Building strong brand awareness has become a top priority for companies in recent years. As this Google Trends data shows, interest in the topic has nearly tripled since 2012:
According to a Nielsen report, over 70% of marketers say building brand awareness will be their number one priority in 2024:
But how should companies go about measuring and improving brand awareness? Surveys are one of the most effective methods.
This guide will explore the benefits of conducting brand awareness surveys and provide best practices for creating and distributing one. I‘ll draw from my decade of experience in data analytics and research to offer concrete, proven advice.
What is a Brand Awareness Survey?
Brand awareness refers to how easily prospective customers can recall or recognize your brand. It‘s a key step in their journey from initial discovery to becoming loyal buyers:
Brand awareness surveys help assess that awareness and aid in developing marketing plans. They provide quantifiable data on:
- How familiar consumers are with your brand
- What perceptions exist around it
- How you compare to competitors
- The effectiveness of ongoing campaigns
Regular brand tracking surveys over time can show progress and help align efforts to business goals.
Statistical Frameworks for Measuring Awareness
From a statistical perspective, there are two primary ways to measure brand awareness:
Unaided awareness: Asking open-ended questions to see if consumers mention your brand unprompted. This tests true top-of-mind presence.
Aided awareness: Providing brand names and logos to measure recognition and familiarity.
Brands can also assess:
-
Recent exposure: Have consumers noticed your ads or campaigns lately?
-
Association strength: How strongly do they link your brand to certain products, attributes or values?
Combining unaided and aided testing paints a robust quantitative picture of customer awareness and equity.
How to Measure Brand Awareness
There are several ways to gauge brand awareness:
- Surveys – The most scalable and cost-effective method. Allow gathering feedback from many respondents.
- Interviews – Provide more qualitative, in-depth insights from a smaller sample.
- Focus groups – Facilitate open discussion between select consumers about brand associations.
- Website analytics – Signals like traffic, search visibility, and social mentions indicate awareness levels.
- Brand lift studies – Measure how campaigns impact metrics like brand recall and purchase intent.
Using a combination provides both quantitative measurements and qualitative context into perceptions, emotions, and associations.
For example, a Fortune 100 technology company I worked with combines:
- Ongoing brand tracking surveys across 4 global regions
- Focus groups and interviews for select campaigns
- Social listening data
- Web traffic and search visibility metrics
This multidimensional view allows them to size awareness, dig into perceptions, monitor trends, and quantify campaign impact holistically.
Benefits of Brand Awareness Surveys
Surveys in particular have key advantages that make them a staple of brand tracking efforts:
Speed – Online surveys can quickly gather large amounts of feedback for analysis. A sample of 1000+ respondents can be surveyed in under a week.
Cost – Much more affordable than interviews or focus groups at scale. Online surveys can cost as little as $2 per response, versus $50+ for focus groups.
Anonymity – Lead to more honest responses than other methods. 62% of consumers are more likely to leave negative feedback anonymously. [Hubspot]
Reach – Can target demographically diverse respondent pools. Multi-channel distribution vastly expands audience reach.
Scalability – Easy to distribute via email, social media, website, and more. Studies show a multi-pronged approach improves response rates by up to 75%. [SurveyMonkey]
Data integration – Results easily combined with other metrics for analysis. Statistical modeling can connect awareness to sales, site traffic, ad recall, etc.
7 Insights Brand Awareness Surveys Provide
Well-designed brand surveys deliver actionable insights across these 7 areas:
1. Baseline Brand Familiarity
What percentage of customers recall your brand unaided? How does aided awareness compare? Questions like these establish current familiarity and mindshare.
Having an accurate baseline is crucial – Interbrand‘s annual ranking of the most valuable brands weighs brand awareness heavily, linking it directly to valuation.
2. Demographic Variations
Adding demographic questions lets you see how awareness differs across age groups, locations, income levels, etc. This enables tailored messaging.
For example, a recent client saw awareness among 18-24 year olds trailing other segments. We helped them craft a social media-focused campaign to successfully reach this demographic.
3. Qualitative Sentiment
Open-ended questions reveal how people feel about your brand. Sentiment analysis via natural language processing can categorize it as positive, negative or neutral.
I helped one manufacturer uncover that while awareness was high, sentiment skewed negative. We instituted customer panels and feedback channels to address this.
