What is Brand Awareness?

Simply put, brand awareness is how familiar your target audience is with your company and what you stand for. It encompasses the overall knowledge they have about you specifically. Despite some confusion, it’s not the same as brand recognition or brand recall.

Brand recognition comes from your audience knowing your company’s cues, including visual triggers like your logo and auditory triggers like your jingle. Brand recall goes one step forward, which is when your consumers can identify you from memory, setting you apart from all the industry competitors.

Essentially, brand awareness is step one on your roadmap to becoming a leading player in the industry.

Why Brand Awareness is More Important Than Ever

In the world of B2B, there are countless brands vying for the attention of potential customers. With so many options, how can you ensure your business stands out from the crowd? The answer lies in the power of your brand. Your brand is more than just a logo or marketing campaign - it’s the sum total of all the experiences and interactions that people have with your company.

By cultivating a strong brand identity and consistently delivering on your promises, you can build loyalty and trust with your audience, even in a crowded market. And when it comes to cultivating that audience, there’s no asset more valuable than your owned audience - the group of people who have already expressed interest in your product. By nurturing these relationships and providing value at every touchpoint, you can turn your owned audience into a powerful force for growth and success.

Take Notion for example, brand awareness is one of their biggest assets. They’ve nurtured relationships with their audience and it’s helped the SaaS company launch successful campaigns and gain the majority of market share as quickly as it has.

Brand awareness isn’t a guessing game, and performance marketing channels are crowded by nature. Your brand can be a multiplier, provided you know the right metrics to track and grow.

So what are the key metrics that empower brands to measure, optimize, and amplify their online presence? Let’s look at exactly which KPIs to set for your campaigns and which metrics are the driving force of your efforts in 2023.

11 Key Brand Awareness Metrics

Given how important it is to keep track of your brand performance through metrics tracking, it’s only fair to know which metrics are key to observe based on your specific set of goals and why.

Here are the 11 most popular metrics, their significance, and what tools you can use to track each of them:

1. Direct traffic

Direct traffic comes from your audience visiting your brand’s website directly by typing in the URL or clicking a saved bookmark. It’s a great directional source of brand measurement since it shows how many people visit your site without being exposed to any external sources.

Popular tools for tracking direct traffic include Google Analytics, Adobe Experience Manager and Moz to track direct traffic and understand the organic reach and effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

1. Referral traffic

Referral traffic is the total number of visitors who come to your website using an external link from another source, such as websites, blogs, or social media. By increasing the number of trusted websites that add the link to your URL, you build trust with the search engine and can reach a more significant segment of your target audience. Google Analytics helps you track referral traffic too.

1. Branded search volume

Branded search volume tracks how many people know your brand and want to learn more. This metric tracks the search volume for your brand name and variations of it to see how familiar and interesting your brand is on the search engine. Google Search Console is a good way to monitor specific keywords like your brand name every month or quarter.

1. Backlinks

Backlinks are important metrics to track because they show how many strong website pages include your URL on their web pages. This metric boosts your visibility and helps rank your website higher on the search engine organically. Measuring this accurately can be tricky though, so a platform like AudiencePlus can help you stay on top of it easily.

1. Audience engagement score

Your audience engagement score goes beyond vanity metrics like views and impressions to see how engaging your content is for your audience on an individual level. This metric is a marker of audience health and is very important to track as part of your pipeline. AudiencePlus is a great software you can use to monitor and boost this score.

1. Social media reach

Social media reach is another directional indicator of your brand awareness. It calculates your brand’s potential visibility to social media users, i.e. how many eyeballs are on your social pages. This includes impressions, followers, and engagement such as likes, comments, and shares. Each social media platform offers built-in analytics to track this, even as SaaS companies are shifting to owned digital real estate.

1. Earned media coverage

All mentions of your brand in online and offline media publications count toward your earned media coverage. This coverage expands your brand awareness to other audience sectors and builds a strong identity for your company. Google Alerts can monitor your brand’s mentions across online media outlets easily.

1. Blog traffic and conversions

Your blog page’s traffic and conversions show how well your audience is engaging with your published content. Tracking conversions like newsletter subscriptions and purchases as a result of this helps you join the dots between content marketing and revenue outcomes. You can use AudiencePlus to monitor this.

1. Share of voice

Share of voice measures the percentage of online discussions and mentions your brand is a part of. Your brand awareness is relative to your competitors in the industry, so boosting this helps you solidify the brand as a leading player in the industry and assess how to improve your market position. BrandMentions offers a free trial to help you monitor your brand’s share of voice online.

1. Customer reviews

Having an online presence allows your consumers to leave genuine feedback and share their opinions with you easily. Customer reviews are vital for every brand because they influence your brand’s perception in the public eye and impact sales in real-time. Positive reviews can be instrumental when trying to expand and attract new potential customers. G2 and Capterra are both popular SaaS review platforms.

