Launching an engaging digital brand awareness campaign.

Brand awareness is a crucial metric for launching a branded digital campaign, but it's also one of the most challenging to measure. If you're trying to increase your company's online presence with digital ads, how can you gauge whether or not your efforts are working? 

How to measure brand awareness

Brand awareness is a standard metric used to calculate the success of digital marketing efforts. It refers to the number of people familiar with your brand. Whether your product or service is newly launched or a common household name, tracking brand awareness is essential to developing strategies for growth.

A digital brand awareness campaign aims to showcase a brand to potential customers. Consider these metrics for your business and how you can apply them:

• Top-of-mind awareness
• Ad recall lift
• Branded search volume
• Social media engagement

Top-of-mind awareness

Top-of-mind awareness refers to how quickly a brand can be recognized when described in a specific industry. A brand with strong top-of-mind awareness will not only stand out in its category, but when brought up in conversation, people will also be able to describe brand attributes like its logo, what separates it from competitors or even it’s quirky ads. 

Online surveys and focus groups conducted by a third party can help you understand your customers' thinking. Gather information about consumer perceptions by asking questions like, "What brands come to mind?" and "Which brands have impacted your life lately?" then publish to your potential audience. These surveys' insights will tell how aware people are of your brand, and you can likely publish them on the channels where you published your campaign.

Ad recall lift

Ad recall lift describes the percentage of people who remember seeing an ad from your brand. It will help you determine if your ad effectively engages your target audience. Strong ad recall lift demonstrates that you understand the types of advertisements that resonate with your audience.

Brand lift studies are a unique way to measure the impact of campaigns. These studies will vary in delivery by channel but can be commissioned on whatever digital marketing platform you're running your campaign. Like surveys, they will gauge the awareness of your brand by polling people who might have seen your ad.

Branded search volume

There is tremendous value in traffic coming to your site through keywords that contain your brand name. By narrowing the search volume parameters to a specific period, you can get reliable insights into how often consumers enter your brand name into a search engine, throughout your campaign. A clear signal that your brand awareness campaign is delivering positive results is when those branded keywords receive an increase in search volume. 

There are several ways to measure search volume. A great tool is the Google Search Console, which will single out keywords and tell you how many impressions and clicks you have for that specific keyword. A branding agency can also support your digital marketing campaigns by providing insights into your current efforts and strategies to optimize future campaigns. 

Social media engagement

Like branded search volume, social media engagement has multiple benefits for your brand. You grow your organic social media presence while capturing another measure of your campaign's success. To measure social media engagement in the simplest form, look at how many people interacted with your page—a like, retweet, or share—and measure this throughout your campaign.

Reddit offers an excellent example of a brand that uses social media engagement as a metric to track the success of its brand awareness campaigns. Reddit's Superbowl campaign had an innovative approach where they only took out a 5-second ad, sending users to their platform to continue the conversation. They tracked users who had seen their ad, navigated to their platform and engaged with a post. This gave them more visibility and helped to measure how many viewers engaged with the ads.

Launching your campaign

Before you start measuring your brand awareness campaign, you have to build and launch it. Begin by engaging your creative team to develop the messaging and visuals that will become your ad creative. Next, select the channels you'll advertise on, including social media, PPC, or email. You'll then establish a budget, timeline, and metrics before drafting your campaign. A second pair of eyes is always beneficial to success.

When your campaign is live, you’ll want to monitor frequently and adjust creative when necessary. Information will start to flow in through your selected channels, and once you have data to work with, use the strategies above to continuously measure your brand awareness.

Converting brand awareness into actions

Awareness campaigns are about people remembering your brand. While impactful ads help achieve this, having your audience complete an action is more beneficial.

Successful digital marketing is gauged by the number of users who take action, whether making a purchase, submitting their information, or contacting your company. An excellent way to increase this number is to keep your audience engaged with always-on brand awareness campaigns,  complemented by conversion-focused ads. 

By layering your campaign objectives, you can guide your audience through the funnel in as little time as possible while maintaining an engaged community of consumers, allowing you to capitalize fully on your branding campaigns.