Your CEO strolls up during your first cup of coffee and asks “how is our brand doing out there?” It’s a tough question first thing in the morning, or any time for that matter.
Without spending a small fortune on primary research, or investing in a myriad of expensive, complex technologies and processes, how do you know? The Internet has powerful and affordable new tools that can measure reach, frequency, conversion rates, and many other metrics better than ever. But finding a way to answer the simple question “how many people know who we are” is a real challenge. How about a simple indicator of brand awareness?
A method I have used in the past to at least get some insight, was to analyze my organic search phrases using a powerful program called LeadLander. There are other options on the market, but I found this one very intuitive. My process was to look at a report I exported from LeadLander each month listing how many people found our site by searching the company name, or some variation of it. By tracking and charting these numbers over time, I would start getting a picture of the brand’s general direction. Someone doing a search on the company name must already know who you are and they are likely coming to visit. Not an exact science by any means, but combined with other metrics, I found it was a useful “indicator”. It helped separate “who knows us?” from “who found us?” To adjust for site traffic fluctuations, it’s best to use the percentage of the unique visitors searching your company name, relative to the total number of unique visitors. I also filtered out exiting clients for obvious reasons. In the example below, the grey line acts as a reasonable proxy for brand movement over the year. If anyone has any other low-budget ideas that would help, please comment.
