Brand Recall: How to Measure and Boost Brand Awareness

Marketers should never underestimate the power of brand recall to drive sales. Consider how brand recall influences your choices as a shopper: When you need to purchase a new product and are presented with an array of options, what factors affect your decision to buy?

The average adult is exposed to some 362 ads every single day, so how can you make your brand’s message stick?

In this article

1. What Is Brand Recall?
2. How to Measure Brand Recall
3. Increasing Brand Recall
4. How To Measure Brand Awareness 
5. Popular Ways to Boost Brand Awareness
6. The Most Effective Way to Enhance Brand Recall: Sonic Branding
7. Find a Voice to Build Your Brand Recall

On the one hand, consumers opt for a product manufactured by a company they know and trust based on experience.

Alternatively, you may take a chance on something new because you were impressed by its advertising. Either way, your final choice is influenced by your awareness of the brand.

For marketers, instilling brand loyalty is everything. As HubSpot reports, “Once a consumer bonds to your brand, they’re more likely to make repeat purchases with little to no forethought.”

By investing time and money into your ad campaigns, you’re striving to stand apart from your competition. Ensuring your audience remembers who you are and what you stand for is half the battle.

Often, the difference in approach is educating your market versus merely driving up brand impressions and being seen. GetResponse delineates how content marketing is not sales. Like many other B2B organizations, GetResponse employs a variety of inbound activities, such as webinars and podcasts, that engage their audience in longer sessions, typically greater than 15-20 minutes. As such, they increase brand recall.

Before you set out to increase brand awareness, you must thoroughly understand the diverse metrics you can use to measure it.

Let’s explore the various ways of measuring brand recall and brand awareness so you can strategically track the performance of your next ad campaign.

What Is Brand Recall?

Brand recall measures the proportion of consumers who can recollect your brand. Your audience’s ability to remember your brand is determined by several factors, like whether they’ve been exposed to your ads or have distinguishing features that linger in your audience’s memory.

How to Measure Brand Recall

Two types of brand awareness surveys are used to measure brand recall:

• Aided brand recall: This measurement involves presenting survey respondents with a list of competing brands and asking them questions that test how well they can identify your brand and the components of its advertising.
• Unaided brand recall: This method involves providing survey respondents with a product category and prompting them to list the brands that come to mind. For example, when you ask your respondents to name coffeehouse chains, they may respond with Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts, and Tim Hortons.

The percentage of consumers who can name your brand without being fed its name will allow you to gauge its recall. Unaided brand recall is a noteworthy metric because it proves pre-purchase awareness.

On the other hand, brand awareness (aided or unaided) doesn’t precisely signify intent to purchase. Of the percentage of consumers who are aware of your brand, only a slighter segment will intend to purchase from you.

A better way to track intent to purchase is to measure prospects’ behaviors and place them in your marketing funnel. “If prospects are exhibiting behaviors that don’t seem to be linked to purchase, like reading blog posts,” Instapage writes, “They’re likely in the early stages of the marketing funnel.” If a prospect has visited a price page or is making searches oriented around precise keywords, these are more potent signifiers that they are seriously considering purchasing.

Brand recall remains highly important, however, because when customers are toying with the idea of making a purchase and starting to place searches (when they’re still at the beginning of the marketing funnel), they are bound to seek out and respond more viscerally to the marketing efforts of a brand that they are already familiar with.

In a 2001 Journal of Product & Brand Management study, Aron O’Cass and Kenny Lim underline that “consumer brand knowledge determines how a customer thinks about a brand, and how the consumer responds to different stimuli regarding a brand.”

Increasing Brand Recall

When you set out to achieve an increased brand recall, two key metrics will play a role: reach and impressions.

• Reach refers to the number of people served your ad at least once.
  
• Impressions refer to the number of times your ad has been served.

When running an ad campaign, remember that one impression isn’t enough for consumers to become familiar with your brand.

Marketers generally follow the rule of seven, which states that a consumer needs to make about seven impressions on a member of the brand’s target market before deciding to buy from it.

If your campaign has a high number of impressions but minimal clicks, it isn’t doing well. Conversely, if it has a low number of impressions but a high number of clicks, it is performing successfully.

