Brand awareness

Brand awareness is about people gaining a deeper understanding of your brand’s products, services and values. At the most basic level, your aim should be to make customers aware of you. This differs from brand recognition, where you are aiming to be instantly recognisable based on aspects like colours, logo and jingles. You may be recognisable, but customers may not have an in-depth knowledge of you.

Brand awareness brings big benefits:

• Increased sales - Customers are more likely to buy from brands they recognise

• Increased sales - Customers may even look forward to new products from you

• Increased profit - Customers will be less price-sensitive, and some will pay more from a trusted brand

• Reduced churn - Customers will be more loyal, resulting in higher customer retention rates

• Reduced marketing costs - Customers will recommend your product to others allowing you to market less

• Improved marketing results - When customers know who you are, they are more likely to engage with your campaigns

Improving awareness for a target customer group

The success of these improvement initiatives be tracked using Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).

• Advertising campaigns - These are designed to bring awareness of products and services through paid channels. These should show how you differentiate from the competition. Another option is to run a campaign to demonstrate your brand’s personality and values. Your advertising should follow your brand guidelines such as colours and tone of voice. Advertising is a subset of marketing.

• Marketing campaigns - These are broader than paid advertising and focus on ensuring your offerings are desirable to your target customer group. Marketing can include after-sales messaging that aids customer satisfaction and retention. For example, upskilling existing customers in a new product feature. Many of the activities listed here fall under the definition of marketing. For example, you may run a campaign to upskill people in a new product feature and include a video or an article about it.

• Be clear on your differentiators and ensure you regularly message these

• Promote your values where they align with your target customer group, such as being environmentally friendly

• Create valuable content:

  • Thought leadership and innovation in the form of videos, blogs and articles

  • Allow customers to easily share this with others

  • Monitor social media for the latest discussion topics, FAQs and misinformation

  • Offer free complimentary products to customers

• Encourage customers to leave positive reviews of you on third-party platforms, ideally with information about what they liked in your offering

• Create customer testimonials:

  • Have a clear goal and make the information concise

  • Be easy to understand

  • Demonstrate the benefits the customer has achieved, ideally numerically

• Demonstrate expertise by taking part in events such as conferences, podcasts and meetups

• Appear in the media, ideally without paying. This is known as earned media. This is because you have to put in sufficient effort to make yourself newsworthy, and there can be costs, such as larger venues to pay for.

• Work with influencers and industry experts to get your brand more coverage:

  • It is especially effective to have someone trusted to promote a product without being paid to do so

  • Be a guest on a blog or video (such as YouTube)

Measuring brand awareness

The information below is provided as a starting point. There are many tools on the market that help automate the gathering of these metrics.

Social media

The amount of interaction with social media content. This can include likes, comments and shares.

Share of voice

This is the percentage your organisation is mentioned versus that of your selected competitors. Success can be calculated for each marketing channel and further broken down by aspects like country and language. Digital marketing channels include news, blogs, social media and the Internet. Share of voice on the internet also applies to people searching for keywords where you want to rank high in the search results.

Having a high percentage of share of voice isn’t always positive. Sentiment analysis looks at the overall tone of customers. Tracking sentiment when you run a marketing campaign will help you understand how well it is landing.

• Tracking percentages - There are tools that can give percentages of positive, neutral and negative comments

• Gain customer insight - Understanding customer’s opinions gives you insight into them. For example, you find a lot of complaints that your 4X4 isn’t performing well in the snow or a part of your software is hard to use

• Understand your competition - You can also track the sentiment of your competitors to highlight strengths and weaknesses

Customer surveys

From these, you can gain quantitative (numerical) and qualitative (the reasons behind the numbers) results. Surveys allow you to gain valuable information about your customer’s knowledge and opinion of your brand.

Referrals

People arriving at your website from external sources such as social media platforms.

Earned media

The amount of attention you are receiving from the media where you have not paid them. This can be from sources like blogs, newspaper articles and reviews.