Brand Awareness Research: 5 Business Benefits

February 23, 2012

brand awareness research

Last week, I wrote a blog post explaining and sharing six examples of commonly used types of B2B brand awareness survey questions.

 

 

 

 

This week, I will share five business benefits of tracking brand awareness and why you should consider them when determining whether or not to start a brand awareness research initiative.

 

 

 

 

 

1.) Brand awareness research enables your company to quantify the aggregate impact of its awareness marketing initiatives. Often times, marketing awareness program impact is gauged in terms of the total number of companies or individuals touched by the program(s), but these are not realistic metrics for evaluating these programs.

The goals of these types of programs are to build brand awareness within a targeted group of potential customers and eventually convert this awareness into sales down the road. Therefore, measuring the number of individuals or companies that a campaign touches is not a fair measure of the reach of a campaign because many of the individuals or companies touched could be irrelevant.

That’s why you need to limit the reach measurement to just the companies who qualify as potential customers. An effective medium for measuring this impact is a periodic brand awareness survey that collects vertical identifier information, allowing you to track the impact of marketing awareness campaigns across — and within — verticals over time. However, since these types of studies rely on benchmark comparisons, their potential usages must be thought out in advance to ensure that the data will be usable for future analyses.

 

2.) Brand awareness research trends serve as a great indicator of brand health. Companies can utilize the changes in non-customer brand perception as a gauge of the brand’s reputation amongst new customers. This information can be combined with data from customer experience tracking studies to acquire a good overall picture of brand perception amongst customers and non-customers.

By monitoring these trends over time, a company can easily identify potential problems developing with its brand reputation and also determine whether it is investing enough in its brand awareness and brand building programs to meet the goals it set out for with these initiatives.

3.) Brand awareness research also exposes the gaps in a marketing campaign’s reach and allows a team to strategically plan to make-up for holes in coverage in subsequent awareness marketing campaigns. This is important because it ensures that your marketing budget is being spent in areas with highest return to expenditure ratios.

However, to be used in this manner, it is critical to track several important respondent qualifier data points like company size, industry demographics, geographic location, and respondent persona information (i.e. title, experience). Tracking this information allows a company to slice and dice the results of the study into many different angles and gives it the best glimpse of the market. The information learned can be insightful in determining:

    • What mix of marketing channels to utilize for prospect education
    • Which ad campaigns to continue or retire
    • How to realign brand building investments by geography, vertical or other important demographics

4.) Similarly, knowing which customer segments are most likely already aware of your brand and/or products due to the concentration of awareness in a certain customer segment also helps determine the most efficient deployment of sales resources to leverage target buyer awareness. This will drive sales conversion ratios for your company, as the sales team will be focusing on the sales opportunities that are already there for the taking and not wasting too many resources on trying to sell to unaware customers that have not yet reached the consideration phase of the buying process.

5.) Brand awareness and perception research provide useful competitive intelligence on key competitors in the marketplace that can be used to identify areas where you company is more or less branded than its competitors. This can be valuable information in determining how much a company should invest in brand building to keep pace with competitors. It also helps identify where messaging seems to be reaching customers better than key competitor marketing awareness campaigns.

 

Brand awareness research provides great information and insight that allows you to gauge the success of your company’s awareness marketing initiatives and plan out its sales and marketing strategies.

 

The quality and depth of the insight that a brand awareness study provides is highly dependent upon the quality of the research design. So it is important to invest the time and money in designing an effective research instrument to collect this data. I highly recommend reading my earlier blog post in this series on the eight research and design factors to consider when planning out a brand awareness research project.

 

However, brand awareness research is expensive and is not for every company. Company’s should measure the costs and benefits before investing in a brand awareness research initiative. Additionally, they should also evaluate the alternative methods of monitoring brand awareness. Some of the most common methods will be covered in next week’s post.

Marketing Manager, Pricing Strategy

<strong>Brandon Hickie</strong> is Marketing Manager, Pricing Strategy at <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/">LinkedIn</a>. He previously worked at OpenView as Marketing Insights Manager. Prior to OpenView Brandon was an Associate in the competition practice at Charles River Associates where he focused on merger strategy, merger regulatory review, and antitrust litigation.