With more B2B companies on the scene than ever before, it's imperative that brands take up space in the minds of their audience members. Up to 70% of buyers are more than halfway through their research process before they contact any companies at all, highlighting the need for early brand awareness.

Today's brand awareness goes far beyond just being "known" — B2B brands today want to capture Mindshare, where the brand becomes the automatic first choice in their category.

Yet tracking brand awareness, which leads to Mindshare, is tricky. It's not like you can get into the minds of people and find out what they know about you! So how do we measure something as nebulous as brand awareness?

Successful measurement of brand awareness requires a strategic combination of surveys, analyses, and metrics. Today we'll look at the essential brand awareness metrics, covering:

• 14 Metrics to Measure Brand Awareness
• Why measuring brand awareness is important
• Goldcast offers a data-driven approach to brand awareness

Let's get straight to the key metrics that will help you assess your brand's market presence. Read through the entire list, and reflect on which metrics would work for your specific business and industry. While each KPI is valuable as a benchmark, you'll get the most insight by combining multiple important metrics.

One of the most surefire ways to measure brand awareness is to look at the hard numbers around revenue, conversions, and product demo requests.

You can't expect to publish content to build brand awareness and then immediately see a bump in revenue. However, when you start to see steady, consistent growth over time, that's a good indicator you've built strong brand recognition. People are aware of you, and they come to you when it's time to purchase.

Track revenue and marketing efforts, and look for patterns. If you see a spike in sales or sign-ups after a certain campaign, event, or after publishing a specific type of content, this is a signal to investigate further. It might be worth investing in that same asset in the future to see if you can replicate results!

Knowing how people feel about your brand can clue you in to how aware folks are. Customer sentiment analysis relies on AI tools to process large volumes of feedback to uncover what customers think and feel about your brand.

Essentially, a machine learning tool takes everything from your social media channels to help desk tickets and parses through all of it, coming up with a comprehensive view of how your audience sees you.

Sentiment data can be helpful in figuring out whether the general audience feeling is positive or negative; you can also learn what's working well so you can double down on those things. And, if you notice a big shift in sentiment after a certain campaign, you'll know whether that marketing tactic had the intended effect.

Remember how we started all of this by saying you can't exactly get into people's heads and figure out what they think? Well, customer surveys are the one way that you can sort of do that, by asking people directly.

Brand awareness surveys are a straightforward way to gauge brand recall and customer satisfaction. Surveying customers is a pretty straightforward way to gauge brand awareness, but the reach is inherently limited to the people that you know are in your audience. However, surveys can provide invaluable, honest information about how your customers think about your brand.

When you're designing your customer surveys, include a mix of questions and try not to ask too many, as people don't want to spend a ton of time giving input. If you're looking to analyze brand perception specifically, you might ask them what comes to mind when they think of your company, as well as why they worked with you versus a competitor.

Branded search volume refers to the number of times your company's name is typed into a search engine during a specific period of time. Generally, the more people who are searching for your company, the higher the brand awareness — they can't look you up if they don't know about you!

You can track branded search volume using tools like SEMrush, Google Analytics, and Google Search Console. You can also uncover information about what site visitors do once they land on your homepage. Analyzing the search terms and phrases that bring visitors to your site can also inform the content you create. If people are constantly Googling "[Your company] vs [competitor company]", write some comparison post blogs and promote them to answer those questions and bring in more readers.

Direct traffic, when someone visits your site by typing in the URL or using a bookmark in their browser, is a clear indicator that someone knows you well enough to seek you out on their own. If you're seeing a bump in direct traffic, similar to branded search volume, that shows increasing brand awareness.

Overall traffic, which may come from paid ads, social media posts, Google searches, and elsewhere, can provide valuable information as well. Pay attention to metrics like time on site and bounce rate when newcomers arrive on your site. Are they engaged? Are they hunting around for information? What page do they exit from?

Website traffic data can help you edit the site experience to better serve audience needs. Digital marketing efforts, including SEO and content marketing, can drive organic traffic and improve the user experience.

When another website links to your content, that's called a backlink. The more quality sites that use your content as sources, the better your site's search ranking and credibility — plus, you have the potential to glean more visitors from those sites.

More backlinks means more brand awareness. Other companies recognize that you're a leader in your space, and they want to promote your content within their own. You can even partner with companies to cross-promote content as part of your backlink building strategy. You should also examine which of your pieces get the most backlinks; this can clue you in to the topics that are resonating so you can create related assets.

The amount of people who take the action you want them to take, or convert, is strongly correlated with brand awareness. People usually only do something like sign up for a demo or register for an event if they're at least somewhat familiar with your brand.

Track conversion rates across different channels to see if there are any differences. If you get more conversions on LinkedIn than you do via email, for instance, it might be worth shifting your focus more to LinkedIn promo and posts.

We just mentioned LinkedIn, which is where your B2B audience hangs out. Hopefully, you've already developed a solid LinkedIn strategy that includes video and multimodal content to engage the most audience members. You should also be regularly interacting with people in your network and on your posts to bolster brand awareness.

Good social media metrics to track for brand awareness include:

• Follower growth: The more people that follow you or request to connect with you, the more brand awareness you can infer.
• Post engagement: Are people liking your posts, commenting on them, or resharing to their networks? These are all signals that brand awareness is climbing.
• Post impressions: The higher the number of people that view your post, the better.
• Hashtags and click-through rates: You want people to click through your CTAs and explore your hashtags as much as possible.

