of brands, are they able to recognize yours from the lot?

Brand Image:
Brand identity and Brand Image are two different things. While Brand Image is based on the customer’s perception of you, Brand Identity is what your team creates for itself with marketing campaigns . Finding out the differences in both of these can help you with understanding how your marketing efforts can be improved.

Brand recall:
Can a customer think of your brand when you give them a product in your niche or do they think of your competitor first?

Brand Trust:
In this time and age when there is little trust among customers for conglomerates, how much do customers trust your brand? If their trust factor is less, then you will have a difficult time, you should take steps to make them trust you.

Customer Profile:
If your customer persona changes, then you need to change your product or change your marketing message.

Which parts of Brand Awareness should be tracked?

Measurements like usage, purchase intent, perceptions, brand attitudes are recommended to be tracked.

Methods to measure brand awareness

Surveys:

You can ask your customers how they heard about you no matter what type of survey you are conducting, let it be email surveys, phone or website. If the survey is for random people, ask them if they are familiar with your brand.

Website Traffic:

There are a lot of insights that you can fish out through website traffic, especially if you are using an analytics tool like GA. For example, ‘Direct’ channel in Google Analytics gives you a count of the number of people who typed your URL into the address bar, used their bookmark, clicked in a link on an untracked email or from a link on an offline document. This detail will give you an idea about your brand awareness. This metric should keep gradually increasing.

Social Listening:

Where do you find most of your customers hanging out? Social media, right? Listen to their conversations online about your brand and your competitor’s because it will help you understand what they are doing better. Not only should you listen to the organic conversations about your brand, but even you can prod your customers to talk about your brand. These thoughts are naturally expressed, so they are more valuable.

How to create effective brand awareness surveys?

No matter the size of your business, you should always be on top of it and making your customers aware of your brand should be a task that you keep performing religiously. There are a variety of marketing efforts that go into improving brand awareness, but you need to know how well they are performing. Sending out surveys to your customers and prospects is one of the best methods to measure awareness.

Brand recall:

Is your product the top-of-the-mind category? Brand recall is the ability for your customers to recall your brand name from memory when prompted by a product category. If you are in a crowded marketplace, it makes sense to work on this.

Let’s say you are in the eCommerce niche where you sell drones, this is the question that you could ask.

‘When you think of drones, what brand comes to your mind?’

You have achieved brand awareness if your customer recalls your brand name without assistance. If your name doesn’t register, then you need to take steps to ensure that your customers recall your brand name without any prompts.

Brand Recognition:

Brand recall is when customers can recall your brand without any prompts, but brand recognition is when they can recognize your brand name when prompted with a list. It is also called aided awareness.

A simple question to gauge brand recognition is this:

“How familiar are you with these brands?”

You can use the help of a scaling system like a Likert scale which has options ranging from ‘Extremely familiar’ to ‘Not familiar’. You should list your competitors and give them the Likert scale options for each of them.

Your customers might say that they are familiar with your brand, but you still have to work on brand recall or top-of-the-mind recognition. Brand recognition is developed by frequency and consistency. Also, remember that brand recognition can also be because of negative experiences. If brand recognition comes out of negative associations, it can lead to decreased preference and loyalty.

Brand Identity:

It is all about how organizations differentiate itself from its competitors. The differentiation helps your audience to understand who you are, immediately recall your brand and helps with brand equity as well. Organizations that have strong brand identities are usually successful with a lot of customers who are advocates for them.

The differentiation that brands use is usually visible elements like color, logo, design, typography, product packaging, email design, website, etc, that can create a distinct image.

You can use these questions to create a memorable brand identity:
How do you want customers to think of your brand?
Is there a unique personality for your brand?
What’s your company’s story?
How do you want customers to remember you?
What’s the first thing that you want your customers to describe you?

Creating a narrative or a story about your brand helps in huge brand recalls which will generate a spiral of associations and word-of-mouth referrals.

Here are some brand identity questions that you can ask your customers:

ABC company helps with my XYZ needs better than anyone else
I do not know what would I do without the services of ABC company

The answers should give the respondents to agree or disagree with these statements.

