Brand awareness isn’t just about whether people know your name—it’s about whether they care about your brand. A brand can become a household name overnight for all the wrong reasons, and then be forgotten by the next news cycle or worse, stuck with a bad reputation. The goal of your brand strategy shouldn’t be to just go viral. Instead, the focus should be on making the right kind of impression, and building a meaningful connection with your target audience.
Metrics are critical to track this progress, but they don’t tell the full story. A comprehensive brand strategy relies on more than just data points. Brands that chase empty numbers risk irrelevance, while those that balance data with cultural resonance build staying power. At the end of the day, you can’t track brand awareness without considering brand perception—and there should be more to both than plugging numbers into spreadsheets.
Why Measuring Brand Awareness Is Harder Than It Looks
There’s a major difference between recognition and resonance. Brand recognition means that an individual knows your brand’s name or associates your logo with your brand. This is typically a very surface-level interaction. Brand resonance refers to a deeper relationship between consumer and brand. Over time, the brand comes to resonate with the consumer in some meaningful way. For example, the consumer might identify with the brand’s core values of sustainability and empowerment, use their products on a daily basis, or feel like they’re a member of a shared community of like-minded consumers.
Traditional methods of measuring brand awareness and recognition rely on vanity metrics such as impressions, mentions, and follower counts. Vanity metrics are all about quantity over quality. While they might tell you how many times a social media post or ad has been seen, they don’t tell you anything about how that piece of content was perceived or the kind of impression it made. Chasing empty buzz can create a lot of noise, but it doesn’t automatically translate into results. A brand strategy based on shallow metrics is unlikely to promote brand resonance, customer loyalty, and meaningful engagement.
The Metrics Side: How to Measure Brand Awareness with Data
When used thoughtfully, metrics do bring something to the table. A well-rounded brand strategy is built on the understanding that metrics are only one part of the story. Pairing metrics with additional methods of analysis and more holistic tools makes all the difference. These are the most popular metrics used to track brand awareness:
Social Media Metrics
Impressions capture how many times a piece of content pops up on a screen, while reach measures how many unique users see that piece of content. It’s important to use these metrics together. An ad could show up seven times for the same user. This would count as seven impressions, but one reach. Looking at impressions alone can overestimate how many people are actually seeing your content. Share of voice is another key metric that focuses on how your brand awareness on a particular platform compares to your competitors. Measuring share of voice allows you to determine how your brand strategy is working across different media channels, and where there could be room for improvement.
Analyzing engagement is another essential aspect of tracking the impact of your social media. Monitoring comments, likes, and shares can provide insight into how people feel about your posts and your brand. Keep an eye on growth in your follower count and engagement rate over time. Trends up or down in both can be compared to different social media campaigns and strategies to see what kind of content is received positively by your target audience.
Website & Search Data
Metrics aren’t just for seeing how many views you’re getting on Instagram or Tiktok. It’s also crucial to get an idea of who’s visiting your website and how they are interacting with it. Branded search volume lets you know how often users are searching for your brand specifically online. Trends in this metric can help you visualize shifting interest in your brand and specific attributes, such as new products or key services. Tracking brand search volume over time can indicate how certain marketing campaigns or media strategies are impacting brand awareness and audience growth.
It can also be beneficial to monitor where website traffic is coming from. Direct traffic is a metric that measures how many website visitors reach your site by typing in the address and seeking it out directly. Referral traffic, on the other hand, captures all of the visitors who reach your site by clicking a link from another source. Common sources include social media posts, partner websites, product roundups, and blogs.
Media Coverage & Mentions
Tracking media coverage involves measuring every instance in which your brand’s name or products appear in relevant outlets. This generally includes social media, blogs, websites, video clips, newspapers, and magazines. When analyzing mentions, it’s essential to consider both volume and sentiment. Volume is the number of mentions you get, while sentiment goes deeper—looking at the tone and perception of those mentions. The goal of sentiment analysis is to determine whether your brand is mentioned in a positive, negative, or neutral light. This provides insight into how consumers may feel towards your brand and products or services when they encounter the mention.
