Brand awareness is a term that’s thrown around a lot in the marketing community, but how is it actually useful in practice? Like most metrics related to branding, it’s hard to measure. How do you pin down “awareness”? Today’s brand managers need to know how to improve brand awareness campaigns using a brand tracker so they can make smarter marketing decisions.
How Can You Track Brand Awareness Campaigns?
With a brand tracker.
Simply put, a brand tracker is a tool that helps measure the success of your campaigns. Essentially, it helps make sure that your campaigns are actually doing what you want them to: increasing awareness.
Because you don’t have the time to poll the entire general public or analyze the minuscule details of every campaign, a brand tracker does the heavy lifting for you. It defines key metrics of campaigns and presents them in a way that makes it easy to decide on smart decisions about your strategy.
In this fast-paced world of marketing today, you can’t afford to pass up a tool that makes your life simpler. In this guide, we’ll break down why using a brand tracker helps improve brand awareness in your campaigns and beyond.
Why Track Brand Awareness?
First, let’s talk about why you should track these brand awareness campaigns at all. Certainly, there are easier things to track, so why go through the trouble of trying to nail down awareness in particular? Plus, won’t increase traffic to your website and/or increased sales do the trick? Maybe, but brand awareness is more than profit.
Brand awareness doesn’t just refer to how aware people are of your brand. It also relates to reputation, perception, niche, and more. Your brand is competing with dozens (or even hundreds) of similar brands both online and offline. Your brand awareness measures how well you stand out and whether your marketing is successful.
What happens when you track brand awareness?
- You learn more about your target audience
- You recognize whether the right audience is seeing your campaigns
- You determine if you’re spending your marketing budget on the right things
- You understand your customer’s journey
- You make smarter decisions about marketing in the future
All of these things matter when it comes to boosting your brand. You can throw all the money you want into your marketing campaigns, but it doesn’t mean anything if the wrong people are seeing it.
As a brand manager, you should track brand awareness so you can strengthen your marketing campaigns not only today but into the future. While there’s no such thing as a future-proof campaign, these are the analytics that help you build the strongest foundation possible.
Mini Case Study: GetYourGuide
To understand why tracking brand awareness campaigns are so valuable to brands of all shapes and sizes, let’s look at an example. In the UK, GetYourGuide is one of the new players appearing in the tour booking travel niche. Throughout the general population, GetYourGuide has brand awareness if just 6%. This means that 6 out of 100 people will likely recognize GetYourGuide in the UK.
That’s not a very impressive number, so we need to dig a bit deeper.
While GetYourGuide could continue to target the general population with their campaigns, this probably isn’t the most effective way to grow. As the saying goes, if you’re talking to everyone, nobody’s listening. Sure, the company will continue to grow, but it’ll be at a slow, inefficient rate.
Simply put, GetYourGuide needs to bring in some more powerful tools to harness the brand awareness they do have and put it to good use.
Using a Brand Tracker to Improve Awareness
Now, if GetYourGuide was using a brand tracker, they would easily be able to go beyond not only targeting just the general population but niche audience that made sense to them as a business.
Using a brand tracker would make it possible for them to:
- Learn which niches react better to their brand
- See how they compare against the competition
- Automate and simplify their research
- Create stronger campaigns that lead to better results
While it’s true you can keep track of your own brand awareness when it comes to things like website traffic, search traffic, social engagement, storefront foot traffic, and so on, but these all take time and money. They’re also hard to analyze on their own.
When your analytics are scattered and not cohesive, they don’t lead to real-life conclusions about your key performance metrics.
Even more, they only tell one side of the story. You might know that 100 visitors came to your website last week, but how many of those users were even in your target audience? Similarly, perhaps your social reach plummeted. Is there a competitor’s campaign that might be attracting your audience’s attention instead?
These are the questions a brand tracker can help answer for you.
Let’s take another look at GetYourGuide to bring things back into perspective. By using a brand tracker, they can narrow down their growth to a more specific target audience.
For a tour company, that means focusing on frequent travelers and those with the time and money to afford travel opportunities. By highlighting this audience, they will be much more successful when it comes to increasing their brand awareness amongst those who can use their service.
We decided to track GetYourGuide during Q3 of 2019 and see how they stood within the different niche audiences. We saw that for frequent travellers, brand awareness increased to 12%. It was the same with the “tourist” persona we created: frequent travelers aged 26–45 with a medium-income who watch more than 3 hours of TV a day. This is impressive compared to the 6% brand awareness within the general population.
What does this information reveal?
It shows just how powerful it can be to niche down with the right audience. By tracking your brand awareness with a brand tracker, you can see this growth for yourself in real-time, learning more about where to spend your money and which niche to focus on. GetYourGuide has currently launched billboard campaigns in Berlin’s Tegel Airport. Here, they should reach their perfect target audience. But how much of an impact will these campaigns have? Only a brand tracker can provide the answer.
Brand Tracking Your Competition
This might surprise you, but you don’t want to just look at your own brand tracking data. You also need to track your competition.
Why spend time seeing what others are doing in your niche?
Because not only does it pay to keep an eye on what brand awareness campaigns the competition is running, but it also can help you refine your own strategy.
Let’s once again look at GetYourGuide. GetYourGuide can take their strategy a step further by brand tracking their competition. In this case, the newer company is falling drastically behind Expedia. This makes sense because Expedia is a well-known, popular brand that’s been advertising for years.
By using a brand tracker to dive deeper into Expedia’s brand awareness, GetYourGuide can see how they compare against one of their biggest competitors.
In the UK alone, Expedia boasts the following brand awareness:
These percentages mean that almost all of the UK’s population recognizes Expedia. If someone is planning a trip, they’re much more likely to use a platform like Expedia than GetYourGuide.
However, all hope is not lost.
GetYourGuide now has the opportunity to analyze Expedia’s strategy in the UK. They might notice that Expedia has been running social media ads recently and that these ads are producing high engagement rates. This would show GetYourGuide that their target audience responds well to social media ads, so they might want to also consider this type of campaign in the near future.
Also, GetYourGuide can see which types of travelers are more likely to respond to these campaigns, giving them greater insight into their audience. If younger travelers are more likely to book through a platform like Expedia, then this is a strong indicator to GetYourGuide that they might need to consider targeting a younger audience.
It pays to keep an eye on the competition, especially in a world that’s moving as quickly as ours. While you shouldn’t copy another brand’s strategy, learning from what they’re doing right can be a huge asset for brand managers. One of the most influential ways brand trackers make a difference is by helping you understand your competitors’ strategy and audience.
Achieve Stronger Campaigns with a Brand Tracker
Now that you know how powerful brand tracking can be, there’s no reason not to take a closer look at your own brand awareness. While it might seem hard to measure things like “awareness,” it’s easier than you think. With the right brand tracking tool, you can leverage the best, niche-specific data for your team to make the most of your marketing budget.
You need a brand tracker that understands your audience and measure the KPMs that matter the most to you. While you can measure some of these things on your own to some extent, this isn’t an effective use of your time and you’ll run into a lot of costly limits.
Analyze your brand awareness from the comfort of your office. From tracking your target audience to keeping an eye on your competition, there are no limits to what you do next. Supercharge your next campaign with the help of a brand tracker.
Originally published at https://www.latana.com.
