10 metrics to measure the brand awareness and reach of your B2B business
Naseef KPO
Founder & CEO, Skalegrow - B2B Marketing Agency | IIM Bangalore | Speaker | Mentor | Helping 20+ B2B Marketing Leaders & CEOs Do Marketing Right | Building India's Largest B2B Marketing Community | ?? Book a meeting now
In the last edition of the Elevate Your Marketing newsletter, we learned the metrics you should use to measure the effectiveness of your B2B marketing efforts from a conversion or new business generation standpoint.
Let us now take the next step and learn how to measure the brand awareness and reach of your business.
Before we start!
All the 10 metrics I have listed in this article are not individual numbers, but rather a category or group of metrics that can be measured to evaluate your brand strength. Under each, I have also mentioned the individual metrics or values you need to measure.
That said, let us dive right in!
10 metrics to measure brand awareness
The 10 types of metrics you need to measure for estimating the brand awareness and reach of your B2B business are:
Let us now look at each of them in detail.
1. Branded keywords data
The number of times your brand name is searched for will give you an indication of your company's reach and awareness. You can find this data in multiple ways as given below:
One thing to note here is that, while looking for brand keywords data, make sure to include all the possible variations. For instance, if your company name is 'Congur', you need to consider phrases like 'Congur office', 'Congur location', 'Congur address', etc., as well while consolidating the keyword data (assuming that you are getting traffic to the website for these phrases). If searches using your leaders' names are also generating some traffic (which happens if they are popular), you could count them in as well.
2. Organic social media reach and engagement
The reach your content has across all the social media platforms is a good measure of how popular your brand is. Though the metrics will vary slightly depending on the platform, more or less you need to measure reach and engagement using the following values:
You could also have metrics specific to different platforms. For instance, you might want to measure custom button clicks on LinkedIn. Similarly, retweets on Twitter are something that you don't want to miss out on measuring.
3. YouTube metrics/video reach
Most businesses use YouTube as the primary platform to host and distribute video content. However, if you are using any other platform like Vimeo, or even LinkedIn as the primary distribution channel for videos, you need to measure relevant metrics on those mediums.
For now, let us list down the metrics for YouTube (and you can find corresponding metrics on any other platform you might be using). Below are the metrics you can monitor at a channel level:
In addition to viewing numbers at a channel level, you can dig deep into the analytics of every single video on YouTube. You would be able to see most of the above metrics at the video level as well. One notable data you could find here is the traffic source of your video. Some of the traffic sources on YouTube include YouTube suggestions, notifications, channel pages, external, etc.
4. Campaign reach
The reach of your paid campaigns is an indication of how many times your content has been consumed, and accordingly how many times your brand has been 'seen'.
In most of the platforms you use for paid campaigns (say Google ads, LinkedIn ads, Facebook ads, etc.), you can use ad impressions/views and clicks as the metrics to measure brand awareness or reach. While impressions/views will tell you how many times your content has been seen, clicks will give you data on how many people your campaigns have been able to attract to your website.
5. Subscriptions and other audiences
These refer to any kind of subscriptions you have for your company's content across platforms (please note that this is different from paid subscriptions of your product if you are in the B2B SaaS space or are selling any kind of subscription-based product). Some examples include:
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Using subscriptions, you are mostly trying to educate your audience. And the number of people you are able to reach with these would tell you how many people are being influenced or positively impacted by your content.
In addition to merely counting the number of subscribers, you can make more sense of this data by measuring metrics like delivery rate, open rate, click rate (in the case of email-based subscriptions), number of new subscribers added during a period, traffic from subscriptions, etc.
6. Mentions and coverage
Mentions and coverage refer to nothing but shoutouts of your brand's name across social media platforms, press coverages, conferences, online events, etc.
To measure mentions and coverage on social media platforms, you can use a social media analytics tool like Brands24 or Mention. The number of press coverages can also be measured automatically to some extent by looking at the data you get from the PR distribution site you use (like prweb.com or prnewswire.com). As long as the website has a self-serve analytics module, you should be able to get the data.
Some of the other items like mentions in conferences, online events, podcasts, etc., will have to be manually tracked.
7. Total website traffic
This might be a little tricky. You could argue that the absolute value of a website's traffic cannot be taken as a benchmark since this number could vary across industries. To tackle this issue, some marketers adopt the methodology of comparing their company's traffic to the its top competitor.
Whatever method you are following, given that the website forms a company's 'face', the number of eyeballs you get on it is a good measure of how far your brand has reached. Some of the metrics you can measure here are:
8. Direct and referral traffic
While direct traffic is a measure of how many people are landing on your website without a 'nudge' or direct campaigns/outreach, referral traffic will give you an idea of how many users or pageviews external sources have generated to your website.
These data points can be obtained from Google Analytics. You can drill down further to see:
9. Backlinks
Backlinks are one of the most important contributing factors to the SEO success of a website. At the same time, they also mean that many people/websites have willingly linked to your website. This tells you the breadth of your brand's reach in terms of the external websites that have given you credit for your content.
This can be measured using metrics like:
You can obtain these data points from an SEO tool like Ahrefs.
10. Customer and prospect feedback
Customer surveys are one of the most popular techniques used to understand the recall and recognition of your brand among your existing as well as potential customers. You can build the survey questionnaire with a mix of multiple choice and open-ended questions to get the right insights about your brand.
Some of the questions you could ask while collecting customer feedback are:
Here, the objective is not to measure brand awareness purely in quantitative terms, but rather to understand the nature and quality of the reach you have developed over time.
You could also do a similar exercise with your prospects where you can focus on the brand discovery phase (such as whether the prospects know your brand, how they found out about you, etc.) than the brand affinity or loyalty phase.
That's it. We wrap it up for the day!
The was quite elaborate. Since the topic was very vast, it made sense to cover it from all possible angles. Hope this was a useful read. Please do not forget to leave your feedback or questions in the comments section.
As always, until we meet next time, happy learning!
PR minus fluff | Founder - StrategyVerse Consulting | Helping startups gain organic publicity faster
2 年Some of these metrics work when we club more than one tool. For example, measuring the impact of media impressions becomes possible when we publish the impressions on owned media.