Brand awareness is an indicator that shows how familiar a brand is within its target market, and it can significantly influence consumer purchasing decisions. The power of brand awareness is evidenced by the fact that some brands have achieved such widespread recognition that their trade names have become synonymous with the general terms of the products they represent -indeed, which brand comes to your mind when you hear the word “bleach”?
Measuring brand awareness is very important for a promotional strategy because you can observe the progress over time, as well as the performance of your advertising campaigns.
Moving on to a broad categorization of the indicators by which brand awareness can be measured, the following emerge:
- Tools for metrics around the brand’s website (e.g., website traffic)
- Tools for metrics around offline and online mentions of the brand
In this article, we will focus on the second group, for which we highlight the following 4 indicators:
Publicity Share
Through Media Monitoring & Analysis services, you can have a complete overview of your actions in the media, both offline & online. This includes earned Media, meaning the publicity your brand gains without having paid for it. You can set a specific period and see in which media there are mentions of your brand, an element that can be integrated into your overall communication plan.
Share of Voice (SoV)
Share of Voice is a significant KPI for your brand’s recognition, as it shows how many people are talking about your brand compared to your competitors. It helps you identify opportunities to target an audience that might be interested in your product/service but may not know you yet.
Digital Listening
Digital listening is the ideal way to measure your brand’s references in online media. It includes monitoring a brand’s mentions on news sites, blogs, forums, and social media to capture news, trends, and opinions related to the brand.
Some useful digital listening metrics to monitor are:
Total Mentions: The total number of references related to the brand.
Benchmarking: Comparison of a measurement (e.g., number of mentions, sentiment) with the corresponding previous period to clearly determine if there has been an increase or decrease.
Trending/Fading Topics: Topics that are spreading faster in volume during a specific period or topics for which the buzz is weakening.
Impact: The impact of a website. This is an algorithm that gives a score from 1 to 100 and reflects how “significant” something is.
Reach: The average number of individuals estimated to have seen a given post from a source. It is calculated by taking into account measurements such as followers, engagement, page ranks, and estimated views.
Sentiment
Sentiment analysis provides businesses with valuable information about the opinions, behaviors, and feelings of their audience towards them and/or their brand. Once you understand the way your target audience interacts with your brand, you can improve/enhance the user experience, protect the brand’s reputation, get a picture of the audience’s sentiment towards your competition, and implement appropriate crisis management tactics before they are even needed. Regarding social media, likes, comments, shares, and hashtags are numbers related to capturing sentiment.
Measuring brand awareness is an integral part of your communication plan’s success. Understand significant indicators either through a Digital Listening services demo or through a Media Analysis sample.
