Evaluating and assessing the impact or value your influencer campaigns create is extremely important. Just as you report and optimize on paid ads on Facebook and Google, it is also necessary to report on your influencer campaigns in order to optimize your influencer efforts.
When assessing the impact of your influencer marketing, it's important to take into account the type of campaign you're running. There are big differences in the KPIs you should measure depending on whether you're running performance-driven collaborations or brand awareness campaigns.
In this post, I will focus on the possibilities for evaluating brand awareness campaigns without having to spend the tip of a jet fighter.
You can measure the effect of your brand awareness yourself.
We see a tendency for marketing departments to opt out of brand awareness campaigns, as it can seem confusing and costly to assess the effect of such a campaign.
A good assessment is about looking at the most relevant data associated with a campaign. For brand awareness campaigns, most companies actually have the necessary data available in-house.
Four methods for assessing the impact of brand awareness
1. Brand search volume / share of branded search:
Share of branded search is another really good way to measure your brand awareness. You should think of it as your share of the pie in the industry/product category you are in. Competitors are also in the equation here. In a very practical way, you measure share of branded search by dividing the number of searches for your brand by the number of searches for your competitors. All this data can be found using Google Trends. In addition, studies have shown that if you increase your share of branded search, you typically get a higher market share.
Brand search volume is how many people search for your brand name (not against your competitors). So it’s not just when someone searches for “best hair products for women” and finds your brand, it’s searches specifically for your brand name. The more people who search for your exact brand, the better your brand awareness. It shows that consumers can remember you and that they see your brand as an opportunity to have their specific needs met.
2. Regular consumer surveys:
This method is one of the more resource-intensive methods mentioned above. Nevertheless, it is also one of the best methods for measuring brand awareness. Online surveys in particular, where you ask consumers in your target group about brand-relevant questions, give you a unique opportunity to understand your target group and what trends and values consumers attach to your brand.
For example, these could be questions about what values the consumer attributes to your brand or whether they have encountered your brand on social media within the last month. Ongoing consumer surveys give you the opportunity to follow consumers' perceptions of your brand and thus always have your finger on the pulse of the direction your brand is moving.
3. Keep track of your social media data:
Keeping track of your own social media data may seem like a given. But by keeping track of your social media, you actually get a good indication of how far you reach and how many people are actually familiar with your brand. In particular, the number of followers on social media is a good measure of brand awareness. If we assume that people only follow what they like or are interested in, the number of followers can give a good picture of your brand awareness. Here, a pre-post analysis would make great sense. Identify the number of followers, engagement, views, etc. before and after the campaign, to get a clearer indication of how individual campaigns affect your brand awareness.
4. General traffic to your pages:
Both website traffic and other digital platforms can indicate how many people know about your brand and are searching for it. Measuring general traffic is good for giving a general indication, but the disadvantage of this way of measuring is that you don't necessarily know what has created the increased traffic - whether it's a good blog post or your influencer campaign, you can't know for sure. This method is therefore best if you only have a single type of campaign running at the time. And if you only have one campaign running, a pre-post analysis of your online traffic will certainly give clearer indications of how good your brand awareness is.
Now pre-post analyses have been mentioned a few times and you might be thinking “that sounds a bit confusing with such analyses”. It can also be if you are doing a large consumer survey. In reality, it is quite easy to do your own “mini” pre-post analysis. You can often find all the necessary data in the tools you most likely already work with, such as Google Analytics, Google Trends and various insight tools on your social media. However, it is super important that you remember to separate your data before the campaign from your data after the campaign, in order to get a true picture of the effect of your campaign.
I hope that after reading this article, you no longer fear brand awareness campaigns. Yes, it is harder to measure the direct effect in dollars on brand awareness, but there are plenty of methods that can give you a really good indication of how much value your brand awareness campaigns are creating.