Center video as part of your social media strategy. Video has become increasingly important for B2B marketers and it's the best way to authentically connect with your audience. Metrics like "time spent watching" can give you insight into how your videos are performing with your audience.

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While we're on the topic of social media, are people proactively posting your brand content or tagging you in comments when others ask for recommendations? Tracking your social media mentions can help you assess brand awareness and audience sentiment. If people are recommending you, it's a pretty safe bet they like and trust you.

Conversely, when people mention you in a complaint, try to view that as an opportunity to: a) learn more about what's not working for your customers, and b) address it in a positive way on that channel and turn the conversation around. It can feel discouraging to receive negative reviews or feedback, but it's actually a good thing that people feel motivated to share their experiences with you.

To keep tabs on social media mentions, pay attention to your notifications across channels. Social listening tools help you monitor mentions of your brand across social media platforms in real-time. Explore Sprout Social or Brandwatch, which can be particularly helpful to find untagged mentions or process large amounts of information.

Studying attribution uncovers where your conversions come from, but there are typically many, many touch points along the road. This is why "assisted conversions" are important — there are channels that contribute to conversions but won't be the direct last place a person interacts with you before being a customer.

You can track conversions (and assisted conversions) via tools like Google Analytics, which gives each assisting channel a partial credit for a conversion. This helps you understand the full impact of your marketing and brand awareness efforts.

Events are a great example of why assisted conversions matter. It's not common for event attendees to immediately convert after attending an event — but what is common is that most people who do convert have attended some type of event with a company. Thus, while you can't directly attribute conversions to events, they're still an important part of attribution reporting.

You can use Google Trends to analyze how many searches happened on Google during a certain window of time. For example, you might use Google Trends to search for your core product offering. You can filter results by things like geographic location and time range. Let's say you choose to look for worldwide search results in the past 90 days.

If you see an uptick in the past month for your offering compared to the prior months, that's a sign that brand awareness is on the rise. You might also use Google Trends to search for keywords you're trying to rank for and assess their recent relevance; if people aren't really searching for those phrases anymore, you may need to shift your strategy.

Share of voice measures how much of the industry conversation belongs to your company, compared to your competitors. Typically, if you've got a higher percentage of the "voice" for your industry, you've got strong brand awareness. (You'll have to do some deeper digging to make sure that the conversation is positive, but in general this correlation stands.)

SOV can also point you toward the people who are owning the conversations you want to be in, which is useful information. If you know that a competitor owns the majority of the available voice, you can analyze their strategies to see what's working to engage people.

You can track SOV via tools like Sprout Social and Semrush, which break down results by channel; for example, you can separately measure media SOV against social media SOV to see how you're doing on each channel.

Earned media is media coverage you receive organically, without paying for it. This is a powerful indicator of brand visibility! If you're getting a slew of press mentions, unsolicited podcast invites, blog shout-outs, and the like, that means you're top-of-mind for people in the industry.

If you can, try to understand the reason behind the mention. If a journalist highlights a recent report or whitepaper you did, for example, it's worth noting that and creating other similar content to promote in the future to other journalists.

Depending on which outlets mention you, earned media mentions can lead to more coverage. Having a quality outlet on your side is like partnering with a trusted influencer; it can really expand your audience.

For B2B marketers, the number of people that sign up for your events — as well as the amount that actually attend and engage throughout the session — is strongly tied to brand awareness. B2B events serve as critical touch points throughout the often-long customer journey, building relationships and keeping you on people's minds.

Events also serve as fuel for your content strategy via repurposing, which allows you to take a single recorded event and turn it into tons of video snippets, social media posts, emails, and more.

Goldcast allows you to do both: host compelling, engaging events and easily repurpose content afterward. One of our clients, Birdseye, saw a 10X engagement rate boost during events hosted on Goldcast, coupled with an improvement in their sales enablement and repurposing processes!

Now that we know all of the different metrics you can use to track brand awareness, let's touch on why it matters so much.

Measuring brand awareness allows you to:

Knowing your level of brand awareness can help you drill down into which marketing initiatives are working best. If you see a spike in brand awareness across several metrics, that's good information that whatever campaign you're currently running is working well. You can also track a mix of metrics to see which channels and content types work best for your audience.

Knowing how people perceive you can inform your strategy going forward and validate whether your existing efforts are working with your target market. If you track brand awareness consistently, you'll be able to spot changes in brand awareness or customer impressions so that you can quickly course correct if needed.

Unless you're the only brand in your industry space (which, if you are, lucky you), you'll benefit from knowing where you stand against your competitors. Brand awareness metrics can show you where you stand and highlight opportunities to stand out against other companies.

The better your brand awareness, the higher the chances are that sought-after influencers and companies will want to partner with you to boost their signals, too. Keeping tabs on brand awareness, as well as the people owning conversations in your industry, can lead to fruitful collaborations that further amplify your reach.

Measuring brand awareness requires a comprehensive approach that includes a variety of metrics. No metric on its own can tell the full story, but if you take them together, you'll begin to understand how your brand holds up in the overall market.

To get there, you need the right tools and technology — including a platform that makes it simple to host captivating B2B events and create bingeable content afterward. Goldcast does exactly that, helping brands build awareness through our video-first marketing campaign platform.

With Goldcast, you're able to host an engaging virtual event, generating powerful video content you can turn into multiple content assets after the event is over. Our detailed analytics and reporting suite also provides detailed engagement metrics over time, helping you to make data-driven decisions.

Ready to take a more strategic approach to building brand awareness? Check out the Goldcast Core platform to see how we can transform your events, or sign up for Content Lab for AI-powered repurposing, absolutely free.

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