Brand awareness survey: key points you should know

In today's market, where competition is fierce, the need to grow a loyal and sustainable audience is more vital than ever. Products may come and go, but your brand will stay forever.

What your audience thinks about the brand is probably your first step to creating that legacy. Conducting a brand awareness survey will tell you a lot about how your potential clients perceive your company. 

Creating a brand awareness survey can be tricky. But you, my friend, have come to the right place. Now before we move on to that, this post will walk you through the essentials of brand awareness and the right questions you have to put in your upcoming surveys. 

What is a brand awareness survey?

It has been rightly said that the best way to find something is to ask! 

A brand awareness survey is a questionnaire that measures how aware your target audience is of your brand. It is also a way for you to find out what they think of your brand and how easily recognizable it is. You can use this survey to understand what kind of emotions they associate with your brand, how much they trust it, or even how loyal they are. 

Your brand awareness can generally be measured by your audience's recency and frequency with your category and brand. You can also use techniques such as word association to check for brand recall and top-of-mind awareness. A brand awareness survey sets you in the right direction for change and helps you shape your brand exactly in the way that your audience would want it to. To sum it up for you, it could be a real game changer for your brand and give you the answers you would never have guessed otherwise. 

Why is it vital for businesses to measure their brand awareness?

Brand awareness is a really helping aspect no matter what industry you are in. So it is important to check the current situation and take necessary action. And there's not just one but many more benefits of conducting a brand awareness survey. Let's see what they are. 

1 - Your audience feels heard:

Engaging with your audience is not a one-way street. Feedback is an inevitable and unmissable part of a customer journey. It tells you exactly what you might need to improve upon. Besides telling you about your brand awareness, a survey also makes your audience feel like they have a voice. It values their decision-making process when they talk about what's important to them in a category and what made them choose a particular brand or product. Collecting such valuable data is fundamental to building a loyal customer base. 

2 - Helps you evaluate:

Sure, numbers are one thing! Your sales, traffic, users, etc., definitely tell you whether your efforts are paying off or not. But you are trying to build your brand a certain way. And this brand awareness survey will tell you whether your marketing activities are setting the right tone with your audience or not. 

It exposes the gaps in your campaigns' reach so that you can optimize your future strategies accordingly. Decisions related to your packaging, pricing, receipt making, channels, and promotions, everything can be tweaked and made better for your audience based on these brand awareness surveys. 

3 - Some juicy intel:

This kind of survey is also a way of getting to know how well (or not) your competitors are doing. How high up are they on the list of brands they recall? What words do they associate your competitors with? Do they buy from them more often than they buy from you? You get a fair idea of where you are lacking vis-a-vis the other players and up your game! 

And if you thought that's all, gear up! Brand awareness surveys are not only low cost but can also be shared through multiple channels and are quick!

4 - Generate leads:

Brand awareness surveys can be a great way for you to gather some qualified leads as well. You know which of your respondents are aware of your competitors' services or interested in your category as a whole! 

This will help enterprises categorize the people that participated in the survey and enable them to fine-tune their market segmentation strategy. 

How to measure brand awareness effectively

A brand awareness survey is like no other. It uses so many dimensions to be able to understand where your brand stands and what it needs to do. So here are some practical tactics from us that will help you leverage your brand awareness survey to the fullest! 

Spot your ideal audience

"Not everybody may like you. But not everybody needs to." We know this may sound like a quote from Instagram, but this is true for your business. The first step to using your brand awareness survey is to find the right segment to target for your brand. 

Ask the appropriate questions

Conduct some research into creating the perfect questionnaire. Keep your questions relevant to what you want to learn from your survey and what is the bottom line behind it. Ensure that the questions you ask get down to the nitty-gritty of the information you want. 

Use your data

Analyze your results to their fullest extent. Gather as much information from it as you can. You can also ask your open-ended audience questions to help you implement future strategies and maximize the conversion rate.

Consider social listening

Identifying the social platforms where your prospects are most active should be a major focus of your strategy.

Social listening is an organic way of getting honest feedback from your clients, who tend to share their thoughts and experiences fully. 

This also addresses one of the issues with surveys, response bias, in which respondents may not provide natural responses merely because of the way questions are formulated.

Plenty of social listening tools permit you to create your specialized searches that can surmount the issue of a generic brand name by filtering out any undesirable mentions.

Types of brand awareness survey

Brand awareness surveys are not always the same. Here we will go through the three different types of brand awareness surveys with case-based scenarios to help you understand how to use them.

1 - Top of mind awareness survey

Top-of-mind awareness refers to what brand comes to the minds of the user when they think about your category. Look at Colgate. It is more often than not the first brand that comes to mind when the general public thinks of toothpaste. Nike for shoes. McDonald's for burgers. The list goes on. 

So you want your brand awareness survey to have questions related to your product category to understand whether your brand is the first answer for them. For example, 'Which brand comes to your mind when someone says 'interactive content? And hopefully, it's us!

2 - Unaided brand recall survey

It might sound similar to top-of-mind awareness, but it's the list of brands that subconsciously comes to your audience's mind when they think of a product category. When one thinks of beverages, Coca-Cola might be the first brand one thinks of. But other brands will also come to their mind (such as Thums Up, Dr. Pepper, Fanta, etc.) without any aid from the brand.

3 - Aided brand recall survey

Here, the respondent might be prompted by a name, picture, logo, sound, or any other symbol that might help them recall brands. They could also answer what they remember about a particular brand and what it does. This allows a company understands its brand recognition. 

If one shows the respondent an Apple logo, they might end up naming their different product lines, tagline, models, etc. 

11 Effective questions to ask in a brand awareness survey

This isn't an exhaustive list, but these sure are a must-include for any brand awareness survey based on what you are trying to understand:

1  - When you think of (product category), what brands come to mind? - Unaided recall

2  - When was the last time you used a (product)? - Recency

3  - What is the first brand you think of when thinking of (product category)? - Top-of-mind awareness 

4  - Which of the following brands have you heard of? - Aided recall

5  - Which brands do you purchase (product type) from? - Unaided recall 

6  - Which of the following things would make you loyal to our brand? - Consumer needs

7  - If (brand name) was a person, how would you describe that person? - Brand personification

8  - Which of these aspects led to you choosing (brand name)? - Evaluation of alternatives

9  - How did you find out about (the brand name)? - Marketing channel effectiveness 

10  - List five words you would choose to describe this brand. - Word association

11  - How familiar are you with (brand name) 's products and services? - Brand recognition

Final thoughts

About 35% of marketers face a challenge with keeping their brand relevant. And a brand awareness survey can be a major medium for improving that. Now that we have covered the basics of any brand awareness survey and how it can help you, it's your turn to give it a try. And if you're looking for a place to create a brand awareness survey easily, look no more. Check out our variety of survey templates and get started with the one you like!

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