How to monitor brand awareness through surveys

Brand awareness can be considered a vanity metric, but your customer's ability to remember your brand is one of the most important factors for them to buy the product you offer. This is why brands spend millions of dollars on celebrity endorsements as this helps to be remembered.

Why measure brand awareness?

Strong brand awareness includes the possibility of increasing your income in the short term. High brand awareness is associated with higher customer retention, higher sales, business longevity, etc. Why? Because people want to do business with companies whose products and brands they already know.

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Here are some statistics on brand awareness to remind you of its importance:

• A successful brand increases customer loyalty, gives the company an enhanced image and a trustworthy identity.
• 89% of B2B marketers say brand awareness is the most important goal, followed by sales and lead generation.
• 70% of brand managers say that building an audience is more valuable than direct sales.
• Consistent branding helps increase revenue by 23%.
  
  

What can measure brand awareness?

When you survey your customers about your product, you get to know a lot of deep insights about what they think about the brand, associations, etc. A brand awareness survey can help you measure the following:

Brand recognition: When the audience receives a list of brands, can they recognize yours from the lot?

Brand image: Brand identity and brand image are two different things. While the brand image is based on the customer's perception of the company, brand identity is what your team creates for itself with marketing campaigns. Discovering the differences between the two can help you understand how your marketing efforts can be improved.

Brand reminder: Does a customer think of your brand when is given a product in your niche or does he think of a competitor first?

Brand trust: In this age of low trust among customers for conglomerates, how much do customers trust your brand? If the trust factor is lower then you will struggle, you need to take steps to get them to trust you.

Customer profile: If customers' personalities change, you must change their product or change their marketing message.

What parts of brand awareness should be tracked?

Tracking metrics such as usage, purchase intent, perceptions, and brand attitudes is recommended.

Methods for measuring brand awareness

Surveys: You can ask your customers how they found out about your business no matter what type of survey you're conducting, whether it's email, phone, or website surveys. If the survey is for random people, ask them if they are familiar with the brand.

Website traffic: There is a lot of information that you can extract through website traffic, especially if you are using an analytics tool. For example, the 'Direct' channel in Google Analytics gives you a count of the number of people who typed your URL into the address bar, used your bookmark, clicked a link in an untracked email, or from a link on an offline document. This detail will give you an idea about your brand awareness. This metric should continue to increase gradually.

Social listening: Where do you find most of your customers hanging out? Social networks, right? Listen to their online conversations about your brand and that of your competitors because that will help you better understand what they are doing. Not only should you listen to organic conversations about your brand, but you can even prompt your customers to talk about your brand. These thoughts are expressed naturally, so they are more valuable.

How to create effective brand awareness surveys?

No matter the size of your business, you should always know, and making your customers aware of your brand should be a task you continue to perform constantly. There are a variety of marketing efforts being used to improve brand awareness, but you need to know how well they are performing. Sending surveys to your customers and prospects is one of the best methods of measuring awareness.

Brand recall: Is your product the most important category? Brand recall is the ability of your customers to recall your brand name from memory when prompted by a product category. If you find yourself in a crowded market, it makes sense to work on this.

Let's say you are in the e-commerce niche where you sell drones, this is the question you might ask.

"When you think of drones, what brand comes to mind?"

You have achieved brand awareness if your customer remembers your brand without help. If your name is not registered, then you must take the necessary steps to ensure that your customers remember your brand without any notice.

Brand awareness: Brand recall is when customers can remember your brand without any notice, but brand awareness is when they can recognize your brand if you give them a list. It is also called assisted consciousness.

A simple question to measure brand recognition is the following:

"How familiar are you with these brands?"

You can use the help of a scaling system like a Likert scale that has options ranging from 'Extremely familiar' to 'Unfamiliar'. You should list your competitors and give them Likert scale options for each of them.

Your customers may say they are familiar with your brand, but you still need to work on brand recall or core recognition. Brand recognition is developed through frequency and consistency. Also, remember that brand recognition can also be due to negative experiences. If brand recognition stems from negative associations, it can lead to decreased preference and loyalty.

It is about how organizations differentiate themselves from their competitors. Differentiation helps your audience understand who you are, immediately remember your brand, and also helps with brand equity. Organizations that have strong brand identities are often successful with a large number of customers championing them.

The differentiation that brands use is usually visible elements such as color, logo, design, typography, product packaging, email design, website, etc., which can create a distinct image.

• How do you want customers to think of your brand?
• Is there a unique personality for your brand?
• What is the history of your company?
• How do you want customers to remember you?
• What is the first thing you want your customers to describe to you?

Creating a story about your brand helps in great brand recalls that will spiral out associations and word-of-mouth referrals.

Brand image: The brand image tells you about the real perception of the customer. This must be aligned with your brand identity. This is one of the reasons why you need to conduct regular surveys with your customers. For example, Colgate is one of the most popular brands for personal hygiene and their customers think so too. It has managed to generate trust in their minds.

The brand is important because people base their purchasing decisions on it, as it inspires trust. Anyone would be wary of investing in a new brand as they are not sure if it would sufficiently solve their problem.

Here is the question you can use in the survey:

"What comes to mind when you think of our brand?"

You can give them a bunch of brand attributes they can choose from or leave it as an open question for the customer to answer.

Brand trust: For customers to trust your brand, your products must not only be worthwhile but also have an overall brand name that draws them to you.

This is what you can ask your customers in the brand survey. They can use options from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree" on a 5-point scale.

• Brand X is always trustworthy
• I trust brand X ads
• X always keeps his promises
• X solves all my pain points in the niche

Customer profile: Is the target audience correctly defined? If you sell industrial equipment, you certainly can't expect to find it on Instagram. You can find some of them, but it's certainly not the right place to focus your marketing efforts.

No matter what type of product/service you sell, you will have 3-4 types of ideal customers. Ask questions of different stakeholders to ensure you get your ideal customer profile.

Ask your customers the following:

• What do you do for a living?
• Where do you work?
• Why do you want our product?
• How exactly does it help you?

The above questions can be open and answered by the client according to their suitability.

Brand awareness surveys should lead to the following:

You can create a marketing strategy based on the feedback your customer gives you about brand awareness. This is a long-term plan and your new brand idea needs to be slowly conveyed to customers in terms of ads, content, logo, typography, etc. Insisting on creating an immediate change can be disastrous for the company, as customers may not be able to accept sudden changes.

Some of the results of a brand awareness survey

• See if you have addressed your audience correctly
• Define the customer's personality accordingly
• Monitor channel usage
• Change spending patterns and channels based on responses.
• Venture into new areas to do business
• Horizontal or vertical scaling of the business based on the results of the survey

While these changes may take time to think about, they are worth the effort. Be patient with the results.

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Conclusion

Brand awareness should be the foundation on which your marketing strategy revolves. The greater the number of customers who remember it when they think of the product, the greater the probability that they will buy yours. There was a time when it was difficult to get this metric as accurately as possible.

Brand awareness is a concept that can pay you big dividends in terms of inbound sales, customer perception, and branding. Once you describe the steps, you can grow an audience that will recognize the brand despite the number of competitors. They will choose your products over the competition and will not stop recommending them.

Do you have any ideas about brand awareness and how to implement it? When you want to improve your brand awareness and are looking to pick the brains of your customers, use an online survey tool to help you match your needs with the utmost precision.