Let’s play a little game.
Soda.
Laptop.
Fast food.
Brands, products, logos – Many things flashed through your mind when reading these words, right? You’re probably envisioning different products that you have seen and/or heard of countless times. Most likely, Coca-Cola, Apple, and McDonald’s popped in your head in the first 2 seconds after reading those words.
Why do these names often top the list? Because of brand awareness. It is an extremely powerful concept that indicates whether consumers know/have heard of a brand. In other words, brand awareness is a measurement of how familiar people in your target market are with your brand. If potential customers can recognize and tie their recollection to a product, you have a clear advantage over competitors.
Why Is Brand Awareness Important?
Brand awareness is one of the key assets of any successful company. The sum of all the thoughts, feelings, and reactions that individuals have in response to a brand, which influences their brand loyalty, is known as brand experience. Strong brand awareness coupled with an extraordinary brand experience is a recipe for long-term success for any brand.
Now, why is brand awareness important? Well, it drives sales. Literally.
-
According to research, 89% of consumers will buy a product from a brand they follow on social media. In addition, 85% will recommend the brand to their families and friends.
-
75% of buyers are more likely to make a purchase from a brand they know.
-
A study by KettleandFire revealed that 77% of US consumers purchase gifts from brands they know.
How to Measure Brand Awareness
Now that we all understand what brand awareness is and why it's so important, how can we actually measure it? There are multiple ways to measure brand awareness.
There are certain website analytics you could use to gather insights. For example, you could measure website traffic over time to get an indication of changes in brand awareness. Look at the amount of direct traffic your website is getting, meaning the number of people who are typing your website URL into their address bar. You could also look at how many people are searching for your brand name in search engines like Google.
You can leverage social media as well. Social listening allows you to listen in on conversations happening on social media and elsewhere online about your brand. In addition to these qualitative insights, consider quantitative social media metrics like share of voice, volume of mentions, reach, and engagement to check the pulse of your brand awareness.
And of course, you can conduct surveys to gather qualitative feedback to measure brand awareness. Ask your existing customers how they found out about your brand or ask a random sample of people whether or not they're familiar with your brand.
Getting Started with Brand Awareness Surveys
It is important to create brand awareness surveys and start gathering insights from your audience that you can put into action. These surveys can help you understand and improve your branding efforts, and get insight into how you can continue to develop your brand.
Aided and Unaided Brand Awareness Survey Questions
There are two types of brand awareness survey questions – aided and unaided. Aided questions usually contain your brand as a checkbox choice in the answers field while unaided questions are mostly open-ended. It’s best to utilize a combination of these in your surveys.
Here is an example:
“What is your go-to painkiller if you have a headache?” (Unaided)
Answer: …
“What painkillers work best for you when you have a headache?” (Aided)
A: Advil
B: Motrin
C: Tylenol
D: Aleve
Keep in mind that unaided questions can be a bit tricky since consumers will have to type their answers in manually, which is an extra step to take when participating in a survey. A good rule of thumb is to include one unaided question in every five questions to minimize inconvenience.
It is important to understand that brand awareness survey results are never 100% accurate—because we are all human and often short on time or attention. An affirmative response generally triggers follow-up questions. For this reason, consumers tend can respond negatively just to avoid answering more questions. As a result, a survey run by Google revealed that only 85% of people in the US had heard about Coca-Cola, which is most certainly wrong.
Make Answering Survey Questions Easy
First, you need to make sure that people understand what you’re asking quickly and easily. The questions need to be short, to the point, and informal. Remember that users may not be paying too much attention when going through the survey—a million things can easily distract them—and they will most certainly be reluctant to read a question twice.
Second, allow users to skip questions. Ask only the most important questions, and don’t try to force matters. A single question may make the difference between quitting the survey or completing it.
Brand Your Survey
This may seem counter-intuitive, but a branded survey often acts as reassurance for respondents and also improves the brand experience. Users intuitively check for corporate visual clues to make sure they aren’t just wasting their time or being scammed by some data hijackers. Just don’t overdo it – company logo, corporate colors, and branding typeface are enough to do the trick.
Offer Rewards When Necessary
Offering rewards for completing your survey has multiple benefits. For one, people will actually be interested in completing it. Two, they will feel more responsible when answering the questions, which will help improve the response rate and confidence interval of your survey. And three, it will improve your brand experience.
The reward doesn’t necessarily have to be big – a small discount or a free product sample is usually enough to get users interested. That being said, the reward has to be proportional to the survey length. It would be unwise to expect users to participate in an hour-long survey for a 5% discount coupon.
Final Thoughts
Sending out brand awareness surveys periodically is a cost-effective and time-efficient way to measure the strength of your brand and understand the overall effectiveness of your marketing and advertising campaigns. Run them quarterly, or at the very least, bi-annual.
Ready to get started with brand awareness surveys, but don't have a survey tool yet? Check out Alida Surveys.