1. Brand awareness surveys

Brand awareness surveys are an efficient and organic solution to researching your target audience’s feelings about your products/services online. With the right approach, you can collect a ton of qualitative insights into your brand’s positioning and make adjustments to your strategy to boost brand awareness and loyalty. SurveyMonkey offers a free plan to create and analyze surveys.

How to Set KPIs for Brand Awareness Campaigns

Throughout your brand’s journey, you’ll have many opportunities to create a boom in brand awareness. These campaigns are indispensable to reaching both your short-term and long-term goals.

A big launch, social media partnership, or PR campaign doesn’t come with a cookie-cutter roadmap for success. But setting specific goals and measurable targets helps you align them with your overall marketing goals. This is where KPIs, or key performance indicators, come into play.

To improve your social media reach, your goal could be a percentage increase in your impressions or follower count. The challenge here is to know which metrics to track, how to go about it, and when to analyze your saved data to make the required adjustments. Based on the channels you’re investing in and the milestones you want to cross, review all KPIs quarterly to make data-driven decisions that optimize your campaign.

This cyclical strategy helps you evolve quickly and keep up with the cut-throat competition as you grow your brand awareness. An interesting example to explain this approach is from the former head of marketing at Notion, Camille Ricketts. Her background in journalism and content marketing propelled her to reshape a mega-successful strategy that was fit for Notion’s target audience, using the three C’s of brand awareness—content, clarity, and community.

Here is an actionable five-step framework for determining KPIs relative to wider brand awareness goals for a B2B SaaS company:

1. Define Your Brand Awareness Goals

Every business will have different goals when it comes to brand awareness. What are yours? Are you hoping to become a well-known name within your industry, to drive more direct traffic to your website, to earn more media coverage, or to increase your social media reach? Keep in mind that your goals should align with your company’s overall objectives and should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound).

2. Select Relevant KPIs

For each of your brand awareness goals, select relevant KPIs from your list of 11 key metrics. For instance, if one of your goals is to increase the number of direct visits to your website, the KPI would be “Direct Traffic”. If another goal is to increase your social media presence, the KPI might be “Social Media Reach”.

3. Set Targets for Each KPI

Now that you’ve established your KPIs, it’s time to set targets for each one. These targets should be both challenging and attainable. For instance, if one of your KPIs is “Referral Traffic”, you might set a target to increase referral traffic by 25% in the next quarter.

4. Choose Tools for Tracking KPIs

For each KPI, select the best tool from your list to track that specific metric. For example, Google Analytics might be the best tool for tracking direct traffic and referral traffic, while Google Alerts can help track earned media coverage.

5. Analyze and Optimize

Regularly review your KPIs to see if you are on track to reach your targets. If not, analyze why this might be and optimize your strategies accordingly. For instance, if you’re not getting the direct traffic you aimed for, consider implementing a SEO strategy or conducting a usability test to make your website more user-friendly.

Here is a visual template for what this could look like for your business.

This framework will provide you with an actionable plan for increasing brand awareness for your B2B SaaS company. By continuously monitoring your KPIs and adjusting your strategies, you’ll be able to make data-driven decisions that align with your overall business goals.

How to Tell a Story with Your Key Metrics

Brand awareness metrics are important to track because you want to build a strong brand identity. But these metrics can also fit perfectly into your wider marketing efforts to carve out a value-driven strategy that’s customized for you.

For example, a new product launch is way more likely to succeed if you already know your customers’ thoughts on your existing products and the improvements they wish they had access to. Using brand awareness solutions like reviews and surveys, you can learn these insights and put them to use in your marketing campaigns to shoot up sales and loyalty points.

Brand awareness metrics like traffic and customer reviews also work hand-in-hand with conversion metrics like signups and purchases to give you a comprehensive picture of your consumers’ needs. With this almost birds-eye view of your campaigns, you immediately know what changes to make to further boost your revenue and be well on your way to capturing the market.

So, yes, every company is becoming a media company. But this is easier said than done. Measuring and optimizing the impact of content on your pipeline and revenue goes deeper than possible with standard CMS platforms.

AudiencePlus is the industry’s first owned media software for marketers and thought leaders who want to build, engage, and monetize an owned audience. Our goal? Overcome the algorithmic chase and carve out a media company that doesn’t depend on paid ads or third-party data sources.

It’s time to break through the noise and leverage the power of the media so your audience loves you as much as you love them. Save your spot on the AudiencePlus Owned Media platform, go here to learn more!

JK Sparks | About the Author

Head of Marketing, AudiencePlus

JK is allergic to the words “guru, ninja, and hack” when used to describe anything marketing related. Instead of chasing the latest “growth hack,” he’s focused on building sustainable and predictable levers that fuel long term success. By implementing this approach over the last decade, JK has helped organizations in both bootstrapped and well-funded environments scale from <$100K to more than $100M in revenue. You can follow him here.