Measuring Awareness Advertising
If you Promote your Brand, Here’s How to Measure its Success
Measuring brand or awareness advertising may be difficult, but it's certainly not impossible. This article shows you how to do it
Sometimes customers won’t buy from a company unless they know and respect them – that’s the power of branding. Unfortunately, advertising the brand (awareness advertising) can mean a lengthy wait before returns are realised, as it doesn’t always generate immediate sales.
The key point about awareness advertising is that it’s not designed to generate an immediate response, hence why it’s so difficult to measure. It can be done, but it needs different techniques from that for ‘direct response’ advertising.
The techniques available can be grouped into two categories; Questioning and Comparison.
Using Comparisons
Comparison involves establishing a benchmark and then comparing results against that benchmark over time.
For example, a survey may highlight that 50% of prospects have heard of your brand and 15% may consider you as a potential supplier of the product or service. Asking those questions again in 6 months may reveal that now 75% of prospects have heard of your brand and 25% would consider you as a potential provider. You can reasonably conclude that your marketing and advertising activity was responsible for the increase.
Alternatively, if you were only doing one thing differently, you can conclude that responsibility for the increase rests with that one item.
Questioning
Questioning involves asking appropriate questions of prospects, enquirers and customers. Many companies will ask an enquirer how they heard of the company or, preferably, how they obtained the telephone number. How about adding this question; “which of these items/media do you remember seeing?”. The answer won’t tell you whether the activity made them purchase, but it will tell you which of your awareness advertising activities are actually being noticed.
Questioning also helps you find out what enquirers, prospects and customers think of your awareness advertising. Create a short survey asking pertinent questions, e.g. which have you seen, which haven’t you seen, rank each on a scale of 1 to 10 on whether it appealed to you or not, etc. Then combine the answers from all respondents to give you a clear picture of how people see and perceive your advertising.
Getting the Full Picture
Don’t use a single customer’s response, combine several for a more accurate view. Ideally, you want at least 25-50 responses to a single question before you start to draw any conclusions.
If you want to be really adventurous and courageous, get a group of customers together in a room and hold a ‘focus group’, where an independent facilitator leads a discussion about your materials, without you being there. The results are often both illuminating and scary, so they’re not for the faint-hearted! But there’s no substitute for really knowing how people feel.
However, the only true way to accurately measure awareness advertising is to compare two periods of time; one with activity and one without. Then you’ll see just how much extra business your awareness advertising helped generate for you. There is a caveat to this approach though; the difference may be due to timing, rather than a true reflection of the power of your brand.
So how do you know if you should use awareness advertising? Read Using Customer Buying Processes to help you identify if awareness advertising is important for your business. If it is, follow the techniques outlined here to get the most out of it. If you also need direct response advertising, see the techniques in Measuring Advertising Results.
