Here’s how to quantify the impact of content marketing on brand awareness, a notoriously difficult benefit to measure.

A successful content marketing strategy strengthens the relationship between brands and their target audiences. And brand awareness is a key component to any successful content marketing strategy. Ultimately, the more aware audiences are of your brand, the more likely they are to buy your products or services.

To properly measure the impact of your content marketing, you must start at the beginning, with the overall goals for your content marketing strategy. What kind of content are you creating? Why are you creating this content? How will this increase sales or grow your business?

A lot of our customers include increasing brand awareness among their content strategy goals. But this is a very difficult objective to quantify. How can you measure how familiar people are with your brand?

Here are four metrics we recommend for tracking the impact of content marketing on brand awareness.

4 metrics to measure the impact of content marketing on brand awareness.

1. Social media reach

Tracking the reach of your social media content is a good gauge of the impact it’s having on your brand awareness. Companies can waste a lot of time trying to track down information on various social media accounts; don’t fall into this trap.

Use tools, like Shared Count, that show how many times a piece of content has been shared on social media. Shared Count accurately tracks the social reach of your content on the most popular social media sites — including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn — to easily keep track of your social reach. In turn, you can discover the impact your social reach is having on your brand awareness.

2. Brand mentions

Not to state the obvious, but if people are talking about your brand online, it’s safe to assume they are aware of you. There’s a great deal of value in knowing what customers are saying about your company and your products/services. Monitoring brand mentions online can provide honest feedback and objective insight from current and potential customers.

There are several tools to help you track brand mentions online. Here at Fronetics, we prefer the ease of Google Alerts, which allows you to set up custom alerts when your brand is mentioned online. We also use Hootsuite, where you can track brand mentions, as well as keywords and phrases, across all of your social media platforms.

3. Media mentions

Media mentions differ from brand mentions in their origin. Media mentions come directly from publishers, instead of customers. These mentions include any media coverage — TV, print, social media, interviews — that include your brand. Remember, if publishers are talking about your brand online as a result of the content you’re creating, it’s impacting your brand awareness.

And let’s not forget about linkless mentions. As Google and other search engines continue to update their algorithms, it’s crucial to update your monitoring practices. Linkless backlinks are becoming increasingly popular and can have a huge impact on your brand awareness (and SEO!).

4. Branded searches

Knowing how many people are searching for your specific brand tells you a lot about how well known your brand is. Using online tools, such as Google Adwords or Moz, you can track the searches for your products, blogs, social media platforms, and any other variation that you find useful. These tools are free, easy to use, and perfect for determining if your company is popping up when customers are searching.

Using these tools to measure brand awareness offers clues that customers are finding your company in their search efforts. If the needle is not moving in a positive direction, always adjust your strategy to until you find what works for your business.

Drawing the public’s attention to — and heightening their knowledge of — your business ultimately generates leads. And some of those leads will turn into sales. But, let’s be honest: this doesn’t happen overnight. And it’s often difficult to quantify.

That’s not a reason to throw in the towel. There are ways to measure the work that you’re putting into your content marketing program. Using these metrics, you can start tracking the impact of content marketing on brand awareness.

Related posts:

• Want More Leads? Focus on Brand Awareness.
• 3 Tools for Measuring Your Content Marketing ROI
• Measure Social Media Success in Terms of Potential, not Dollar Amount