One of the key goals for many marketers is to increase and measure brand awareness for their company. It’s an important function of marketing, but is often considered a fluff or academic exercise by the uninitiated.
However, building brand awareness is essential. People are more likely to buy from names they trust and identify with. You need to establish yourself as a recognizable name in your industry. Brand awareness campaigns begin a unique conversation with your audience and funnels them deeper into your Sales Lifecycle.
Measuring the effectiveness of your brand awareness campaigns can be difficult. There are a number of channels that can be incorporated into your campaigns, but each one is different. Not only do your audiences interact differently, but your ads are also displayed differently. There are even different metrics and benchmarks that govern your campaign performance.
[box]While the importance placed on each metric will depend on which channel you are using, here are a few metrics you need pay attention to measure the effectiveness of your brand awareness campaigns.[/box]
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1. Impressions
Impressions are an important metric for all of your campaigns, no matter what your goals may be. However, they can be more important when you are actively trying to promote brand awareness among your audience.
In online advertising, impressions represent how many times your ad was served within a certain amount of time. In a brand awareness campaign, you might not care whether prospects actually end up converting into a lead. But you do need to know how many times your ad is being served across all of your advertising channels.
Many vendors will guarantee a cost-per-one thousand impressions or CPM. This allows you to accurately budget your spend on impressions as well as hold your vendor responsible for the performance of your campaign. The more targeted the impression, the higher your CPM will probably be.
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2. Customer Engagement
When focused on branding, you can use metrics like click-through-rate (CTR) and conversions to measure customer engagement. While it may seem counterintuitive to track engagement, you need to understand if users are responding to your ad content.
[box]Knowing your audience is responding to your ad content will allow you to make better decisions and actively respond to low audience engagement.[/box]
CTR is a great metric to track customer engagement through channels such as social media and paid search. Tracking this metric will allow you to measure the ratio of clicks to impressions from your ads.
Conversions are useful on other channels such as the display network, where user behavior is different. On banner ads, where your ads are competing more to get the attention of a reader than on other channels, conversions are a more accurate benchmark to measure performance.
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3. Reach and Frequency
Reach and frequency metrics are the least complex in your brand awareness measurement stack. Reach simply refers to the unique people who are receiving impressions from an advertisement. Reach may be lower than impressions since one person can see multiple impressions. Frequency, on the other hand, is the average number of times a person is exposed to an ad over a set period of time.
These metrics are important for a couple of reasons, but most of all because they further break down your impression metrics. Now you have a better understanding of how many unique introductions you are gaining from your campaign.
[box]Measuring the performance of your brand awareness campaigns can be difficult, especially since there aren’t very specific conversions to track. But once you know the right metrics to track you can effectively measure one of your most essential functions.[/box]
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