Measurable Goals for Brand Awareness

Your brand doesn't do you any good if people have never heard of it. Brand awareness is the first step in building eventual brand loyalty: consumers have heard of your brand and remember it, even if they don't have strong feelings about it yet. Measuring brand awareness tells you if your initial branding campaign has been effective.

Name Recall

When consumers are asked about a particular product or service and think of your company, you've achieved name recall. If you open a vegetarian restaurant, for instance, you can measure name recall by polling people to list all the local restaurants they know. If more people name you after a brand-awareness campaign, that shows the campaign worked. You can make the questions specific: "Name restaurants using local organic produce," for example, shows whether a campaign to make people remember your brand in that way succeeded.

Recognition

Brand recognition tackles recall from a different angle: you tell consumers your company or product name, and see how many of them remember hearing about it. Another approach is to show them a list of logos, ads or brands in your field, including yours, and see if your brand is one of the ones they can identify. If your brand-awareness goal was to achieve 60 percent name recognition, for example, this sort of test can measure your success.

Social Media

Facebook and Twitter have become 21st century tools for promoting brands. If you use them to boost brand awareness, you can also use them to measure your success. Useful, measurable goals include getting a certain number of fans for your company's Facebook page, boosting your total Twitter followers or getting say, 20 percent of your followers to retweet your tweets. You can measure specific brand-awareness efforts or campaigns by tracking the growth in your social-media followers.

Market Penetration

The market penetration metric measures your success with a target demographic. If you market products for infants and 40 percent of the parents in your community buy them, you have 40 percent penetration. You can learn a lot by combining this data with brand awareness: If you only have 20 percent brand awareness, that suggests buyers aren't picking your products based on your brand, so you can't build brand loyalty. Increasing brand awareness among people who use your product is an effective, measurable goal.