A question — Would you like your target audience to be more aware of your brand?
The (correct) answer: A resounding “Yes!”
But why? Well, because the more people know about your brand, the higher the chances are they’ll become (and remain) customers. But you can’t just sit back and hope that your brand awareness is increasing — you have to find a way to measure it.
While good intuition is always beneficial, it won’t allow you to accurately brand awareness levels. Plus, key stakeholders often require more quantitative results to keep an eye on the important metrics like CAC and ROI.
Thus, to track a brand’s awareness and prove results to supervisors, you need reliable data from a high-quality, state-of-the-art brand tracker. This article will take a look at a few ways brand tracking software can help increase brand awareness and bring better brand management, as well as provide a mini case study on e-learning platforms.
How Does Brand Tracking Software Increase Brand Awareness?
First, let’s begin with a definition. Simply defined, brand awareness is how familiar consumers are with your brand. Essentially, it answers the question: How many people recognize your brand name and/or logo?
Brand awareness is incredibly important because it’s the first stage in your brand funnel and your target audiences’ first step towards becoming loyal customers. When a consumer recognizes your brand, they’re far more likely to convert into a customer. High brand awareness also helps consumers narrow their choices — as they’re less likely to use a brand they’ve never heard of.
Other benefits of improved brand awareness include increased customer loyalty, stronger word-of-mouth marketing, and better top-of-mind retention.
Unless your brand is incredibly young, it’s likely you’ve already gained a certain level of brand awareness. But every brand marketer shares a goal: increase brand awareness. That’s where brand tracking software comes in.
Brand tracking data will reveal your brand health and awareness levels within your target audience(s) and show you how your brand is performing in comparison to the competition. But that’s not all, there are plenty of other benefits of brand tracking, which we will cover here.
First, brand tracking software allows you to monitor your brand’s perception and identify any weaknesses. While it’s never fun to see where you’re lacking, such weaknesses reveal exactly where you need to focus your time and effort to improve your brand awareness.
Second, many key stakeholders will require a deeper and more quantitative overview of brand awareness — meaning they want nuanced data on your brand awareness campaigns. To meet these needs, more and more marketing teams are turning to brand tracking tools.
Third, brand tracking software like Latana allows you to define and target niche audiences — i.e. more focused subgroups of the brand’s target audience. By taking a more niche focus, brands can tailor their marketing strategies to show specific consumers the content with which they will best resonate — and precisely how they’ll solve consumers’ problems.
So, to better explain the value of measuring brand awareness via a brand tracking tool — as well as how such data will help increase brand awareness — we used our own software to track seven US-based e-learning brands. Here's what we found:
Mini Case Study: Brand Awareness Across E-learning Brands
Let’s start with the basics. Below you will find a chart showing the US general population’s brand awareness for seven e-learning brands in 2019: Khan Academy, Udemy, Brainly, Skillshare, Coursera, General Assembly, and Udacity.
Clearly, Khan Academy boasts the highest brand awareness levels of all the brands, and, interestingly enough, there's a significant gap between 1st and 2nd place. However, second-place winner Udemy and the remaining brands all rank very closely for gen pop brand awareness — ranging from 17% to 8%.
So, what does this brand tracking data tell us? Other than our clear front-runner, the remaining brands have a lot of work to do if they’re going to increase their own brand awareness. But before they can pull ahead, each brand should examine where they currently rank in comparison to their closest competitors — this should help them make important changes to their brand strategies.
Of course, each brand should take a deep dive into Khan Academy’s brand strategy to see how they’ve been so successful in building brand awareness. And with that information on hand, they should then integrate Khan Academy’s most successful ideas into their own strategies.
However, each brand would also benefit from setting a goal to increase brand awareness above that of their closest competition. For example, Brainly’s goal could be to outrank Udemy before the end of Q4. And with the ability to monitor brand awareness using brand tracking software, Brainly would be able to measure their progress over time.
By utilizing brand tracking software, brands have access to long-term data — which allows them to identify their closest competitors over a longer time period. Just because another brand is your biggest competition today doesn’t mean they hold the title over a 6 month period. Long-term data provides more oversight, which leads to smarter brand management.
Additionally, brand managers can use brand tracking data to see what’s working and what isn’t — for both themselves and their rivals. This information can help brands by revealing when it’s perhaps time to try out a new channel or revamp their brand strategy altogether.
Does Focusing on Niche Audiences Help?
Earlier, we touched on niche audiences — a very important part of many brands’ marketing strategies. Niche audiences allow brands to speak to more customized portions of their target audiences, making it easier to connect with them.
In an effort to show how brand awareness can be affected by niche audiences, we once again turned to data about our seven e-learning platforms. The niche audience we chose to examine is the Coursera Persona — aka men and women aged 26-45, with high and medium-income, high and medium education level, career-oriented, and employed full-time.
Compared to the general population, we can see that most of the brands have seen increased awareness levels. While Khan Academy is still leading the pack at 49%, Udemy’s brand awareness went from 17% to 23%, General Assembly from 9% to 15%, and Coursera from 10% to 13%. That’s not too bad!
With this data on hand, these brands now know exactly how they’re performing with an important niche audience — which could potentially result in increased profits.
Next, let’s look at another important audience, the Urban Millennials Persona — aka men and women aged 18-35, located in US Cities.
Within the Urban Millennials target audience, we can see that brand awareness leader Khan Academy saw a drop in their performance. Instead of remaining at the level of the Coursera niche audience (49%), they’re back down to their general population level (42%). Clearly, they perform better with a more focused, niche audience.
Additionally, all remaining brands saw a decrease in comparison to their performance with the Coursera niche audience. Information like this shows brands two things. First, it identifies the target audiences that they’re failing to connect with — which might encourage them to re-strategize and run new campaigns aimed at the younger market.
Second, it shows them how important it is to create strategies while keeping niche audiences in mind, as they obviously perform better.
However, it's also important to remember that — when tracking brand awareness — you won’t always see a large difference in performance between the general population and your target or niche audiences. But when you do, it’s a great sign and should be used strategically.
Final Thoughts
Just as professionals turn to e-learning companies to improve particular skill sets, brands should turn to advanced brand tracking software to learn more about and boost brand awareness.
By tracking brand performance and using your data in a strategic manner, you’ll be rewarded with insights into what your team should focus on. This means less time wasted and more resources saved — plus, the data-driven results you need to continually improve your brand awareness.
Updated by: Cory Schröder on 10.12.21
