How do you measure brand awareness among your target audience?

1 Define your objectives

Before crafting your survey questions, it is essential to determine your objectives and goals. What do you hope to gain from the survey? How will the results be used to enhance your brand strategy? Some potential objectives may include assessing the level of brand recognition and recall among your target audience, comparing your brand awareness to that of your competitors, recognizing the sources and channels that influence your brand awareness, and evaluating the effect of your brand awareness on customer loyalty and satisfaction.

2 Choose your survey type

There are two main types of brand awareness surveys: aided and unaided. Aided surveys provide a list of brands or options for the respondents to choose from, while unaided surveys ask the respondents to name or describe the brands or options without any prompts. Aided surveys are easier and faster to complete, but they may introduce bias or influence the respondents' answers. Unaided surveys are more challenging and time-consuming, but they reveal the true level of brand recall and preference. You can use a combination of both types of surveys to get a comprehensive picture of your brand awareness.

3 Craft your survey questions

Crafting the perfect survey questions for your objectives and survey type requires careful consideration. To ensure your respondents understand the questions, use language that is straightforward and unambiguous. Incorporate a combination of open-ended and closed-ended questions to acquire both qualitative and quantitative data. Rating scales, multiple choice, and ranking questions are useful for gauging brand awareness, preference, and satisfaction. Text or image questions can be used to test recognition or recall of your brand name, logo, slogan, or other features. Additionally, skip logic or branching can be employed to tailor the survey to the respondents' answers and avoid irrelevant or redundant questions. As an example, unaided questions such as “What is the first brand that comes to your mind when you think of [product category]?” or “How would you describe [your brand] in a few words?” can be used to measure brand awareness. Aided questions like “Which of these brands have you heard of in the [product category]?” or “How familiar are you with [your brand] on a scale of 1 to 5?” can also be used. Furthermore, questions such as “What is the slogan or tagline of [your brand]?” or “Where did you first hear about [your brand]?” can be used to assess brand recall. Finally, questions like “What are the main benefits or features of [your brand] that make you choose it over other brands?” or “How likely are you to recommend [your brand] to a friend or colleague on a scale of 1 to 10?” can be used to measure brand preference and satisfaction.

4 Distribute your survey

Once you have crafted your survey questions, it is time to distribute them to your target audience. You can employ a variety of methods and platforms to reach your potential customers, such as emailing a survey link to existing or prospective customers as a standalone message or as part of a newsletter or campaign, posting the link on social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn, embedding the survey on your website as a pop-up, banner, or widget, joining relevant online forums, groups, or communities to share the link, or running paid ads on search engines, social media, or other websites to direct traffic to your survey landing page.

5 Analyze your survey results

Once you have gathered enough responses, it is time to analyze your survey results and draw meaningful insights from them. To process and visualize your data, you can use a variety of tools and techniques, such as descriptive statistics to calculate the mean, median, mode, standard deviation, frequency, or percentage of your data; inferential statistics to test hypotheses, compare groups, or identify correlations or causations using statistical tests like t-tests, ANOVA, chi-square, or regression; data visualization to create charts, graphs, tables, or dashboards to display your data in a clear and engaging way with tools like Excel, Google Sheets, or Tableau; and text analysis to use natural language processing, sentiment analysis, or word clouds to extract and interpret the meaning and emotion from your open-ended responses with tools like SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics, or Wordle. By analyzing your survey results, you can measure your brand awareness, recognize your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and use your findings to improve your brand strategy, positioning, messaging, and marketing campaigns.