This blog explores brand awareness, starting with the foundations then exploring the reasons to measure it, the metrics to focus on, the Better Brand Health Tracking approach, and how quantilope can help.
Brand awareness is part of most traditional brand funnels, as a starting point before consideration and usage/purchase. If consumers don't know about your brand, there's a very slim chance they'll end up being customers. However, building brand awareness isn't a snap of the fingers. It takes time, strategy, and patience to build awareness around your brand, what it stands for, and what it offers. This post dives into how brands can measure, track, and manage their brand awareness levels to stay competitive and relevant in their market.
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What is brand awareness?
Brand awareness is the degree to which consumers can recall or recognize a brand under various conditions. The core goal of brand awareness is to get your brand top-of-mind among potential customers. It’s more than just getting your brand name out there – it’s about ensuring your brand name also evokes your desired brand identity and brand associations among your target market.
Brand awareness is often the first step in any consumer journey, influencing everything from initial purchase decisions to long-term brand loyalty. When consumers are aware of your brand, they’re much more likely to consider it when they have a need your products or services can fulfill; these need-states are known as Category Entry Points and serve as the foundation to Better Brand Health Tracking (BBHT) studies.
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Reasons to measure brand awareness
Brand awareness is one of the first interactions consumers have when building a relationship with your business. When you understand your level of brand awareness in your market, it serves as a foundation for strategic next steps: either building up awareness through things like marketing campaigns and social media tactics, or maintaining/nurturing existing brand awareness through things like product innovation, loyalty programs, new product lines, etc.
Measuring brand awareness lets you know if your business efforts and investments are paying off (think: marketing strategy, channel distribution, innovations, etc.). It helps you understand the level of brand awareness your company has before and after these types of initiatives to decide if it’s worth continuing or if you might want to switch your approach for something more effective.
Without tracking brand awareness, it’s like throwing darts in the dark (or as we like to call it in market research – going off ‘gut feel’). With the research tools and solutions available today, making decisions based on gut feel is no longer a reasonable option. Whether you want to start running a full-blown brand tracker or start with a smaller ad-hoc study, make sure your study (at a minimum) captures brand awareness levels.
Below are just a few ways measuring brand awareness can support your business.
Evaluate marketing effectiveness
Measuring brand awareness allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts and other marketing campaigns. Are your investments (both time and money) in content marketing, social media, and SEO paying off? By measuring brand awareness metrics, you can see if there’s a change in awareness levels before/after those initiatives. You can also see which channels are most effective at increasing awareness and boosting brand visibility, which can vary by industry, audience, etc. Measuring brand awareness is a great way to optimize your marketing strategy by prioritizing based on impact.
Understand customer perception and loyalty
Beyond simple brand recognition, measuring brand awareness might also include measuring brand attributes and associations. Within a brand awareness survey, you can capture how well your brand image resonates with your target audience. Are consumers associating your brand with positive attributes? Are they becoming a brand promoter? These brand metrics are crucial for fostering long-term brand loyalty and converting potential customers into loyal advocates. When consumers have strong brand recall and awareness, it’s a fair assumption they’ll choose your brand over competitors when they find themselves shopping in your category.
Capture competitive positioning and brand popularity
Understanding your level of brand awareness is valuable in itself, but understanding it relative to competitors is even more beneficial. Competitive awareness allows you to benchmark your performance against other key players in your industry. If you’re right on par with close competitors, what can you do to sway shoppers from their brand to yours? Or, if you’re trailing behind, what kind of marketing tactics might boost brand awareness? For brands leading their industry in awareness, how will they maintain it? Brand awareness is just step one; for brands to be successful in the long run, it’s not just about consumers recognizing their name, but for them to remember and prefer it.
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Common metrics for measuring brand awareness
While many think of brand awareness questions as simple unaided or aided awareness questions, there are actually a few ways to measure it - each offering a unique perspective.
Brand recall & brand recognition
Brand recall and brand recognition are two of the more traditional brand awareness questions. Brand recall measures consumers' ability to remember your brand when prompted with a product category or specific need, without any visual cues; this can be done through a multi-select list (aided brand awareness) or through an open-text format (unaided brand awareness). Brand recognition, on the other hand, is the ability to identify a brand when shown a logo, name, advertisement, or other visual elements.
Both metrics are typically captured through online brand awareness surveys. However, brands can also leverage qualitative means of data capture such as online video surveys or in-person moderated discussions/interviews.
Share of Voice (SoV)
Share of Voice (SoV) is an important metric that can be used to gauge brand awareness. It quantifies your brand's presence in conversations within your industry, relative to competitors. Think of it like the portion of conversations, advertising, or media space you "own" in your industry. SoV is different from Share of Mind (SoM) - a key Mental Availability metric captured in Better Brand Health Tracking studies which measures a brand's presence and prominence in consumers' minds when they are considering a purchase within a relevant category.
