Increasing brand awareness amplifies the success of your other marketing, increasing your brand's familiarity among consumers and making your marketing more memorable. It is crucial to your brand's success because studies show that today's customers prefer companies they know and trust. These studies have shown 46% of people prefer brands that feel 'familiar' to them.
Of that, 80% of men and 76% of women report only buying from brands they know, and 46% would pay more to purchase a product or service from a company they trust.
And tracking your performance helps you achieve this. Knowing how well you perform in real-time allows you to respond accordingly and make instant improvements as you see fit. As a result, you have a better idea of increasing brand awareness using performance results and leveraging essential components of brand awareness.
Here's our expert guide on boosting brand awareness by tracking reach, impressions, and engagement.
Understanding Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is nothing new in marketing. The strategy generally aims to familiarize your target audience with your brand's distinguishing traits, qualities, or images alongside your products and services. In return, consumers feel like they know you and can trust what you provide because there's no anonymity to your company.
As a measure of how well your audience knows your brand, a good brand awareness strategy keeps your company top of mind and likely to purchase. So, while the concept isn't to boost sales in the short term (although it can do so in some cases), the marketing tactic is a better fit for nurturing your company's future with consistent and long-term branding.
How to Track Your Brand
Tracking brand awareness can be tricky, but fortunately, it is well within reach. And when conducted properly, there's no better way to lift other marketing initiatives and boost your brand's visibility and grasp in the target market.
To track brand awareness, you must be intimately familiar with the following terms:
Reach
Reach is an essential metric in marketing that measures the number of potential customers you can reach with your message or campaign in your target market. It's a great way to measure brand awareness by calculating how many people will likely see it and then using those results to inform future decisions.
The formula for calculating Reach is Impressions/Frequency = Reach.
Impressions
Impressions are another metric that can help inform the next steps in your campaign by tracking when ad exposures occur with a target consumer. Often synonymous with Ad Views, impressions track when a web user visits your website, clicks on an ad, or views a piece of content or message you deliver, whether it's a display ad or OTT video.
To calculate Impressions, you follow this formula: Average Persons X Number of Spots = Impressions.
Engagement
Engagement rates measure visitors' activity and interaction level on your ads, website, social media, or content. This metric aims to gauge how engaged your audience is with your content to see how well consumers connect with your brand. These are the Likes, Comments, Shares, and Mentions on social media. And the higher your Engagement Rate, the higher your potential reach will be.
There are several formulas for calculating Engagement Rate. It requires more nuance to calculate, as many tracking methods follow particular campaign goals. However, some of the more popular formulas include the following:
- Total Engagements Per Post/Reach Per Post X 100 = ERR
- Total ERR / Total Posts = Average ERR
- Total Engagements on A Post/Total Followers X 100 = ER Post
Improving Your Brand Awareness
Brand awareness campaigns focus on your core values and company instead of specific products or deals. By lifting your brand's 'awareness' and 'perception' among the public, you positively position your brand to encourage ideal customers to seek more information about your products and deals in response.
These campaigns can go on year-round, as branding generally takes time to build and strengthen. It is not a marketing method specific to one or two channels. To maximize your results, it's best to leverage multiple mediums — like content sponsorships, display ads, email, print, or traditional ads like TV and radio —to increase visibility and awareness.
Partner with McClatchy
For the best results in improving brand awareness, you need a media partner who is passionate about getting results and specializes in every area of brand awareness. The marketing method can be highly complex and requires considerable time and patience. McClatchy can help!
With our extensive audience reach, which companies get access to, you can get your brand in front of more of your target audience quicker. We have a prominent presence in dozens of local markets spread throughout the U.S., extending well beyond the limits of their local areas. In addition to local trust and reach, McClatchy has a nationally-recognized online reach that appeals to more than 75 million online users, with more than 10 million monthly video views and seven million (and counting!) social media followers.
Reach out to our experts to discuss your marketing goals, so we can start building, tracking, and improving your brand awareness among the right people.
