Measure Brand Awareness To Determine Marketing Campaign Efficacy

Changing customer perceptions is hard. And, it takes time. How then, do you know if your marketing and branding efforts are taking hold? You might be inclined to say, “a rise in sales or inquiries.” However, in long sales cycle industries, that may take far too much time.

That’s why quick touch-points taken over shorter periods of time make for better measurements. By using two key marketing research metrics—aided and unaided awareness—businesses simplify marketing campaign performance tracking and understand how effective marketing activities are…all while still having time to adjust what isn’t working.

Why Measure Brand Awareness

You may want to push brand awareness aside and consider it a vanity number with no business impact. That is shortsighted! In fact, there are at least three reasons businesses should take stock of brand awareness:

• Get Ahead of Long Sales Cycles: In several industries (e.g. enterprise software) it takes months, if not years, before prospects request information from a company. In these situations, measuring lead or customer growth may mean waiting too long. Measuring awareness represents a quicker, shorter-term approach to measuring campaign performance.

• Measure Campaign Performance Objectively: Relatedly, taking brand awareness touch points over times gives you a tangible, objective read on whether or not your marketing and branding efforts are really moving the needle.

• Enjoy An Early Competitive Differentiator: With some studies pointing to as much as 95% of purchase decisions being subconscious, creating a foundation for trust is key. Building brand awareness, gives you a leg up on your competition. However, if you don’t measure it, you’ll never know how you really compare.

Measuring Aided & Unaided Brand Awareness

There are two main ways to gauge brand awareness.

The first is “Unaided Awareness.” This captures top-of-mind awareness, letting you measure how much people know your brand without any assistance.

For instance, we ask respondents: “What are all of the different sneaker brands you know?” Respondents likely list brands like Nike and Reebok. Unaided awareness is the holy grail of brand achievement. It means your brand or business is so well known that prospective buyers readily recall its name.

The second type of awareness is “Aided Awareness.” This one captures more latent awareness, letting you gauge how well your brand is recognized with some assistance. To measure aided awareness, we ask respondents: “Which of the following sneaker brands do you know?” They then select as many brands as they know.

Armed with the raw data, you then graph both the unaided and aided awareness of each brand. As you can see from the graph below, this is an opportunity to collected additional measures of interest. For instance, “most trusted brand/business,” “most used brand/business,” or any other measure that’s relevant to what you do.

Over time, collect what marketing tactics or campaigns launched, and when. This lets you visualize if brand awareness changes with each new marketing effort.

Of course, don’t expect a single “silver bullet” activity. Rather, you’ll likely see slow and steady awarenes growth with each incremental, layered activity.

Why Measure Brand Awareness Long Term

Once you measure brand awareness numbers, you have an objective measure to drive two key strategic conversations:

1. Spend Amounts: How much money to spend on marketing is always a controversial conversation. Seeing growth or declines in awareness helps justify incremental spend, or show that increases in spend don’t move the needle.

2. Spend Allocations: Another controversial topic is where to spend money. By measuring awareness over time, you’ll see if investments in marketing channels or marketing activities move the needle, or don’t.

Remember, you should never measure brand awareness just for the sake of saying you did it. Instead, measuring awareness is about driving to broader organizational strategy, be it measuring the efficacy of spend, performance, or some other business decision.