How to Build Brand Awareness Through Brand Tracking

Brand building, brand tracking, brand awareness.

These terms are thrown around in board meetings and marketing round-ups, but often without any solid insights to back them up.

Brand awareness is the jumping-off point for all interactions with your brand. It’s the key to building an army of brand advocates who can support you in building future demand.

The catch? Brand awareness is one of the toughest benchmarks to measure effectively.

But not to worry. You’re going to come away from this article knowing how to measure brand awareness and what these insights can do for your business, with a little help from your friends here at Tracksuit!

Brand awareness: The notoriously elusive marketing metric

Management consultant Peter Drucker has a saying that we’re big fans of here at Tracksuit: What gets measured, gets managed.

With this in mind, it’s not hard to see why performance-driven marketing activities like lead generation and paid ads are so addictive. We have a bunch of enticing metrics and reports at our disposal to help us with that measuring and managing.

But when it comes to brand awareness, marketers are left pretty much in the dark.

How do you track brand awareness? What does brand awareness look like? Ask a dozen marketers and brand managers, and you’ll get a dozen different answers.

The problem is there’s no single, accessible metric that marketers can rely on to demonstrate brand awareness – and this makes brand tracking a tough undertaking.

Take the number of impressions on a social media campaign. Lots of impressions equals growing brand recall, right? Not necessarily. Impressions don’t guarantee that a person has retained any information about your brand – only that they stopped scrolling for long enough for one to register.

To make things worse, brand awareness in one channel doesn’t always transfer to another. A person might recognize your logo when it shows up on a billboard, but this doesn’t mean they’re going to seek out your brand when need recognition strikes.

In sum, tracking brand awareness in isolation has limited value to your business. Unless you can link brand awareness with consideration and purchasing intent, you have no idea whether your brand awareness strategy is bearing fruit.

This is why you need an innovative brand health tracking solution that puts a full spectrum of brand growth metrics at your fingertips.

Why measuring brand awareness is important

1. Brand awareness helps to build a case for brand marketing

We get it. Brand marketing can feel like the mythical X factor – essential for success, but impossible to pin down. Unlike conversions or click-through rates, there are no flashy graphs on Google Analytics or social media that you bust out in those dreaded quarterly meetings.

By measuring brand awareness, you can ensure that brand marketing stays relevant and stave off skepticism in the boardroom. Providing timely, relevant insights about how brand recognition is developing turns brand-building from an obscure art form into science.

2. It helps you create achievable growth OKRs

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) isn’t just a fancy buzzword. Effective goal-setting is essential to move your business forward and keep everyone in your organization on the same page.

As we said at the start of this blog, you can’t manage something effectively unless you can measure it (sorry not sorry for being a broken record!) For brand awareness to form part of your OKR framework – and it definitely should – you need to build a good picture of how consumers are reacting to your brand-building efforts.

3. It helps inform campaign ideation and creation

When brand awareness is intangible, it’s less likely to be on your marketing team’s radar. After all, what’s the point of planning a campaign around something you can’t even measure?

This can kick off a vicious cycle where brand awareness becomes less of a focus in brainstorming sessions. In the long run, this limits your ability to build future demand and store up your brand against loyalty shocks, such as recessions and (ahem) global pandemics.

When brand awareness is tangible and measurable, you can start driving more effective brand marketing by fostering brand familiarity and meaningful touchpoints with your audience.

4. Brand awareness informs your overall marketing strategy

A consumer buying your product without being aware of your brand is like trying to run a marathon before you can manage 5km. In other words, it’s just not going to happen. 

Because if your target customer hasn’t heard of you, why are they going to buy from you?

Someone choosing your brand over competitors is rarely an accident. It’s the result of endless brand positioning campaigns designed to nurture people through consideration to usage – to the point where customers don’t want to buy from anyone else except for you.

When increasing brand awareness forms the foundation of your marketing strategy, you know exactly how your brand is being perceived – and whether your efforts are paying off.

Knowing what your brand is out to accomplish and how this can be maintained and evolved over time is the secret sauce of any iconic, successful brand.  Here's everything you need to know about brand management

Is there a way to measure brand awareness without spending tons of money?

There’s one word that sums up traditional brand tracking methods: Expensive. Endless focus groups and cumbersome market research tactics are the domain of corporations with money to burn – not startups and SMEs who need to do a lot with a little.

So, short of personally canvassing thousands of people to play a game of 20 questions about your brand, are there any reliable (and affordable) ways of measuring brand awareness?

Fortunately, the latest generation of SaaS has introduced an influx of brand tracking solutions that transform these high-level insights into intuitive, easy-to-interpret dashboards. But the likes of Qualtrics and Latana are still inaccessible to your average joe, thanks to enterprise-level pricing that keeps brand tracking away from emerging brands.

This is the ultimate puzzle for newcomers. Brand health tracking is like a fine wine; the longer it ages, and more valuable it becomes. Measuring (and increasing) brand awareness from day one leaves you better positioned to justify your brand-building efforts to the C-suite upstairs. Yet all too often, brand tracking isn’t available to those who need it.

There’s a massive gap in the market for an always-on brand tracking solution that captures all the vital signs needed to measure your brand-building efforts at a perspective and price point that’s accessible for smaller businesses.

That’s also why Tracksuit exists. 

Always-on, radically affordable brand tracking

But what is brand health tracking? In essence, it’s a composite of all the ways that consumers are thinking about your brand. In other words, it measures how your brand is performing according to how you want your solution to be perceived.

At Tracksuit, we live for providing businesses with real-time, actionable brand insights that cut out the jargon and vanity metrics. Rather than focusing on short-term (and sometimes meaningless) performance goals, Tracksuit is all about adding value to your long-term brand-building efforts.

How? Our approach to brand tracking relies on a unique benchmarking system that’s custom-tailored to your business’s competitors and target audience, meaning you can see how your brand is really performing in all the ways that matter.

Our intuitive metrics map how successful you are at building future demand across the entire customer journey: Awareness, Consideration, Investigation, Preference, and Usage. Using our best-in-class market research methodology, we create insightful questions that unlock what your target audience thinks and feels about your brand.

With these powerful metrics, it’s no longer a challenge for your marketing team to pitch the value of brand-building to the higher-ups. The question of ‘How is my brand tracking over time?’ is no longer hypothetical – the evidence is right there at your fingertips. 

We all know that brand awareness is the bedrock of any iconic brand. Yet it’s often the squeaky wheel of even the best-resourced marketing strategies. In many cases, struggling to manage and measure brand awareness isn’t down to a lack of skill, it’s a lack of intelligent brand health tracking solutions accessible to emerging brands.

This is why businesses shouldn’t just rely on generic brand tracking metrics pulled from social or web analytics. With the power of Tracksuit brand tracking, you’ll know exactly where your brand is headed, all thanks to powerful brand-centric insights that will transform your (and the C-suite’s) understanding of ROI.

Better brand building, here we come!