Brand Image:

The brand image tells you about the actual customer perception.Your brand image should be in alignment with your brand identity. This is one of the reasons why you need to conduct surveys regularly with your customers. For example, Colgate is one of the most popular brands for personal hygiene and its customers believe so too. It has managed to create trust in the minds of its customers.

Branding is important because people base their buying decisions based on it as it inspires trust. Anyone would be wary of investing in a new brand as they are not sure if it would solve their problem sufficiently.

Here is the question that you can use in the survey:

‘What comes to your mind when you think of our brand?’

You could either give them a bunch of brand attributes that they can choose, or leave it as an open-ended question for the customer to answer.

Brand Trust:

For customers to trust your brand, not only should your products be worthwhile, but it needs to have an overall brand name that attracts customers to you.

Here is what you can ask your customers on the branding survey. They can use options from ‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree’ on a 5-point Likert scale.

Brand X is always trustworthy
I trust brand X’s advertisements
X always delivers its promises
X solves all of my pain points in the niche

Customer Profile:

Is your target audience rightly defined? If you sell industrial equipment, you can certainly not expect your audience on Instagram. You can find a few of them on Instagram for sure, but it certainly is not the right place to concentrate your marketing efforts.

No matter what type of product/services you sell, you will have 3-4 types of customers who are your ideal customers. Ask questions to different stakeholders to ensure that you get your ideal customer profile.

Ask your customers the following:

What do you do?
Where do you work?
Why do you want our product?
How exactly does it help you?

The above questions can be open-ended with the customer answering them based on its appropriateness.

Brand Awareness surveys should lead to this:

You can create a marketing strategy based on the feedback your customer gives about your brand awareness. This is a long-term plan and the new idea of your brand should be slowly fed to your customers in terms of adverts, content, logo, typography, and so on. Insisting on creating an immediate change can be disastrous for your branding as your customers might not be able to accept the sudden changes.

Some of the outcomes of a brand awareness survey

See if you have rightly targeted your audience
Refine customer persona accordingly
Monitor the use of channels
Change spending patterns and channels based on the responses
It will reflect on your marketing messaging
Venture into new areas to do business
Horizontal or vertical scaling of business based on the survey results

While these changes might take time to reflect, these are well worth the effort. Be patient when it comes to the results.

You can do both offline and online surveys but the hassle associated with offline surveys is a lot. If you are sending your surveys to customers and the general audience, ensure that there is some kind of return for them in the form of a free product, discount, upgrade or at least an ebook that gives them more knowledge.You can assess the results that the marketing efforts have produced using the outcome.

Here are some brand awareness stories of popular brands:

There are a lot of brands that used effective brand awareness measures like creating content, holding competitions, and so on. Let’s talk about a few here.

KISSMetrics is an analytics solution that increases customer acquisition and retention rates. It created 47 infographics which helped them grow from 0 to 350,000 readers a month, in just 24 months. These infographics resulted in 2,512,596 visitors, 41,142 backlinks and 3,741 unique referring domains.
Dropbox is a cloud service that lets you store documents including photos, and videos and share them with others. It offered more space for users who referred their friends. They were able to increase their signups by more than 60%
Evernote is one of the most popular note-taking tools. They used a technique where users had to send invitations to their networks to actually use their service. This resulted in 125,000 sign-ups.

Conclusion

Brand Awareness should be the foundation on which your marketing strategy revolves around. More the number of customers who recall your brand when they think of the product, the higher are they likely to buy your product. There was a time when getting this metric as accurately as possible was difficult.

When you use the brand awareness guidelines to work on your brand, you will soon be a superstar in front of your customers. Brand awareness is a concept that can bring you rich dividends in terms of inbound sales, customer perception, and branding.Once you outline the steps, you can grow an audience who will recognize your brand despite the number of competitors. They will choose your products over the competitor’s and won’t shy away from recommending you to their friends and family.

Do you have any thoughts regarding branding awareness and how to implement it? When you want to improve your brand awareness and are looking to pick the brain of your customers, use an online survey tool like SurveySparrow which can complement your needs with utmost accuracy. It is a free online survey tool, which comes with hordes of features using which you can gauge the outcome of your branding efforts so far.

Wouldn’t you want your brand to be counted among the likes of Nike, Coca Cola, Google, Facebook, and Apple?

How to Monitor Brand Awareness Using Surveys