Surveys & Recall Studies
Surveys can be a useful tool when measuring brand awareness in your target demographic, or in other consumer groups that your brand hopes to reach. Brand recall surveys are a time-tested strategy for determining brand awareness. These surveys ask participants to name the top brands that come to mind in a specific industry or product space, or to recall which brand was linked to a certain type of marketing campaign. These kinds of questions let you know how recognizable your brand is in your industry, and how memorable your marketing efforts are.
A net promoter score or NPS is a measure of how likely a customer is to recommend your brand, products, or company to others. Higher scores indicate a greater likelihood that the customer is satisfied with their experience with your brand and would recommend it to a friend, colleague, or family member. NPS is a good indicator of customer loyalty and brand perception on an individual scale.
The Soul Side: Measuring Resonance and Reputation
When it comes to capturing the quantitative side of brand awareness, there are plenty of metrics to choose from. Diving into the qualitative side is much less straightforward. As a result, it’s easy to miss out on measuring factors such as resonance and reputation. These more holistic measures are essential for gaining a deeper understanding of the consumer/brand relationship, and the emotional connection your customers develop with your brand.
Cultural Relevance
Brands that invest in cultural relevance are tapped into the values and interests of 21st Century consumers—especially the ones in their target audience. Your brand should be part of conversations that matter most to your customers. Your brand doesn’t have to jump on every bandwagon and trending topic. Instead, you should tune into the identity and needs of your specific customers, and pay attention to when issues relevant to them arise so that you’re prepared to thoughtfully respond—solidifying your place in a shared community.
Emotional Connection
The true goal of brand awareness is for customers to not just recognize your name or logo, but to feel something positive when they do so. You want people to be invested in your brand, not just aware of its existence. Social listening is a strategy that relies on monitoring online conversations about your brand, your products or services, and your place in your specific industry. Social listening aims to get a grasp on how people who post about and discuss your brand feel about your company and products, including what they like and what improvements they think could be made. These insights can help you determine how to adjust your brand strategy moving forward to be more in line with your customer base.
Alignment with Values
Customers are more likely to have a positive perception of your brand and build a lasting relationship with your company if you have shared values. Customers who are proud to associate with your brand are loyal customers. Ensuring you have clearly defined, cohesive brand values and that they come through in your social media and marketing efforts is vital to promoting brand resonance. Any influencer or brand partnerships and ad campaigns should reinforce these values and maintain authenticity. The people and companies you choose to feature in your content should share your brand values.
Putting It Together: A Balanced Brand Awareness Strategy
Metrics mean nothing without context. The most successful brand awareness strategies combine quantitative data with qualitative insights. This is the best way to not only see how many conversations your brand shows up in, but what is being said and who is saying it. Don’t just measure who knows you—measure how well they know you, and how they feel about your brand. As you finetune your brand strategy, aim for consistency across channels: social, search, PR, and community. Creating a cohesive, recognizable identity on all of your platforms will only boost brand awareness and customer loyalty.
How LaRue Measures Brand Awareness Differently
LaRue’s approach to measuring brand awareness offers the best of both worlds, with a focus on quantitative and qualitative data. Numbers and meaning both have a place in our approach. We offer both data-driven frameworks that prove ROI and storytelling that ensures brands build loyalty, not just recognition. We guide clients towards cultural relevance, not empty metrics.
Learning how to measure brand awareness effectively means redefining it. Millions of views don’t mean nearly as much if they’re not getting the right point across or reaching the right people. A brand can go viral without ever making the right kind of impression. The real win isn’t thousands of mentions—it’s meaningful mindshare.
With LaRue’s balance of strategy and soul, brands can grow awareness that actually matters. Contact us to find out more.