You can optimize the use of your limited ad spend to gather the most impressions in many ways. One method is to target niche audiences based on their interests and behavior.

Instead of casting your net as wide as possible, focusing on a smaller, more defined audience that is more likely to convert is better. You can use advanced marketing campaign utilities offered by Look Ads.

With Facebook Ads, you are offered the opportunity to run a brand lift test. Viget defines brand lift as “an increase in integration as a result of an advertising campaign, [that] is primarily used to identify a positive shift in customer awareness and perception.”

Another avenue for achieving this is running an integrated marketing campaign. Instead of isolated marketing efforts across different platforms (email, Facebook, YouTube, etc.), you can create a seamless campaign that spans various marketing channels with a sense of congruity. Campaign Monitor reports that “personalized content provides 18 times more revenue than generic content, 67% of customers expect uniquely relevant content, and nearly half will get frustrated if you only offer generic content.”

How To Measure Brand Awareness 

Diligently measuring brand awareness is a crucial component of increasing brand recall. There are several metrics that you can track to measure your brand awareness.

Here are some other ways to measure your brand awareness:

#1 Track traffic to your website

Using Google Analytics, you can analyze whether visitors to your website have increased or declined. It allows you to compare data by period and date to see when things sped up or slowed down.

Web traffic is often touted as the holy grail for marketers. The more traffic you accumulate, the more powerful your brand. However, a dive into Google Analytics can reveal a lot about brand recall.

Specifically, traffic that arrives at your brand via the ‘Direct’ channel can indicate how much of your traffic is arriving at your site simply because the end user is already so familiar with who you are that they came directly to you.

Alternatively, traffic that arrives at your site via organic search can help you pinpoint how well your site’s content is helping to increase your brand awareness.

In Google Analytics, go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels to see how the source of your traffic breaks down.

#2 Look closely at referrals to your site

This can also be quickly done through Google Analytics. Using the path listed above and clicking on ‘Referrals,’ this channel illuminates the backlinks sending users to your site.

This can be an excellent measure of how your efforts to increase awareness through earned media are paying off, for example, by highlighting news outlets reporting on your business.

However, it can also provide a way to identify other sites that are your biggest fans and understand the big picture of how traffic is reaching you across the internet.

Are you being linked in a popular article? Which readers are clicking through to find you? You can sign up for Google Search Console, a free tool from Google that will help you or your web admin answer these questions.

#3 Strategically study social engagement 

Just because you advertise on social media doesn’t mean you’re performing according to your aims. Calculating your brand’s share of voice is one effective method of determining how strong your brand awareness or recall is on social media.

Share of voice refers to the percentage of your brand’s market. Owning the most significant share of the ‘share of voice’ pie is one effective way to increase your overall brand awareness.

A brand like Nike might be interested in dominating social media conversations about athletic performance. It would compete against other sports apparel and footwear companies, such as Adidas, Reebok, etc., and brands publishing similar content, such as those selling sports nutrition products or energy drinks.

#4 Calculate your share of voice

To calculate your share of voice, you need first to understand who your competitors are. Then, figure it out using this simple equation: divide the sum of all the social mentions of both your brand and all of your competitors by 100. Then, count the number of mentions of your brand and divide that number by the number you got in the first step.

You can also use tools such as Awario or Brandwatch to track competitors and brand mentions.

Popular Ways to Boost Brand Awareness

The best processes for boosting brand awareness will vary from company to company. The method you ultimately opt for will largely depend on how well you have determined your target market.

Are they trend-chasing digital natives who live on Twitter and YouTube, or are they an older audience who stay connected via email and typing questions into search engines?

Here are several strategic marketing forms that will attract audiences to your brand and ensure that you stand out amidst all the competition. These methods are both customizable to various business models, and they’ve proven to be effective.

Narrative Marketing

Tell your brand story. Since the dawn of time, people have naturally gravitated toward narrative arcs that can capture and take them on a journey.

Leo Widrich expands on the ‘sticking’ power of storytelling, drawing on a Princeton study that found that “when we tell stories to others that have really helped us shape our thinking and way of life, we can have the same effect on them too. The brains of a person telling a story and listening to it can synchronize.”

