Building brand awareness is one of the key benefits of content marketing, but it’s notoriously difficult to measure. Until now.

Content marketing is a long-term solution through which a business establishes a relationship with and earns the trust of target customers. It’s called building brand awareness. Drawing the public’s attention to — and heightening their knowledge of — your business ultimately generates leads that turn into sales, after all, which is the end marketing objective.

Let’s be honest: This doesn’t happen overnight. And it’s often difficult to quantify (as opposed to a vanity metric, such as website visits). But 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. And, more specifically, there are ways to measure brand awareness.

4 metrics that indicate you’re building brand awareness

1) Social media reach

The reach of your social content has a direct impact on your brand awareness. The larger the reach, the larger the potential audience.

Twitter originally had an internal tool that tracked how many times a tweet had been shared, but stopped supporting this data back in 2015. So where do you go to track your social media reach?

Sharedcount is a free online tool that allows you to track the number of times a piece of content has been shared on social media, including Facebook, LinkedIn and Google. Sharedcount is an easy way to get basic information about your social reach, so you can spend less time tracking tweets and more time producing your content.

2) Brand mentions

There’s a great deal of value to be gained from monitoring discussions about your brand online. Tracking brand mentions can lead to honest feedback and objective insight from potential leads.

There are several options you can use to track brand mentions. We prefer the ease of Google Alerts, which allows you to easily set up a custom alert, or Hootsuite, where you can track brand mentions, as well as specific keywords and phrases, across all of your social media feeds.

3) Blog shares

By adding a share bar to your blog posts, you make it easy for readers to share your blog content on social networks, spreading awareness about your content and your brand through the amplifying effect of social media.

These share bars are easy to set up and even easier to monitor. By measuring your average number of shares per blog, you can track what content your users are drawn to and what pieces fall flat.

4) Search volume

One of the main sources of traffic for most websites is through simple searches. If people are searching for your company or products, that’s a pretty solid indication that they are aware of your brand.

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.

Content marketing takes time, but there are hints along the way that your efforts are working. 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.

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