In today’s overly competitive digital marketing landscape, putting yourself in front of the right people has never been more complicated.

The number of businesses similar to yours is constantly growing. They offer similar products, invest in their business promotion via the same online channels, and target the same groups of people.

To survive, you need to build a recognizable brand. This means:

• Coming up with a unique brand name
• Crafting a killer site and choosing a memorable domain name
• Creating a recognizable logo
• Forming your authentic brand voice
• Defining your brand mission
• Creating high-quality and interactive content to back your brand story and boost your authority
• Promoting your brand widely on social networks

Your goal here is obvious- you want to create stronger relationships with your target audience and position yourself as a leader in your niche. This is how you will boost their awareness of your brand and make them recognize and recall your brand spontaneously.

That said, it’s obvious that your brand is what sets you apart from your competitors. And, to harness all its power, you need to track its growth regularly.

Not sure where to start?

Here are a few tips that may help you!

1. Analyze your Site’s Traffic

If you don’t know where to look for your data and how to analyze it effectively, your website traffic may be a true vanity metric. However, if you know how to measure it properly, these traffic metrics can give you some invaluable insights into your brand’s growth.

Use Google Analytics to track different sources of traffic.

For example, by measuring your direct traffic, you will know how many people landed on your site by:

• Entering your URL into the browser’s address bar
• Clicking on a bookmark
• Hitting a link in an email, chat message, or a text message

This shows you how strong your brand is. Namely, if people already know how to find you, this means that you have a strong brand recall.

You should also track referral traffic, or the number of your visitors that land on your site by following the links on external sites. The rise in referral traffic tells you that the number of external links to your site is growing (meaning that your SEO efforts rock) and shows you where your site visitors are coming from.

You can also use Google Analytics to explore your user demographics. To tailor your branding and marketing efforts to your target audience, you first need to know who they are. The “Demographic” feature in Google Analytics can help you collect all the information about your visitors, including their age, gender, lifestyle, buying interests, etc.

To get the most of your website traffic tracking, you should consider investing in a reliable SEO reporting tool. For example, Reportz is integrated with Google Analytics and allows you to track your major KPIs on a single dashboard. This way, you can access your major traffic metrics on one platform, without having to check your Google Analytics account all the time.

2. Listen to your Target Audience on Social Media

For brands of all shapes and sizes, social networks are the basis of customer acquisition and engagement. Unsurprisingly, they are also an invaluable source of information you need to consider when assessing your brand’s growth.

Social listening allows you to keep track of your target audience’s discussions about your brand across social networks and gain an insight into what they think about you. Most importantly, this is always a great opportunity to participate actively in such conversions and provide your customers with the instant feedback.

Here are a few metrics you should focus on:

• Brand mentions – people usually use brand names to refer to them in their posts, so start by tracking your brand mentions with specific keywords across all social networks you use. You don’t have to limit yourself to the analysis of the direct mentions of your brand name. You could also take your product names, as well as possible misspellings into consideration.
• Social media reach is the number of people that see your content. It shows you, out of the total number of your followers, how many of them are really engaged with your content.
• Engagement levels represent people’s interactions with your brand. This includes their likes, shares, and comments on your posts. This is how you can see what strategies, content, and product resonate best with your target audience.
• Your target audience’s sentiment about your brand. You need to assess whether they associate your brand with positive or negative emotions to tailor it to their needs. Some of the most effective social media sentiment analysis tools are Hootsuite Insights, Twitter Advanced Search, and Brandwatch.

3. Conduct a Brand Awareness Survey

One of the most effective ways to measure your brand awareness is to conduct your own customer survey. You could work with focus groups and select random groups of people to see whether they have ever heard of your brand and whether they can recognize it.

You can also reach out to your existing customers via email, social networks, your website, or online surveys and ask them directly how they heard about you.

It is very important for you to understand what your major customer acquisition channels are so that you can maximize their potential in the future.

Over to You

In the past, measuring the levels of brand awareness accurately was extremely difficult. However, with today’s sophisticated digital marketing tools, this process has become a necessity. It’s the foundation of any effective marketing campaign. By tracking your brand’s growth, you will know what branding strategies work for you the best and be able to focus on them more in the future.

Hope this helps!

Nate Vickery is a marketing consultant and author mostly engaged in researching the latest marketing technology trends and practices applicable to startups and SMBs. He is also the editor at Bizzmark Blog and an author on The Next Web.