Do you think branding is critical to growth? If you do, you’re in good company. According to Circle Research, 77% of marketing leaders think the same thing.
If you don't, you are probably wondering why branding is so important to all these people. The answer? Because it’s what customers connect with. Your product might be great, but what draws customers in and keeps them there is how you communicate that product through your branding.
But having a great brand is not enough; people need to know about it too.
Brand awareness is the first step in the brand funnel. It’s the initial stage where you work to get your brand top of consumers’ minds. That’s the easy part. What is more difficult is knowing whether or not your strategy worked.
That’s where brand awareness software comes in. In this article, we’re discussing what brand awareness software is, how to use it, and how it can change your marketing strategy for the better.
Let’s dive in.
What is Brand Awareness Software and Why Is It So Important?
Brand awareness software is designed to help you keep track of your brand is performing amongst your target audience. It enables you to understand your different audience segmentations better, ultimately allowing you to make more informed marketing decisions.
Brand awareness software is built on data. It can unlock and track deep customer insights, so you know where your brand really stands.
Brands need to know if the campaigns they are spending big dollars on are actually having a positive impact. In addition, they need a reliable way to measure impact. That's where brand awareness software is needed: to give brand managers impactful insights that help them track and improve brand awareness over time.
Armed with this information, you can create campaigns that speak directly to your audience, address any barriers to purchase, and start building long-lasting relationships with them.
How Brand Awareness Software Benefits Your Marketing
OK, reliable brand insights. Great. But what can you do with these insights that will benefit your brand?
1. Track competitor performance with precision
Brand awareness software can help you understand how you fare against brands competing for the same target audience. Visualising this data gives you an immediate sense of where your brand could compete to win the battle of the brands. This information will help you position yourself in the marketplace and dominate any gaps left by the competition.
2. Pinpoint the audience segments driving your business
Brand awareness software allows you to segment into the various target audiences that are important for your brand. By tracking brand awareness levels for these audiences over time, you can easily see who is driving your business, and the audiences not worth spending your budget on.
With this knowledge, you can build strategies to engage specific audiences, appealing to their values and forging that sought after emotional connection.
3. Tap into new audiences and further drive business growth
Not only can brand awareness software help you understand your current audiences, but it can also help you discover new ones. Brand awareness software includes various audience characteristics and you can use these characteristics to build new audiences to those you are already tracking and see if they are worthy of marketing directly too.
4. Monitor and measure brand performance over time
Building a brand and forging connections with your audience is a process that takes time, so you’re going to want to track it continuously.
Consistent monitoring will mean you keep your marketing goals in focus and on track to achieve your overall business objectives — namely, to grab more market share and increase revenue.
Different Brand Awareness Software to Consider
Finding the best brand awareness software for your organization might seem like a minefield; with so much choice, how do you decipher differences?
We’ve made things easier by including three tools that can help you achieve different results.
Critical Mention
One way to track brand awareness is by tracking who is talking about you. Earned media is media that’s been created by others outside of your organization, think customer reviews, social mentions, and blog posts (not written by you!). Basically, content that’s about you that you haven’t created yourself.
Critical Mention can help you navigate and analyze all your earned media. It provides notifications when your brand is mentioned on social media, so you can proactively respond. It also helps you effortlessly track news coverage across global online publications, meaning you never miss a brand mention or an opportunity to become part of an active conversation about your brand.
Critical Mention also helps you monitor offline mentions via radio, TV, and podcasts. They also have a sentiment analysis tool to help you understand in which context your brand name was mentioned.
Critical Mention frees up some much-needed time for any brand marketer. However, keep in mind that the tool does not allow you to segment audiences so you have no idea if the people who are reacting to your brand are the people you want/need as customers.
Latana
The best information is the information that comes straight from the source. In that case, it is your target audience. As a marketer, you seek reliable data that will help you analyze audience behaviour, understand your place in the market, and uncover new and exciting audience opportunities.
Latana Brand Tracking provides just that.
With the ability to reach up to 500 million people through custom surveys, you can easily measure brand awareness, position yourself against the competition, segment data to track the audiences most important for your brand, and ultimately focus on the audiences positively impacted by your marketing campaigns.
Latana has a team of experienced researchers providing end-to-end support, using tried and tested methodologies to ensure data you can trust. Throw in an intuitive dashboard and you don’t need to be a data analyst to understand your brand awareness data.
Not all brand awareness software has to cost money. Google Analytics and Google Search Console software are still the tools of choice for many marketers - and it's easy to see why.
Tracking website traffic and brand name searches are both key components of any brand awareness campaign. You can use Google Analytics to filter your web data by source to learn where your users are coming from. If you can track your website visitors back to a piece of earned media on a third party site, you know your strategy is working, and more users are aware of your brand.
On the other hand, Google Search Console is a straightforward way for marketers to understand what keywords users are searching to find you.
Navigate to the ‘performance’ menu to analyse a breakdown of top user search queries. It shows you the keyword phrase searched, including branded searches, how many impressions and clicks each received — it even represents it nicely on a graph to see instantly whether your brand awareness is gathering speed.
Also, if your brand name is getting picked up more by online users, this pattern will show itself in Google Search Console.
Key Takeaways
Brand awareness is a huge topic, with so many factors influencing it, but at the core of any successful brand is an organization that understands its target audience.
Think of your target audience as both the foundations and the cement of any marketing project. Therefore, you should be investing time understanding how they are reacting to your brand, the audience segmentations fuelling your brand funnel, and how they are reacting to your competitors.
If you take only three things away from this article, let them be:
Brand awareness software makes all marketing actions deliberate, no guesswork involved.
Understanding your audience is crucial to improving your brand awareness.
Reliable data is everything. It gives you powerful marketplace insights, unlocks new audience segments, drives business growth and gives you a route to the top.
