Most businesses focus on measuring how many times they impact someone's life with a marketing campaign (the delivery of a campaign) and not on whether or not they actually remember that company when it comes time to make a purchase decision. Businesses should understand that just because you get someone's attention, it doesn't guarantee that they will remember your business when they need a solution to their issue.
Businesses need to learn how to design, measure, and provide evidence of the financial success of a brand awareness marketing strategy by using discipline in tracking their advertising and using hierarchies of evidence for their marketing activities.
The Exposure to Demand Measurement Model
Marketing teams typically look to generic data points to justify their budgets. High reach, high impression counts and high frequency of delivery are typical ways of reporting to that team.
However, the numbers only demonstrate that you've delivered the message. There is no correlation between those numbers and whether or not the buyer will think of your business when they have a major problem they need to solve.
Awareness and Revenue: Tracking the Pathway
The pathway of awareness to revenue starts with typical advertising delivery metrics such as reach and frequency. Then you should include metrics that look at how much attention a user pays to your marketing message (completion rates and profile views).
Only at that point do you begin to develop an understanding of what memory you're building and whether you have any future demand.
The Hierarchy of Brand Evidence
Businesses need to create a hierarchical structure of every marketing metric and find out what that marketing metric can tell you. High impression counts will only prove that you have delivered a marketing message.
Branded search lift and direct traffic provide much better evidence of the demand than the high impression count. Shortlist inclusion and assists provide even better evidence of the impact of your marketing dollar.
The Core Mechanics of Brand Awareness Marketing
Awareness is not a single, distinct state; it represents two groups of data: awareness (the level of familiarity with your brand) and revenue (the point in time that people purchase your product). A well-developed marketing strategy and planning must target specific types of memories in order to effectively change buyer behaviours.
Memory is manifest in two different ways, recognition and recall. Recognition is when a potential buyer sees your logo and knows who you are.
Recall is the more powerful of the two forms of memory and occurs when a potential buyer thinks about your company when they need a solution to their problem(s). Recall gives you the ability to keep moving through your pipeline at a much quicker pace than simply recognition can.
The difference between aided and unaided brand salience can be easily measured by completed surveys companies use to measure mental availability in the market. Aided awareness is knowing a specific number of companies when prompted, while unaided awareness is able to call out as many companies in the category without being told what companies belong to that category.
The ability to call out a company first is referred to as "top-of-mind recall".
Consumer brand awareness strategies tend to look at as many people as possible (mass reach) and overall sentiment towards the brand. On the other hand, a B2B brand awareness marketing strategy must be much more precise, with a focus on individual accounts as well as their longer sales cycles.
If your campaign reaches millions of users who are not interested in doing business with you, your marketing strategy has failed. The goal is to reach the people with control over the enterprise budget.
An enterprise purchase typically involves multiple decision makers. Therefore, a complete strategy must have an awareness-building component for each type of buyer within the buying committee.
Each of these decision-makers has different signs of trust and capability they look for in a brand. You must ensure the perception of your brand aligns with the specific concerns of each member of the buying committee.
Buyers enter the market based on specific triggers. A buyer’s brand salience should be associated with those triggering categories. The key priority for B2B brand awareness is to be one of the vendors a buyer adds to their initial vendor shortlist.
Without an early shortlist, the sales teams will have an uphill battle against the competitors that have established preference.
Operational Tracking and Setup Workflow
A metric cannot be improved until it has been properly isolated. Prior to launching any new activity, the marketing team should establish a concrete set of rules for following the activity's metrics.
Following this procedure will allow for a straightforward means of determining campaign success without the contamination of data. The measurement of all metrics should follow a strict and documented methodology.
Establishing Pre-Campaign Baselines
Always collect 14-28 day baseline measures before investing in any marketing campaign, as has been suggested by InfluencerDB and other like-minded organizations.
In establishing your baselines, include all existing brand search volumes, direct traffic numbers and current percentages of the business in share of voice. Always document your survey questions in the exact wording you will utilize when collecting your post-campaign baselines.
Structuring Your Branded Query Set
Branded search terms are the best indicators of demand. Construct branded query sets that include your company's full name as well as any misspellings of the full name.
Product names, prominent executives' names and all combinations of category with the brand must be included in the query. Utilize analytical software to monitor the number of searches made for each of the above terms and to detect any changes in levels of direct interest in your brand.
Campaign Tagging and Traffic Separation
You must maintain clear data by using standard URL tagging systems throughout all channels of your marketing program. Each campaign ID should have its own UTM parameter and its own landing page.
Clearly separate your organic, referral, and paid campaign traffic in your reports. This will prevent any standard website traffic from being incorrectly identified as earned interest in your brand.
Utilizing Established Brand Awareness Marketing Tools
No single analytical software can measure all aspects of market perception. Therefore, combining multiple analytical software programs is the only way to measure your exposure, memory and demand across all layers of market perception in brand awareness marketing.
Your audience and the anticipated purchase cycle determine the appropriate toolset for your needs.
Tracking Brand and Survey Platforms
Surveys provide a direct snapshot of a shift in how the market views your brand. Tracking tools such as Attest, YouGov, and Kantar provide companies with a way to evaluate both aided and unaided brands in the marketplace.
