How can you measure your brand engagement and awareness over time?

Strong brand awareness underpins business success today. If your brand is among the first to come to mind for a consumer looking at a particular product, service or sector then you will have a significant competitive advantage over others. Key to understanding the brand awareness that your business has built is being able to measure it over time. These five key metrics will help you to get more of an understanding of what you’re achieving with brand engagement and awareness.

Social engagement

Social media is the modern equivalent of word of mouth and a great barometer of brand engagement. Establish what you’re going to measure – volume of @mentions, number of comments, use of a hashtag you’ve created etc – and then take regular “measurements” so that you have a picture of how much engagement your brand is getting as the weeks and months go on. There are many tools available to help you monitor social engagement, from the analytics within each social platform to third party tools such as Hootsuite.

Email subscribers

The number of people subscribing to your email database will be a good indication of how interested consumers are in your brand – and whether that interest is growing. Tools such as CommuniGator Mail will give you opportunities to manage your email subscribers and to monitor important email statistics, such as unsubscribers and email open rates.

Website traffic

Using Google Analytics you’ll be able to monitor key metrics relating to how many visitors your site is getting. The more visitors you have, the more awareness your brand is likely to be generating with potential customers. Google Analytics will also show you how people are coming to your site, for example whether they are arriving via an online search or whether they have landed on it after inputting the exact URL. You’ll also be able to monitor where visitors are coming from to see locations where your brand awareness is growing.

Branded search terms

One of the simplest ways to measure engagement is using branded search terms, which could be anything, from product names through to your business name. Using a tool like Google Trends you will be able to start monitoring how the search terms that relate to your business are being used – and how frequently they are appearing. The more searches you see, the more your brand awareness is building. You can use tools like Mention to monitor your brand name across a wide range of sources, from online search to social media, all in one place.

High quality backlinks

When another website links back to yours it’s often a positive sign of increasing brand engagement. However, not all backlinks are high quality so, as well as monitoring the volume of backlinks you’re getting as a way of measuring brand awareness, it’s also a good idea to use a tool like Ahrefs to see what kind of websites these are coming from. For example, a backlink from a high profile and well established website will be a much more high quality backlink.

Brand awareness has a crucial role to play in successful brand building and establishing key metrics to use to monitor engagement over time is essential. Get in touch with Iconic Digital today on 020 7100 0726 to find out how we can help you to increase your online brand engagement over time.