Businesses across all industries are trying to determine how to track and measure their brand awareness campaigns. In doing so, they hope to justify marketing budgets by gaining insight into ROI and profitability.
What's difficult about tracking ROI for brand awareness is that you can't measure it directly. However, it does have a significant impact on marketing efforts that affect revenue. Here we'll review the importance of measuring branding efforts and the different key performance indicators that can help you track ROI.
Why is Brand Awareness Important?
If you want people to become familiar with your brand and trust you to the point of making a purchase, brand awareness is crucial. Brand awareness efforts are the key to attracting new customers as they come to recognize your brand. Don't underestimate the importance of brand recognition, either: 82% of consumers are more likely to buy from brands that they know. Using a variety of media channels, such as television, radio and digital, will increase brand awareness and, subsequently, brand recognition.
With effective brand awareness marketing, you will connect with your target audiences and encourage more people to enter the sales funnel. The best way to gauge how effective your campaigns are is to track ROI, which can indicate how profitable your efforts have been. The problem is that many businesses don't know how to track brand awareness ROI based on the appropriate key performance indicators (KPIs).
What Brand Awareness KPIs Can You TRack?
While it can be a challenge to connect your brand awareness investment to revenue results, you can better calculate ROI with several metrics. Tracking the following KPIs can give you plenty of insight into your campaigns' performance to help you make informed marketing decisions. By evaluating at these KPIs and measuring them, you can prove the ROI of your branding efforts and make improvements where needed.
Direct Traffic
Direct traffic includes any visits to your website directly, without going through another website or link. Suppose people visit your website directly by entering the site's URL without clicking on ads or finding you in search results. In that case, this is indicative of a successful brand awareness campaign. High direct traffic shows that people have heard about your company through marketing or ad campaigns, without referrals from other sources.
Market Enginuity's broadcast attribution tool, Enginuity Audience Analytics, offers deeper insights into campaign performance by examining site traffic immediately after sponsorship messages run. This tool is used to help sponsors measure the effectiveness of their public media campaigns by linking website or foot traffic with public media sponsorship messages.
Search Volume
High search volume can be another indicator of a successful branding campaign. To see what kind of volume branded keywords have your business name in them, you can conduct an audit using tools like SEMrush. If you see hundreds or even thousands of searches per month for your brand name, this is a sign that people are recognizing your brand and are actively looking for your company, not just the products or services you offer.
Social Engagement
Social media engagement is an indicator of how many people are interacting with your brand on a regular basis. Facebook and other platforms give you the tools you need to measure the performance of your social media marketing efforts. When it comes to brand awareness, you can monitor your posts' engagement, including the number of likes, shares, and comments. If many people are engaging with your posts, this can be a good sign that your brand awareness campaigns are driving traffic to your social media profiles.
Social Listening
In addition to monitoring social engagement, it's important to practice social listening to find out how your brand is performing on various social media channels. Social media tools such as Hubspot’s Social Media Software and others can help you track and gather insights into how your brand is being mentioned on social media.
For example, you can see how many people are mentioning your brand on Facebook and in what context—is it good or bad? You can also compare your brand's reputability and presence with competitors to find out what the competition is doing right, which you may want to adapt to your efforts.
Surveys
Another good way to measure the effectiveness of your branding efforts is to conduct audience surveys. Ask current and past customers how they heard about you. Did they come across an ad or commercial? Maybe they heard about you via public media sponsorships. On the other hand, some may have found you in search engines by searching for the types of offerings you provide. Those learnings can inform your future branding strategy.
Conversions
The number of conversions you attract can also help show how effective your brand awareness campaigns are. If you're getting a lot of direct traffic but a comparatively low number of conversions, this could indicate inconsistent representation in your branding campaigns that don't match your website. If people expect something different from what they ultimately get, you may be inadvertently deceiving your audience, only to disappoint them when they learn more about you. Conversely, high conversions can indicate that you're giving people what they want in both your branding and offerings.
Track All Relevant KPIs to Measure Brand Awareness ROI
If you understand the importance of brand awareness along with the right KPIs to track to help measure the ROI of your campaigns, you'll never be in the dark regarding your brand's performance. By setting benchmarks, identifying the appropriate KPIs to track, and tracking the ROI of your campaigns, you can determine what's working and what needs improvement.
When tracking the impact of your brand awareness campaigns, it’s important to identify your goals and measure your effectiveness with the proper KPIs. Working with a public media partner can help you get the most from your branding campaigns by assisting with implementation and measurement. Effective brand awareness strategies will help you connect with your target audience and convert more prospects while optimizing your marketing budget.