Brands can use these tools to evaluate changes in buyer perception based on their control group versus the exposed group. They help to determine if your message has changed the perceptions of buyers on your category.
Social and Search Intelligence Systems
What people are searching for on search gives insight to what your audience is looking for but doesn't want to share publicly about themselves. Google Trends, Ahrefs, and Semrush can provide measurement on the amount of branded searches over time.
Social media monitoring sites such as Brandwatch, Meltwater, and Sprout Social will provide an indication of how many times people are mentioning you and how many positive and negative comments are being made about your company.
These intelligence systems measure not only the current state of interest but also the overall amount of conversation happening in the market.
Emerging AI Impact Measurement on Brand Visibility
Google and Bing are changing how brands are discovered and engaged by buyers. Systems such as Semrush now track not only the brands mentioned in AI-based answers to search queries but also the brand's link to an actual website or web page.
These searches provide an additional level of visibility and reputation but are meant to complement recall surveys performed through traditional methods of human access rather than replacing them.
Real-World Case Examples of Brand Enhancements
Without context, reports and data may mislead an organization's strategic direction. For instance, reporting a large spike in followers from social media does not equate to business growth; successful organizations compare campaigns in controlled environments to determine the true value of their activity.
Similarly, case study examples offer an organization an opportunity to create a framework for the types of results they can expect.
Isolating Demand Lift with Holdout Groups
Using geographic holdouts to evaluate how an “awareness” campaign actually affects sales is much more effective than using actual sales data in cities where the ads had been run.
By leaving an equivalent city (with similar demographics) untouched you will be able to compare how much the branded search and the direct traffic to your website increased over the period of time in question.
This will give you a clearer picture of how much impact your campaign had on sales, compared to what might have happened because of seasonality or other factors.
Using Published Market Evidence to Analyze Visibility
Every company should examine as many sources of published market evidence as possible to look at the effectiveness of different marketing tactics on their marketplace visibility.
For example, according to Meltwater, the Ralph Lauren campaign created a 41% increased rate of visits to product pages and an 18% increased rate of e-commerce sales.
Another example of using published market evidence to evaluate the effectiveness of marketing tactics is based on the research by Attest, which found that Oddbox saved £200,000 in the process of expanding into a national market by using the insights from tracking brand recognition.
These examples update the perspective on measuring the actual results from brand awareness marketing campaigns instead of just the estimated “reach” of an awareness campaign.
Referral Methods and Market Trust
Trust is the key element that will drive the growth of your brand. The Salesforce research indicated that in order for 81% of consumers to consider making a purchase from a company, they required to have some level of trust in that company.
The Attest research also showed that 49% of U.S. consumers rely on family and friends as their primary means of discovering new brands. One way to gain market trust is to create structured referral programs that utilize this pre-existing trust to accelerate market acceptance.
Linking Awareness to Pipeline Velocity
Awareness doesn't exist as stand-alone within a business. Most awareness tracking solutions are directly linked to a CRM solution, and the best teams measure their incremental pipelines based on comparing the number of shortlisted invitations to the average size of a deal.
This article states the relationship between awareness & sales is modeled vs. a claim of direct causation.
Assessing the Commercial Impact of Brand Marketing
A brand's marketing is considered a long-term investment that can help lower future sales costs. Viewing awareness as a direct-response channel creates a need for marketing teams to optimize the number of inexpensive clicks that they get versus how effectively they can create long-term memories of the business.
The best companies view brand salience as a strategic business asset that helps drive a company's inclusion on shortlists and gives it more pricing power.
By taking a demand-based approach to measurement and shifting marketing budgets from measurement-focused delivery metrics to focusing on shortlists and price, companies better defend their investments in brand marketing.
Ultimately, the true measure of an effective strategy is the number of active buyers who reach out to a company when a critical issue arises, as opposed to the total number of people who saw a brand awareness marketing campaign.
Q&A
What is the process to isolate the impact awareness will have on the sales cycle?
To track the effects of brand exposure on sales cycles, marketers should follow the correlation between brand exposure and the percentage of potential customers who include a brand in their shortlist of options when deciding what to buy. To compare the pipeline velocity (time taken to get from initial exposure to final sale) between customers who have had exposure to the brand versus those who have not, brands can use CRM data. The objective is to be able to show that earlier brand exposure leads to faster sales cycles and not that the single campaign generated the sale.
Why do we have a significant amount of direct traffic that is actually not reflective of true brand recall?
Analytics platforms classify traffic as direct when the referring site is unknown, i.e. hidden social media links, email clicks, and untagged campaigns. To accurately assess brand recall, marketing teams should isolate dark traffic and use their analytics to focus on users who actively entered the core brand name into a search bar or browser.
How does a B2B organization decide when it is time to cut back on its brand awareness budget?
Once a company's market penetration exceeds the sales force's ability to handle the attendant demand, the company needs to shift its resources. Companies displaying high aided awareness rates with poor win rates have moved beyond brand visibility as a potential barrier to closing. As such, the company should now allocate its budget to support product marketing, sales enablement, and specific conversion initiatives rather than new top-of-funnel efforts.