Learn how to map your customers' brand awareness. Work on your brand awareness and watch it bounce back in your revenue.
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I just heard the first few words of the advertisement and I immediately knew, that was [my lovebrand]. No need to skip this add, it always makes me laugh...will share it with my fellas. Besides, I am curios about their new prototype of [my loveproduct]...
Was this the voice of your dream customer? The fast adopter who recommends your product to others? The personificated power of word of mouth?
The whole concept of brand awareness can sound a bit abstract especially to data-driven deciders and analytical souls. However, the bigger your brand awareness grows, the less costs you need to acquire a new customer (the customers will begin to acquire themselves and one another).
Let’s talk about how to measure brand awareness by using an online survey. Read this article, grab the fully editable Brand Awareness Survey Template and scan the situation among your customers.
It is definitely not how you perceive your brand or how you want your customers to recognize your brand.
It means not only if customers recognize your logo or brand design. Brand awareness includes all the emotions (also negative) that come to the mind of your customer when they get in contact with your brand. It means that your customers are able to associate your brand with your products and services.
Let’s go even deeper. Devoted customers may recognize you by creative and unique ads that you launch. They might be even familiar with how your business got started. They can become loyal to your brand because they share the same values as you. And they might also respect you for how you treat your employees or the environment.
You are responsible for marketing campaigns by which you acquire new customers and keep the existing ones. If you discover, that the brand awareness of your target group is exactly what you wanted to achieve, you can surf on the wave of positive brand awareness and create campaigns that will be based on it. Your positioning was successful. There will be a major probability that you will reach out to new customers by something that is recognized and accepted by the rest of your current customers.
This story can also have a totally different beginning. If you find any negative vibe that is occuring around your brand, you can create a campaign where you will persuade your customers about the opposite. And not only this. Listen to this example:
Rumors are occuring that you use palm oil in your products which causes the destruction of rainforests and air pollution. If it is true and it evokes negative emotions among your customers, do not only persuade your customers that you don’t do that but prove that you really changed the method of production and show your new ingredients. And that is where management and product owners will put their hands to work.
The position of your brand among the competitors won’t create itself. When you get the data from the brand awareness survey, you need to come up with practical changes that will support the way you want your customers to think about you. Is this still too abstract? Here are two examples:
Your customers see your prices as too high for current quality of your product. Think about cost optimization in the production process. Use the cost savings for buying/producing high quality materials. In cooperation with the marketing team, discuss the possibility of bundling or cross-selling or upselling to increase the value of the product combination in the eyes of your customer.
According to your customers, the coolest design of your product is the main reason for a purchase.Apparently, your target group values design of your product more than quality or other factors. That is very important information to know! If design is the “why” of the purchase, invest more money into creating more timeless designs so you won’t lose your position overtime.
This might seem a bit out of place, doesn’t it? Yet HR managers also can use knowledge about brand awareness to their advantage, especially in huge corporations and enterprises. Brand awareness in people’s brains is a result of many variables. Have you ever lost positive thoughts about a company after hearing stories of its employees or after a public affair where the company played a significant role? HR managers and PR specialists can work on brand awareness by creating a place with pleasant working conditions and representing the company as an advocate of legal and moral values.
Find out why our customers choose Survio as a reliable feedback solution for their business.
Ask yourself first. What could be the piece of information that would help you map the awareness of your brand? Consider the following questions you can ask yourself to get a better idea of what you want to find out in the survey.
After you summarize what data you actually need to get from your respondents, you can start creating the brand awareness questionnaire. Well… almost.
The last thing that influences the whole structure of your survey is the group of respondents you will ask to fill out the survey (the survey sample). Are you curious only about the behaviour of your already defined target group or are you conducting more complex research where you approach society in general?
In the first case you can save time because you don’t have to ask all the demographic questions that help you sort out all segments. Thanks to this, you can focus solely on customers' attitude to the product or service. The results will help you develop already existing communication to the particular target group.
In the case of surveying among all people you can detect nuances between different target groups and then you can start creating individual ways of communication based on the consumer sentiment of each target group. However, you can't avoid the demographic questions that take up a significant part of the questionnaire.
End of theory, let’s create the questionnaire.
Obviously, you would like your brand to be the most famous, the most visible and the coolest brand ever. Who wouldn’t. But please, leave this excitement to quarterly meetings. Your task is to minimize bias in the survey to get true data.
Asking such questions as Do you know the brand [brandname]? or Is [brandname] your favorite? doesn’t do much good as it prevents customers from finding their own way to your brand.
The design of the questionnaire is also related to what we are just talking about. Covering the questionnaire in your brand colours and stuffing your logo in every corner will cause the exact same bias. You need to stay impartial.
A typical question that you can begin your brand awareness survey with. It will research brand recognition. In questions that follow, it is possible to reveal the name of your brand. Still, avoid asking suggestive questions, such as “The logo of [brandname] looks great, doesn’t it?”
There is no other question type that would offer more freedom to your respondents. In open ended questions you can get to know the attitude, opinion or feeling of your respondent. On the other hand you need to go through every single answer to get the whole picture.
They are easy to fill out and super easy to analyse. You know them mostly as single choice or multiple choice questions. Just be careful that you give your respondent all necessary options to choose from. Otherwise you will welcome bias into your survey again. To avoid that, you can do a pretest or you can add the option “other” so you don’t miss any important response.
There are various ways to share your survey. Your task is to choose the most convenient channel for your respondents. Look for your respondents where they actually are.
Taking aforementioned bias into account, it is advisable not to place the survey on brand awareness directly on your website. Consider other, thematically related information hubs - a blog or forum channel dedicated to hair care, for example.
Just watch the results come in. The charts and tables automatically create themselves in real time.
Results can be filtered, sorted and exported in ready-made reports. Select a convenient format (PDF, .docx, .pptx, .xlsx, .csv or Google Sheets) and you’re good to go.
It's up to you to reflect on the answers, draw conclusions and implement changes in your company.
And that’s it! Try out the Brand Awareness Survey Template, add or edit questions, customize the design and prepare your brand for a take-off to new customer experience.
