Why Brand Awareness Metrics are Important

Impressions to Conversions: Why Brand Awareness Metrics Matter

As a marketer, when you begin to think about a marketing funnel, what is the first thing that usually comes to mind? Is it conversion rates at the bottom of the funnel? Maybe it’s the middle of the funnel stages such as becoming a Marketing Qualified Lead, (MQL) leads turning into opportunities or entering pipeline. Marketing truly begins at the top of the funnel and is typically where all of the creativity starts. Brand Awareness Metrics, also known to many as vanity metrics, truly begin the long journey a lead takes to ultimately becoming a closed won deal in your CRM, so it’s important you give your brand awareness the necessary time and attention it needs to streamline your marketing from impressions to conversions.

Nurturing your brand

Why is brand awareness important you ask? Your brand should be your baby, and marketers play a pivotal role in nurturing your brand from infant stages to full maturity. Most consumers use your social media presence to gauge your brand’s credibility and make a buyer’s decision.

Your brand awareness metrics should be visible to the entire team, in a place where all team members can see exactly how you’re doing. When the time comes, be sure you know what is important to share. Not followers, not likes, but clicks are the most important social media metric to track. Sharing metrics during the analytical meeting involves highlighting top-performing assets and speaking to where you see the most potential for improvement.

Brand awareness is a never-ending cycle of refining your ideas, messaging and finding what exactly makes your audience tick. Your findings should be brought back to your team to dissect and be reused. Make sure to inform your team of what has been successful and what you believe resonates well with your ideal customer profile (ICP). This information is pivotal for your marketing team moving in the right direction. For more on how to properly present results to your CEO and Board, check out our eBook here: How to Present Marketing Results to Your CEO & Board

Aligning your marketing efforts

Most awareness for brands begins on social media, so having a strong social media presence is imperative. Whenever you use an asset, whether it be an eBook, blog, or infographic you should be using clicks as a performance metric to measure success. However, there has to be a strategy behind what you’re doing. Mindless post and resource usage can lead to confusion and ultimately be the death of a brand. Be sure to align what you post with that of the marketing team. When your marketing team sends an email on best practices for achieving a positive ROI, make sure your messaging tells a story that guides readers from the pain they are facing with a negative ROI toward the solution of your product.

Top Brand Awareness Metrics

Which metrics matter most for measuring brand awareness? Here are some brand awareness metrics to measure your top-of-funnel marketing efforts.

Impressions

Impressions are defined as a metric used to quantify a user seeing (but not clicking on) a web page. Typically, an impression is a brand awareness metric applied to digital advertising. It is often used to track advertising campaigns, whether it’s for search engines like Google or Bing, or social media advertising like Facebook or Instagram. Impressions can be used to measure SEO performance as a way to measure the number of times a web page appears in organic searches. This is a reliable metric to measure brand awareness online.

First-page keyword rankings

Oftentimes, organic search can be an important channel for marketers. The number of keywords ranking on the first page of Google (and other search engines) can be a meaningful brand awareness metric. Using Google Search Console, or a keyword tracking tool, you can determine the monthly growth of keywords ranking on the first page.

Branded search volume

How often are people online searching for your brand? Branded search volume tells you just that. Using a keyword research tool, you can find the average number of monthly searches for the past 12 months. You can also see the trend of whether branded searches have improved. 

Social media engagement

There are several social media platforms for organizations to use as marketing tools to drive awareness. For certain organizations, some platforms may be more successful than others.

Whatever platforms you use, tracking social engagement metrics is an excellent way to measure awareness in digital marketing. Brand awareness metrics on social media typically include likes, comments, and shares.

Referral traffic

Getting traffic from other websites is another great metric to use when measuring brand awareness. Referral traffic can be a result of SEO, Public Relations and Advertising. To find referral traffic, you can use Google Analytics.

 The Role of Brand Awareness Metrics in Marketing

Yes, brand awareness metrics can be viewed as vanity metrics, but to acquire more customers, it starts with brand awareness.

• Consumer research – understand your target customer, their behaviors, motivations, and buying patterns.
• Brand research – how is your brand different from your competitor?
• Message – create a memorable message that resonates with your user.
• Call to action – what’s the next step? Your marketing campaign should be enticing based on the user’s needs. No matter what the marketing channel or campaign, clearly communicate the next step.

Once your brand awareness campaign hooks a new user, the call to action you have will push them down the marketing funnel.

In Conclusion (CMOs of tomorrow)

Ultimately, many social media managers of today are the CMOs of Tomorrow.. In training. It’s important to train your mind to think about the bigger picture.

With every post you make, you should be thinking impression, to conversion. The importance of measuring brand awareness metrics will help fill your marketing funnel and better streamline your marketing efforts. If you would like to better understand the importance of a marketing funnel, download our Operational Marketing Funnel Builder.