by Fronetics | May 23, 2019 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing
Measuring brand awareness is a notoriously difficult task. Here are our favorite tools to help you refine your efforts.
Highlights:
- Tools for measuring brand awareness fall into two categories: social analytics tools and social mention tools.
- Our top 3 social analytics tools: Qualtrics, Ahrefs, and Brandwatch.
- Our top 3 social mentions tools: Netvibes, Mention, and Buffer Reply.
We often hear from our clients that measuring brand awareness is one of the slipperiest tasks when it comes to digital marketing. It’s a notoriously difficult marketing element to track, and not having an accurate picture can also make it difficult to evaluate the success of your overall digital marketing efforts, as well as to calculate ROI.
Luckily, there are tools that can help. Broadly, these tools for measuring brand awareness fall into two categories: social analytics tools and social mention tools.
- Social analytics tools are designed to help you determine the times your actions get the most engagement, as well as more detailed user demographics and interactions with your brand.
- Social mention tools track overall mentions for your brand, letting you see everywhere your brand has been mentioned and helping you determine which platforms are performing best for your content.
Here are our top three favorite tools in each category for measuring brand awareness.
Top 3 social analytics tools for measuring brand awareness
1) Qualtrics
Qualtrics boasts that it is “software to help turn customers into fanatics, products into obsessions, employees into ambassadors, and brands into religions.” While supply chain companies will likely raise an eyebrow at such lofty claims, this tool really has the potential to perform for B2B customers. Ideal for complex supply chain business, Qualtrics offers a variety of tools that measure buyer experience, brand experience, product experience, and employee experience.
2) Ahrefs
Ahrefs isn’t exactly a new kid on the block when it comes to measuring brand awareness. The company started in 2011, and has continued to update and add new features regularly, keeping it on the cutting edge of SEO tools. It’s one of the best backlink analysis tools available. Perfect for just about any business, the platform notably helps you analyze why your competitors are ranking in particular areas and what you can do to outrank them.
3) Brandwatch
Some of the most successful brands in the world have been empowered by Brandwatch, which is arguably the leader in social intelligence. The robust analytics features include insights within millions of online conversations, as well as optimized target influencer and other paid social campaigns. It also boasts its Vizia platform, which shares insights with decision-makers throughout your organization, promoting aligned efforts.
Top 3 social mention tools for measuring brand awareness
1) Netvibes
Netvibes lets you easily monitor all your digital assets, as well as customize them based on the insights it provides. Not only can you follow your social networks for brand mentions, you can create alerts for breaking news or publications on key topics. Additionally, you can gain valuable insights by filtering your mentions by author, date, location, language, company, and even more.
2) Mention
Mention lets you monitor your campaigns anywhere online, and “scour the web, social media, and more for powerful market insights.” The platform offers real-time monitoring, letting you get live updates as you launch a campaign, for example. You can create custom insights, involving everything from social media, forums, blogs, and virtually every bit of the web.
3) Buffer Reply
We’re including Buffer Reply because it’s unusual in its focus. While other tools give you access to all your mentions on the web, Buffer Reply lets you hone in on a specific target client or demographic. The platform shows you everything you need to know about the client you’re talking to, each time they’ve mentioned or interacted with your brand. We recommend using it in conjunction with a broader tool like Google Alerts.
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by Fronetics | Mar 12, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Social Media, Supply Chain
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.
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by Fronetics | Mar 7, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy, Supply Chain
Linkless backlinks, or mentions of your business without a hyperlink to your webpage, are now a more effective way to improve your ranking with search engines.
For years Google has used backlinks to rank webpages. Backlinks are any link on another website that points (or links) back to your website. Unfortunately, search engines began to use backlinks as a bit of a popularity contest: The more you had, the more popular your website became.
Businesses quickly understood the loophole in search engines’ algorithms. They could buy, influence or even create relationships with other industry businesses for the sole benefit of getting links to their websites. It didn’t take long for search engines to catch on.
Google has spent years reworking the way it ranks backlinks and trying to penalize brands that pay for or create free links through unethical relationships. But where does that leave the rest of us that are working to create high-quality content in hopes of increasing our SEO rankings?
Linkless backlinks are the future of SEO rankings
You might be asking yourself what is a linkless backlink? Good question.
Linkless backlinks are mentions of your business or brand without a hyperlink to your webpage. In a keynote speech in September 2017, Gary Illyes, a webmaster trend analyst for Google, said:
“Basically, if you publish high-quality content that is highly cited on the internet — and I’m not talking about just links, but also mentions on social networks and people talking about your branding — then you are doing great.”
It all comes down to mentions of your brand on reputable websites. And I don’t just mean backlinks to your webpage. Other sites’ tweeting about your products or mentioning you on their Facebook News Feed can all lead to increased rankings on Google and other search engines. Sounds easy, right?
How to make linkless backlinks work for you
The principles that help you gain backlinks are still true for gaining linkless backlinks. You want to focus on creating the most accurate, high-quality content you can. Create videos and infographics for your website to add visual appeal. And collaborate with other industry leaders to reach new audiences.
But there are a few other tips you can use to help boost your SEO ranking with linkless backlinks.
3 tips for building a strategy for linkless backlinks
1. Work to increase brand awareness and reputation
The foundation of linkless mentions is reputation building. Search engines are looking for authentic mentions of products and brands in content that helps build authority around an industry topic.
Increase your brand awareness by growing your social media presence, by encouraging followers and loyal customers to write online reviews of your products and services, and by participating in collaborative content marketing.
2. Track brand awareness and mentions
You’re working hard to create content that has a far reach across many platforms. It’s a key step in gaining exposure among potential customers and earning new business. This process is called brand awareness, the extent to which consumers are familiar with your brand. And for linkless backlinks, it’s imperative that you’re tracking all of your brand mentions, not just links.
There are several tools to help you track brand mentions online. Here at Fronetics, we prefer the ease of Google Alerts, which sends you a message when someone mentions your brand online. We also use Hootsuite, with which you can track brand mentions, as well as keywords and phrases, across all of your social media platforms.
3. Stay on top of negative mentions
Blog comment sections and social media channels offer an open avenue for customers to discuss their thoughts about your company for all the world to see. And, unfortunately, one negative comment can be infinitely louder than one hundred positive ones. The potential impact it could have on business is scary.
But that doesn’t mean you should delete or ignore every unfavorable brand mention. In fact, companies can use negative online comments as an opportunity to exhibit top-notch customer service and much-appreciated transparency in the way they do business.
Be diligent in monitoring brand mentions and respond quickly to resolve any issues that arise. Responding promptly and effectively to negative feedback online shows your commitment to customer service and transparency.
The art of SEO building is a tough craft to master. As algorithms evolve, it’s important for brands to stay aware of these changes and focus on what they can do to help boost their rankings.
The more buzz around your brand, the better your ranking will be. So make sure you’re utilizing all the different ways to help boost your SEO ranking, including linkless backlinks.
Need more help with SEO? We’ve done the research, so you don’t have to. Have a look.
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