In other words, SoV is what consumers are saying, and SoM is what consumers are thinking. SoV is difficult to track within a survey, but can be measured across various channels such as social media platforms (using social listening tools), news articles, and even search engines.
Brand mentions and earned media
Brand mentions are the individual mentions consumers make about your brand across the web – including websites, blogs, forums, and social media. Total mentions are a key component in your Share of Voice (as mentioned above). Like SoV, social listening and social media management tools are essential for measuring this particular brand awareness metric.
Earned media is similar to brand mentions, though instead of consumers being the ones to mention your brand, it’s other businesses and organizations – such as news articles, industry publications, and reputable websites. Earned media mentions are powerful indicators of brand visibility and credibility. The more earned media coverage your brand receives, particularly through backlinks to your site, the more your brand awareness is likely to grow.
Social media engagement
Social media engagement metrics, such as likes, shares, comments, and following, across major platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and Instagram, are important to consider when measuring brand awareness. These key metrics indicate how well your social media campaigns are performing. Don't forget to track relevant hashtags too! While not exactly brand mentions, hashtags are also helpful in understanding how well your campaign resonated with your audience.
Website traffic and search volume data
Website traffic analysis – often done through Google Analytics, and branded search volume – often tracked through Google Trends, offers valuable insights into different aspects of brand awareness.
Direct traffic (people directly typing your URL into their search bar), branded search (people searching for your brand name), and backlink/referral traffic (visitors from other websites) lets you know how consumers are thinking about and interacting with your brand. An increase in these types of searches can indicate rising brand awareness, brand recognition, and brand consideration. Monitoring organic search engine traffic from SEO efforts also provides helpful context into brand awareness.
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Better Brand Health Tracking (BBHT): A smarter way to measure brand awareness
While the more traditional metrics mentioned above certainly offer valuable insights, there’s a more modernized way to go about brand health tracking: Better Brand Health Tracking (BBHT). BBHT is an approach derived from Professor Jenni Romaniuk’s research at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science.
quantilope has adopted the BBHT approach to offer platform users a deeper, richer, and more actionable way to monitor brand health insights. Rather than leaning on traditional funnel metrics like brand awareness, brand consideration, and brand usage, BBHT is grounded on the following unique elements:
Category Entry Points (CEPs)
CEPs are the mental motivations or needs that ‘prompt’ consumers to shop in a certain category. These need-occasion connections are crucial for building brand awareness (and eventually, overall brand growth). After all, if consumers aren’t thinking about your category in certain buying scenarios, there’s a slim chance they’ll end up buying your brand.
For example, ‘feeling thirsty’ could be a CEP for the soda category, while ‘going on vacation’ could be a CEP for sunscreen. CEPs are present in service industries as well; ‘moving to a new state’ might be a CEP for insurance providers, and ‘remodeling a kitchen’ could be a CEP for a plumbing or electrical company.
Knowing what’s bringing consumers to shop in your category helps build very specific and targetable marketing campaigns that speak to those needs. These targeted marketing efforts help increase the chances that your category (and eventually your brand) comes to mind at the right moments in a consumer’s decision journey.
Mental Availability
As an extension of CEPs, Mental Availability narrows in on the particular brands that come to mind in certain buying scenarios. There are four KPIs that make up Mental Availability:
- Mental Market Share (MMS): How present a brand is in consumers' minds with regard to all Category Entry Points (CEPs) and brands. The higher the MMS, the stronger a brand's Mental Availability.
- Mental Penetration (MPen): How many consumers associate at least one CEP with a brand. While MPen for brand buyers is typically close to 100%, Mental Penetration is especially important to analyze for non-buyers of the brand, as this is a key audience to reach for future growth.
- Network Size (NS): The average number of CEPs associated with a brand. The broader a brand's network is in consumers' minds, the more likely consumers will consider it in a variety of buying situations.
- Share of Mind (SoM): How present a brand is across all CEPs, among those who have at least one CEP association with that brand. In cases of declining SoM, brands can see directly which competitors took away share from them.
quantilope’s BBHT approach automates these Mental Availability calculations so that you can jump right into analysis and strategic planning.
Mental Advantage
Mental Advantage analysis is another component of BBHT that lets brands know how they’re performing in their category, relative to the competition. Mental Advantage analysis considers things like brand size and how ‘typical’ an attribute or CEP is for the category, meaning the analysis is easily comparable across brands of varying sizes. This analysis provides a fair way to understand how well your brand is recognized and perceived – even if you’re a smaller player in your category.
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Best practices for building brand awareness
Once you understand your current level of brand awareness, you can implement several strategies to maintain or enhance it. Below are a few best practices to keep in mind if building brand awareness is a main objective.
