4 Metrics to Measure the Impact of Content Marketing on Brand Awareness

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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Infographic: 4 Ways to Measure Brand Awareness

by Fronetics | Mar 1, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Strategy, Supply Chain

Brand awareness is key in optimizing your content marketing efforts but can be challenging to quantify. Here are four metrics to help you measure brand awareness.

Brand awareness is the extent to which potential customers recognize a brand and associate it with specific products and services. Making the public aware of your company is a long-term goal of content marketing. Through social media, blogs, and other platforms, content marketing works to create brand awareness and strengthen trust with target customers. 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.

But it has been notoriously difficult to quantify how effective your content marketing strategy is (and, more specifically, how far your brand awareness reaches). Unlike vanity metrics, which are easy to quantify, measuring brand awareness takes more than just a simple calculation. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take the time to measure brand awareness.

Understanding the value of brand awareness gives companies insight into how well their content marketing strategy is working to generate leads and drive sales. As marketing ROI guru Jim Lenskold writes:

“The value of brand awareness is the equivalent of half of a $100 bill. Unless you know where to find the other half, there really is no value. Brand awareness does not have a financial value on its own but is part of the collective effort necessary for marketing to drive incremental sales.”

Brand awareness is key to reaching and influencing potential customers. Here are some metrics to help your measure your brand awareness.

4 ways to measure brand awareness

(Made with Canva)

Ultimately, the more aware audiences are about your brand, the more likely they are to buy your products or services. From familiarity grows trust, which only helps to strengthen your brand and create new relationships with potential customers.

Taking the time to measure brand awareness will help to maximize the success of your content marketing strategy and increase leads. These four metrics will give you a good indication of how familiar your target audiences are becoming with your company.

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