Brands should tell three central types of stories to build a loyal customer base: product-focused, role-focused, and emotional-focused.

Telling compelling stories tactfully will imbue your brand with a distinct personality. This personality will present it as an individual to which consumers can relate instead of a mere corporation. Get a dose of inspiration with this list of great brand storytelling examples!

Remarketing

Target your ad campaign to individuals who have already visited your site. You can accomplish this using Google Adwords.

Remarketing is a robust way to reach segments of your audience who have already shown interest in your brand by visiting your site. When the correct marketing is employed, these segments stand a higher chance of converting.

As mentioned above, a brand name must be exposed at least seven times to become memorable. This makes remarketing an effective way to reach audiences familiar with you and ingrain brand recall.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization, known simply as SEO in digital marketing, is one of the most popular techniques for attracting visitors to your site through organic search. Enriching your content to show up when individuals search for relevant topics will ensure they land on your site.

How do you go about enriching that content? 

While prioritizing keyword density (populating your target keyword multiple times throughout your content) is a customary SEO tactic, properly locating your keywords is just as important. Positioning your primary keyword at the beginning of your content, both in a page’s title tag and the opening sentences of your copy — also known as front-loading — is a fantastic way to boost SEO. Google puts more weight on keywords that appear at the top of a webpage rather than further down.

It’s important to note that once you’ve got durable content that has been perfectly optimized for search engines, you don’t duplicate it elsewhere on your site. Google will recognize whether your content is being reproduced, which will, in turn, diminish your SEO. This is why, for each page on your site, you should write distinct title tags, meta descriptions, landing pages, image alt text, etc. The existence of each page on your site should be justified for being 100% unique.

The Most Effective Way to Enhance Brand Recall: Sonic Branding

Studies show that we process sound faster than any other sense. Crafting audio ads is a surefire way to gain instant access to your audience’s undivided attention in a capacity that exceeds anything visual marketing can do. Creative agency Fabrik Brands reports, “It only takes around 0.146 seconds for human beings to react to sound.”

Today’s audio consumption is at an all-time high. Voice commerce sales are projected to reach $40 billion by 2022, and around 60 million people own a smart speaker in the U.S. alone. The Best Audio Brands Report 2019 found that “brand engagement is far stronger when audio is treated as an equal and essential aspect of the brand.”

To be a true market leader, you should tap into the vast potential of audio branding so that your message resonates with viewers and sticks with them in a profound, lasting manner.

In the 2019 Audio Logo Index, a comprehensive study of all the major players in the audio branding realm, Veritonic identified a few key trends that sonic marketers can use. They found that bookending your sonic logo in an audio ad — that is, placing it at both the beginning and end of the ad — increases brand recall. Veritonic additionally found that using a brand’s name in conjunction with a pleasant melody improved its participants’ brand recall.

These findings make clear that while audio is a dimension worth incorporating into marketing efforts, simply playing your brand’s name for all to hear is insufficient.

You ought to be strategic about the number of times it is played and what the audience experiences alongside that sound.

Audiodraft discovered that “brands whose music is aligned with brand identity are more likely to be remembered,” as opposed to music that didn’t align with the campaign or the more significant brand presence. Another key finding they report is that “ads that link sound and visuals deliver higher memory encoding.” So whether you’re creating a television commercial, an online ad, or even a product demo, it’s worth pairing a voice with the visuals.

Additional studies show that messaging delivered via voice tech can double the brand recall of TV commercials because “voice offers a real-time connection that heightens relevance and memory with a hands-free experience.” Consumers are also less likely to skip ads when playing over a smart speaker than when an audio ad pops up while consuming audio content on their phone or computer.

Find a Voice to Build Your Brand Recall

It’s now evident that launching your forthcoming advertising campaign via audio channels and wielding the emotionally resonant power of voice is the optimal way to reach your target audience and cause them to remember your brand. Drive brand recall by finding the best voice actor to read your script and headline your campaign.

Sign up for a Voices account to hire a voice for your brand today.