Brand awareness is crucial for the success and longevity of any business. Running brand awareness advertising campaigns is a common strategy to achieve this goal. However, it can be challenging to determine the actual impact of these campaigns. While metrics like reach and frequency provide some insights into ad performance, they don't necessarily indicate if the brand message was effectively conveyed or if it influenced consumer behavior. To overcome this challenge, advertisers can utilize brand surveys to gauge the impact of their brand awareness campaigns. In this article, we will explore three methods that advertisers can use to better understand the effectiveness of their brand awareness efforts.
Focus Groups & Panels:
One of the oldest and most reliable methods of studying brand awareness is through focus groups and consumer panels. By running an ad campaign in a specific market and then gathering a group of participants for feedback, advertisers can gain valuable insights into the impact of their marketing efforts. While factors like cost and time may make focus groups or panels challenging to organize, they can provide direct consumer feedback on the ads they have seen and the overall effectiveness of the campaign. This qualitative approach allows advertisers to delve deeper into consumer perceptions and identify areas for improvement.
Paid Social Media Brand Lift Surveys:
Social media platforms like Meta (formerly Facebook) offer advertisers the opportunity to conduct brand lift surveys, which can provide valuable insights into the impact of their brand awareness campaigns. These surveys are typically conducted through an experimental method. A pool of participants is divided into groups, with one group exposed to the ad campaign and another serving as a control group. By comparing the responses and behaviors of these groups, advertisers can assess the lift in brand awareness and other key metrics. Paid social media brand lift surveys are a cost-effective way to gather direct consumer feedback and measure the effectiveness of brand campaigns.
Third-Party Digital Brand Lift Studies:
In addition to social media platforms, advertisers can also consider conducting brand lift studies through third-party providers or programmatic demand-side platforms (DSPs). These studies often require a significant number of impressions and a considerable budget to achieve statistical significance. However, they offer in-depth insights into brand metrics such as awareness, perception, favorability, and more. By leveraging the expertise of third-party research firms or advanced programmatic tools, advertisers can obtain objective data on the impact of their brand awareness campaigns. Statistical significance is crucial in these studies to ensure accurate and reliable results.
These methods are just a few examples of how advertisers can gain a better understanding of the impact of their brand awareness campaigns. By utilizing brand surveys, businesses can move beyond surface-level metrics and delve into consumer perceptions, attitudes, and actions. Armed with this knowledge, advertisers can make informed decisions to optimize their marketing strategies and improve brand awareness. It's essential to remember that each method has its own advantages and considerations, such as cost, sample size, and statistical significance. Advertisers should choose the approach that aligns with their specific goals and resources and seek alternatives if these are too cost prohibitive.
For example, if you don't have enough ad budget to conduct a focus group or a brand lift study, you can explore some of the following alternatives:
Website Analytics & User Behavior Tracking:
Although this method won't provide information about brand lift, you can still rely on good old Google Analytics and other tracking pixels to assess user behavior as a result of brand campaigns. Do you see a lift in website traffic immediately following your brand campaigns? Is a certain demographic or subsection of the website performing differently? Are you seeing an increase in soft conversions such as time on site goals, scroll depth goals, or pages/session goals? This type of analysis can help provide at least some level of insight for budget-strapped brand advertisers.
Social Media Listening & Sentiment Analysis:
Social media platforms provide a wealth of user-generated content that can be harnessed to evaluate brand awareness. Advertisers can leverage social media listening tools to monitor brand mentions, sentiment, and consumer conversations related to their campaigns. By analyzing the sentiment analysis and understanding the tone and perception surrounding the brand, advertisers can gauge the impact of their campaigns on social media and make informed decisions for future strategies.
Search Engine & Keyword Trends:
Free tools like Google Trends & Google Keyword Planner can help give insight into how certain search topics are trending over time. Do you see an increase in searches around your brand in a given time period? That may indicate an increase in brand awareness and a lift in user behavior around your brand.
Level Up Your Brand Measurement
Assessing the impact of brand campaigns is crucial for advertisers to understand the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. While traditional methods like focus groups and advanced digital methods like paid social media brand lift surveys and third-party digital brand lift studies can provide very valuable insights, budget constraints may necessitate alternative approaches such as website analytics, social media listening, and keyword trend analysis. By employing these methods, advertisers can gain a better understanding of the impact of their brand campaigns, optimize their strategies, and ultimately improve brand awareness.