Brand awareness campaigns and activations are a powerful tool to drive consumer engagement. Take brands’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic. According to a 2021 survey from Deloitte, close to 80% of consumers recalled instances of brands responding positively to COVID-19 to help customers, employees, and communities. And one in four of those respondents indicated that this awareness of the brand’s actions positively shifted how they view the brand; one in five agreed it made them more likely to buy from the brand.
Many brands are turning to influencer marketing to drive this kind of positive consumer awareness. But often, brands aren’t measuring the impact of their efforts. Awareness in influencer marketing, sometimes known as the ‘halo effect,’ can seem nebulous since it’s difficult to follow every brand impression all the way to a sale. But measuring the impact of awareness campaigns is still extremely valuable.
The key to understanding the impact of brand awareness dollars is a brand lift study. These custom research efforts give brands the ability to assess the impact of influencer marketing on brand awareness and purchase consideration, and optimize future campaigns to increase impact.
How to Measure Brand Awareness With Intention
What is a Brand Lift Study?
Brand lift studies survey consumers after exposure to an influencer campaign to gather data on their impressions. These surveys can be tailored to ask about everything from a viewer’s affinity toward a brand after watching the marketing content, to understanding which messaging within the content resonated most. Say a brand wants its potential customers to have a clear understanding of how their product operates. A brand lift study can assess consumer recall of specific product features to see if the campaign effectively conveyed this information. Each study is customized—by the number of consumers surveyed, to the type of questions asked—to a brand’s unique goals.
Running brand studies across multiple campaigns can generate insights over time to help guide a brand’s marketing strategy, messaging and influencer partnerships to continue to get the most out of every awareness activation.
Running brand studies across multiple campaigns can generate insights over time to help guide a brand’s marketing strategy, messaging and influencer partnerships to continue to get the most out of every awareness activation.
1. Brand Recall measures how well consumers remember your brand after seeing your marketing content. Consumers might simply be asked, ‘Which of the following brands do you recall from the video you just saw?’ The brand study will measure both unaided and aided recall (with visual cues or prompts).
For one fintech brand that worked with the team at BEN, 86% of consumers were able to recall the brand without any cues immediately after seeing the company’s Instagram integration. This marked a 14% increase from unaided recall, indicating that the content was effective at promoting strong brand recognition—helping the brand to stand out among its competitors. Being able to quantify the impact of the awareness campaign on their target audience steered the company toward continued investment in Instagram for better ROI on its influencer marketing campaigns.
2. Change in Opinion measures whether the awareness campaign resulted in a positive or negative response from viewers. This can apply not only to the brand, but also the product being promoted, the content, or the creators who participated. Understanding what makes consumers respond positively can help brands build future influencer campaigns with greater impact.
3. Brand sentiment measures, at a more granular level, how consumers responded to specific elements of a campaign. For example, survey respondents could be asked to agree or disagree if they thought the content made the brand seem dependable, safe, stylish, or high quality. Questions can be more specific based on campaign goals or vertical. A snack brand might ask if consumers think the product is “good for parties” or “has attractive packaging.” These metrics can help brands understand what qualities of a product resonate with audiences and drive a more positive brand sentiment—and even purchase consideration.
4. Purchase Consideration measures whether a campaign influenced the consumer to make a purchase or take further action with a brand. The questionnaire will ask something like, “How likely are you to consider using the test brand for your next [category] purchase?” While awareness campaigns aren’t always designed to spur consumers to make a purchase, they still leave an impression. For example, a real estate brand using YouTube and Instagram influencer campaigns saw a 10% increase in purchase consideration from consumers. Measuring purchase consideration as part of awareness campaigns can help brands assess how effectively their high-level marketing efforts are performing to move consumers through the funnel.
What Awareness Metrics Can Brand Lift Studies Measure?
Leveraging the data from a brand lift study, brands can interpret the impact of their influencer marketing investment toward larger strategic goals. With each campaign, marketers can track individual influencer impact as well as overall campaign impact on key brand attributes as well as purchase consideration. Moreover, the insights from these awareness campaigns can be used to drive better ROI from targeted campaigns like giveaways, product launches, and more. The more brands can reframe their thinking about awareness campaigns as a business driver, the better equipped they’ll be to leverage influencer marketing across the funnel to drive true impact for their brand.
Awareness Momentum Drives Brand KPIs
Take a closer look at brands like Cure Rare Disease and Noom have seen successful brand awareness campaigns by working with BEN.