Brand Awareness Campaigns: What Are They & Why Should You Care?

Say you walk into a shoe shop looking for a running shoe. You try many shoes; some brands are familiar to you, while others are new. The new brand you tried was the most comfortable and cheaper than the others. Yet, your brain keeps pushing you to a familiar brand (ASICS, Nike, or another). And in most cases, you end up buying the brand you know or at least heard.

That’s the power of the brand!

Marketers generally find building a brand a slow process and require patience. Historically, it has taken years for a brand to find its place among the people. But that doesn’t mean we cannot accelerate the process. You may think that running more brand campaigns across different channels may help. But that is not always the case.

One needs to use analytics effectively to build a positive correlation between the number of brand campaigns and brand awareness. Let’s learn how.

Focus of Brand Campaigns

The purpose of the brand campaigns is not to increase the conversion rate nor to increase sales and revenue. They are focused on improving the awareness of your brand among your target audience. This targets the top of the marketing funnel, i.e., awareness.

Brand campaigns indirectly affect sales and revenue because the more people are aware of the brand, the more people will consider buying it and more the conversion. But remember to spare your analytics team from trying to estimate the revenue impact of your brand campaigns. Instead, focus on building your brand and consider brand awareness as the only outcome from the analysis of the brand campaigns.

Every start-up that aspires to be like Apple knows brand awareness drives user acquisition. So understanding how to measure your brand awareness is very fundamental.

How to measure brand awareness?

Brand campaigns need not focus on any of your products, their features, or their sales. The outcome of your brand campaigns is that people should know that your brand exists and why you exist. In terms of analytics, this metric is brand awareness. 

Awareness is one of the most challenging metrics to track because it is not something you can measure through your internal data. Yet there are some ways to measure awareness, and let’s start with the most popular one.

Surveys

Surveys are the best and a direct way to measure brand awareness. When you start thinking about the surveys, you will most likely come up with 100s of questions you may want to ask your prospects. But at the same time, you don’t want to annoy them. So, think about the end goal before you start listing the questionnaires. Sit with your analyst and start listing the business questions you want your survey to answer and the reasons for the same. Once you know what and why you are measuring, you can frame the survey questions that help you answer them. Also, in surveys, since you are dealing with the sample of your target audience, it is crucial to consider the sample size to measure the required awareness lift.

Brand surveys can help you get insightful data which helps build the strategies and campaigns that will work.

Surveys are qualitative and measure a long-term business impact, but they are generally very costly. So, an alternate way is to analyze your web and app traffic data.

Traffic data

Unlike surveys, traffic is not a direct measure of awareness but acts as a proxy. Your traffic growth over a specific period indicates your brand awareness growth. The acquisition source like organic, paid, referrals, and others, can split the traffic, which helps you know the best acquisition source, and you can use this information to design your future campaigns. Also, if your brand campaigns are digital, you can analyze the traffic data to know how your campaign performed. But keep in mind to restrict this analysis to traffic only and not look at the downstream revenue funnel because that’s not the focus of brand campaigns.

Mentions on Social Media

The third approach to measuring your brand awareness is to analyze the mentions on social media. Most social media channels provide an API that you can use to build a web scrapping model to extract the posts or tweets containing the keywords representing your brand. You can compare it with the competition or analyze the growth over time. 

In addition, you use text analytics and machine learning to perform sentiment analysis of the posts on social media, especially while a brand campaign is running, to see how people are reacting to it. Not just social media, you can also analyze your brand mentions across online news, blogs, media, reviews, and others. You don’t even have to do it in-house because there are available tools in the market that allow you do so. But before you walk the path of analyzing the brand mentions, know where you will find your target audience.

Search Popularity

Lastly, another great way to track your brand awareness is to measure the popularity of your keyword searches. Some search engines have an inbuilt feature to see and compare the search trends of particular keywords. This tells you how often the users search keywords related to your brand compared to other keywords or brands. You can leverage this inbuilt feature from the search engines or invest in an external keyword tool to measure the search popularity of your brand over a long period.

Conclusion

There are many ways to get insights into your brand and brand awareness, but sadly, none are directly attributed to your brand campaigns. So, if you have a question like how do you measure the effectiveness of your brand campaigns, then the answer is that you don’t have to. You can measure the traffic, installs, and registrations to know how your brand campaigns perform. Additionally, it would be best to look at the bigger picture, measure awareness and then track it over a long period to ensure more target audience reaches the top of the funnel.

The next post will cover marketing campaign analytics. Until then, Happy Marketing!