Develop a strong and consistent brand identity
Having a strong and consistent brand identity will naturally form memories in consumers’ minds over time (vs. having sporadic branding efforts that don’t feel cohesive or clearly identifiable). Start with the fundamentals – such as your brand’s purpose, mission, values, and unique selling proposition (USP). How can you incorporate these elements into your branding materials? Maintain a consistent brand voice, style and tone so your branding is clearly recognizable. Visuals are also key in developing brand identity, such as logos, color palettes, typography, etc. All the elements you build into your brand to develop a strong sense of identity will help consumers remember you when it comes time to shop in your category.
Invest in content marketing and SEO
When consumers have a question or an interest, they turn to the web. Creating high-quality, high-value content that describes your products or answers a question. Valuable content will increase your chances of being seen; not just because consumers are more likely to click on higher quality content, but because Google considers quality in their search rankings too! Consider creating assets like informative blogs about your brand or category, how-to guides on solving a specific problem, educational videos readers can download, or engaging infographics. You want to demonstrate that you’re knowledgeable and a thought leader in your industry, and content is one of the best ways to do so.
Once your content strategy is solid, invest in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics to make sure consumers are seeing it. SEO involves keyword research, backlink strategies, website fundamentals, and content structure tactics to make sure search engines recognize the value of your content and rank it as such. You want to be showing up on the first page of search results, and the higher the better. It’s typical for the first, second, or sometimes third post to be the one readers ultimately click into; beyond that, your chances are much lower – especially now with AI search overviews.
Leverage social media
There’s no denying that social media is a huge asset for building brand awareness. It’s where consumers spend a huge portion of their time, and where they’re constantly influenced to buy new products and services. Use social media to your advantage by building a strong, engaging brand presence on appropriate platforms. If your brand is a bit more formal and professional, try building a presence on LinkedIn or X (formerly Twitter). If your brand is a bit more casual and friendly, consider Instagram, TikTok, or Snapchat as social media channels for branding. Not quite sure which platform is the best? Start by figuring out who your target audience is and which platforms they use (via a survey). Start there and expand as you grow.
When aiming to build brand awareness, you want consumers talking about your brand and social media is one of the best tools for doing so. It allows brands to converse with their audience, respond to comments, join into discussions, and offer other ways to engage with their brand (giveaways, contents, etc.).
Form strategic partnerships and collaborations
Building brand awareness can be a large undertaking, made easier with the help of others. Use your network to your advantage by forming strategic partnerships with other brands where you can co-market/co-brand for a joint benefit. Reach out to influencers to see who might be interested in collaborating with you to promote your brand’s products and services; this can be especially effective with niche or micro-influencers who often have high engagement rates and a dedicated following.
Word-of-mouth and public relations
Despite the many ways to build brand awareness, nothing quite beats old fashioned word of mouth. Consumers trust those close to them, and if someone recommends a brand, they’re likely to listen! Consider things like referral programs where current customers can invite friends and family to explore the brand; this is a great way to acquire new customers that are somewhat pre-vetted (they probably have something in common with the one referring them). For customers to want to recommend your brand, it means they value your brand and have had exceptional customer experience; emphasize these areas when trying to build brand awareness. Satisfied customers are more likely to become brand advocates by sharing their positive experiences and generating valuable word-of-mouth marketing.
Lastly, public relations is a great way to get your brand in the media through industry publications or news outlets. Contact PR agencies to see how you can generate more coverage around your brand and what you’re up to.
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How quantilope helps to measure and improve brand awareness
As a platform built on the power of AI and automation, quantilope helps brands capture real-time insights that lead to actionable business recommendations.
With quantilope, brands not only capture helpful context around key metrics like brand recall and brand recognition, they can gather even more advanced and detailed brand awareness insights with Better Brand Health Tracking and the largest suite of advanced methodologies. quantilope’s platform is intuitive enough that researchers of any background or skillset can leverage its advanced methods and solutions. For those looking for more guidance in their brand awareness efforts, they can lean on the platform’s integrated AI co-pilot, quinn, for end-to-end research support.
Using quinn as a collaborative research partner – not as a replacement, researchers can set up their survey quicker, create charts in seconds, and receive entire dashboard summaries/reports. With this time saved, brands can make decisions quick enough to act as the market is changing, rather than as an afterthought. In terms of brand awareness efforts, this might mean pulling an ad campaign that isn’t performing well (thanks to real-time data access) and reallocating that budget to something more impactful. Or, if a brand sees a particular marketing effort is gaining a lot of traction, they can quickly distribute it to additional channels for added exposure. It’s these real-time insights that quantilope’s AI and automation make possible that allows brands to stay relevant and competitive.
By leveraging AI and automation, quantilope provides actionable insights into your brand's performance, helping you identify new opportunities. We help you benchmark your awareness level, track mentions of your brand, and understand the demographics of your target market to build a strong brand that lasts the test of time.
Ready to measure, track and improve your brand awareness? Get in touch below!
