Branding can have a powerful impact on a company's visibility, reputation, and sales. It enables your business to attract prospects and build lasting relationships with new customers. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Branding is an essential ingredient for building loyalty and motivating employees. But, just like all good things, it can be quite challenging to measure the success of your branding efforts, let alone implement a solid branding strategy.

So, how do you measure brand awareness? This article delves deeper into building brand success, the challenges marketers face in measuring the impact of branding, and a few ways to measure your efforts.

How to Promote Your Brand

If you want to build a successful brand, start by identifying what strategies work for your business. You should look at other companies in your industry to see their approaches. Then, find out how those companies measure success so you can collect the same branding success metrics for your business.

Look at Your Visual Branding

Visual branding refers to the colors, fonts, and graphic elements representing your brand. They make you instantly recognizable online or offline.

Your logo is one of the first things people see when they walk into your business. It should set the tone for who you are. But more importantly, it should be consistent with the rest of your brand.

When it comes to fonts and colors, don't go overboard. If people can't read what's on your sign without squinting, they probably won't read it at all and go for something else.

Invest in Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is a great way to reach out to potential customers and give them a little taste of what your brand offers. A company should invest in digital marketing strategies on various channels, including:

• Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter
• Search engine optimization (SEO) to make its brand known online
• Content marketing
• Email marketing

Digital marketing provides valuable insights since it's easy to track and measure the most important KPIs.

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Consider PR Practices

Public relations (PR) is a way of communicating with people to help them learn about the products or services you offer. You can promote yourself through news releases, press releases, blogs, websites, and social media.

Most public relations strategies focus on creating newsworthy stories about your company or its products to get them picked up by the media and reach new potential customers.

On top of that, a PR strategy can also help with the following:

• Employee retention
• Client retention
• Growth potential

If you have never done PR before, hire professionals. A good PR agency can help you gain exposure to promote your business growth.

Community Events Sponsorship

Events like conferences, trade shows, and social gatherings are an excellent way of reaching potential customers. They also allow you to meet other businesses in your industry to build connections and find partners.

Sponsoring an event also provides an opportunity for some PR coverage. It gets your name out in the open to the attendees.

5 Ways of Measuring the Impact of Branding

You will never know whether your branding efforts pay off without accurate data. By regularly measuring brand performance, you can see how people respond to your marketing campaigns and find ways to improve them.

So how do you measure brand awareness?

1. Ask for Feedback

Customer feedback is an invaluable tool for measuring the impact of branding. People like it when they can share their impressions. Feedback collection also shows consumers that you care about their opinions, which benefits your brand image.

If you're unsure where to start, ask your customers what they think of your products. Do they find it convenient? Do they have any suggestions? A positive response from them is the first step on your way to building a successful brand.

Use surveys at critical points in the buyer's journey (at initial contact with your business, during product trial, after purchase, etc.) to gauge how well your brand is performing at every stage of engagement.

2. Conduct Market Research

Many brand measurement techniques exist, but only a few focus on market research.

If you know your customers and the optimum ways to reach them, you can use marketing data to determine whether you're on the right track. You want to find out what people think about your product or service.

3. Use Brand Tracking Software

How do you measure brand awareness with software? Easy. Brand tracking software allows you to track growth over time and compare this data against competitors.

Some measures of success for a business you should look at include:

• Brand Awareness - How many people are aware of your brand?
• Brand Perception - How do consumers perceive your brand?
• Brand Loyalty - How loyal are your customers?
• Brand Equity - What is the value of your brand?

4. Social Listening

Social listening always comes up when we think about how to measure progress in business. It's all about identifying and interpreting peoples' conversations about your brand across social media and other online channels. These findings give you a better understanding of how people feel about your brand and set the foundation for future strategic decisions.

5. Split testing

Split testing aims to compare two variations of a single variable to determine which one performs better. When you are looking at how to measure the product's success, split testing is a great way to see what resonates with your target audience (and what doesn't). For example, you can change brand colors on your website and track how users respond to the changes. Increased activity means that the update was successful. Lower activity may indicate that the previous version was better.

Split testing allows you to make data-driven decisions and avoid assumptions based on opinion or gut feeling.

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Tools to Collect The Data For Brand Marketing Analysis

Testing your brand's success starts with an in-depth analysis of the measures of success for a business. You need to gather data from many different sources and then analyze it. Use one or all of the following tools for that:

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a simple, free tool for measuring brand performance. It provides an incredible amount of information about your visitors, demographics, interests, activity, etc.

You'll be able to see branded search volume in your brand name and the search terms your customers used to find your website or blog. You'll also see where they come from and what pages they view on your site.

Social Media Insights

Most social media platforms have custom analytics tools that provide insights into who is visiting your business profile and their activity (likes, comments, shares, etc.). By looking at these insights, you'll be able to adjust the content you post to appeal more directly to the people who are interacting with your brand on social media.

SurveyMonkey Benchmarks

Survey Monkey is one of the most popular tools for creating online surveys, but did you know they also offer a free tool called Survey Monkey Benchmarks? It can help you compare your performance to competitors.

Here are some examples of ways you can use Benchmarks:

• Test customer service satisfaction
• Measure brand awareness over time
• Track consumer sentiment around new products

Inkit Reach Enablement Platform

Inkit is a platform with customer communication and data analytics capabilities. It has multiple features you can use to collect branding success metrics and stay in touch with consumers. In particular, Inkit Send API enables businesses to deliver offline branding materials through direct mail automation. You can send customer surveys to learn what people think, check mail response rates, or include your branding elements to power marketing efforts.

Contact our team to learn more about using Inkit for brand marketing or get a trial version to see how it works.