4. Brand Tracking Over Time
Conducting the survey regularly allows monitoring of familiarity and associations long-term. Quarterly or semi-annual cadence is ideal for most brands.
McKinsey notes consistent brand tracking provides an early warning sign of growth problems and helps justify budget to strengthen awareness.
5. Campaign Effectiveness
Combine results with campaign KPIs to see impact on brand lift and guide resource allocation.
Google offers a free Brand Lift tool that marketers can use to quantify YouTube ad impact on awareness and favorability.
6. Customer Relationships
Discover brand perceptions, values, and other insights to better align with audience needs.
Surveys enabled a Fortune 500 retailer to learn millenials saw them as outdated. Messaging and merchandising shifts successfully attracted this cohort.
7. Attracting New Customers
Learn brand associations, awareness gaps, and what matters most to potential customers.
One B2B startup used this insight to craft targeted content around buyer pain points, fueling 300% YoY growth.
In essence, brand surveys provide the qualitative and quantitative data needed to measure awareness, set baselines, identify growth opportunities, and optimize messaging.
Essential Brand Awareness Survey Questions
While each brand survey should be customized, here are some example questions to include:
Unaided Awareness
- What companies or brands come to mind when you think of [CATEGORY]?
Aided Awareness
- Which of the following brands are you aware of? Please select all that apply. [BRAND LIST]
Familiarity
- How familiar are you with [BRAND]?
- When did you first become aware of [BRAND]?
Associations & Perceptions
- What words or phrases come to mind when you think of [BRAND]?
- How strongly do you associate [BRAND] with [PRODUCT/ATTRIBUTE]?
Campaign Recall
- Have you noticed [BRAND] advertising or campaigns recently? Where did you see them?
Competitive Positioning
- How does your perception of [BRAND] compare to [COMPETITORS]?
Sentiment & Loyalty
- How likely are you to recommend [BRAND] to friends, family, or colleagues?
- What could [BRAND] do to improve our products or better address your needs?
Segmenting questions by demographics, purchase history, etc. provides richer insights. Advanced statistical techniques like cluster analysis can group customers with similar awareness levels and perceptions for more impactful messaging.
How to Distribute a Brand Awareness Survey
There are many options to send out your survey and gather responses:
-
Email – Send directly to customer lists segmented by criteria like location, purchase history, etc. Personalized email blasts tend to generate 30-50% higher response rates. [SurveyMonkey]
-
Website – Display a pop-up or banner ad with the survey to visitors. Embed at natural pauses in site flows for best results.
-
Social media – Share the survey link and targeting specific demographics. Ad spend can further increase reach and participation.
-
SMS – Collect mobile numbers and send a text with the survey link. SMS coupons can provide an extra incentive.
-
Paid ads – Advertise the survey on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or Google. Retargeting helps drive engagement.
-
QR codes – Print codes leading to the survey on receipts, packaging or in-store displays. Offer a discount for scanning to boost involvement.
-
In-product – Prompt current users to take the survey through notifications or other means. Displaying at natural stop points improves completion rate.
A multi-channel approach combines the strengths of each distribution method. Omnichannel campaigns see response rates climb as high as 75%, versus 35% for single channel. [SurveyMonkey]
Analyzing Open-Ended Feedback
The qualitative feedback from open-ended questions can provide some of the most powerful insights. But efficiently analyzing it takes the right tools and techniques.
Here are some tips based on my experience driving insights from thousands of open-ended survey responses:
-
Sentiment analysis – Use natural language processing to automatically categorize sentiment as positive, negative or neutral. Tools like MonkeyLearn make this simple.
-
Topic clustering – Group responses by common topics and themes. This reveals focal points to address.
-
Text keyword highighting – Extract key terms and auto-tag responses. See which words like "expensive" or "friendly" appear most frequently.
-
Response summarization – Automatically generate summaries from large volumes of feedback.
-
Integrate with analytics – Append open-ends to quantitative data for a 360-degree view. tableau and other BI tools have built-in NLP.
Proper open-end analysis provides a information-rich qualitative layer that complements awareness metrics and humanizes your audience.
Wrap Up
Measuring brand awareness through surveys provides data-backed insights to guide branding, positioning, messaging, and acquisition. This enables companies to track familiarity over time, optimize spend, and strengthen customer relationships.
Following best practices around survey design, distribution, analysis, and acting on feedback is key to success. With a thoughtful approach, brand awareness surveys deliver immense long-term value.