6 Steps to Prepare, Monitor and Measure Your Next Brand Awareness Campaign

BY KATE DUNHAM

Brand awareness campaigns have one goal: to raise awareness and visibility of your brand. While it’s important to focus on the creative elements and execution of your campaign it’s equally important to set a social media monitoring plan so you can follow the progress of the campaign in real time. Plus, you’ll want to ensure you fully understand the effectiveness of the campaign once it has wrapped.

Not sure where to start? Use these handy checklists to prep for your next brand awareness campaign.

1. Set your KPIs. How will you measure success?

Before launching any campaign you first have to clearly define your objectives and goals. The objective of a brand awareness campaign is to increase brand awareness. In order to evaluate if that objective was achieved, you need to pre-determine what metrics you’ll measure to determine the level of success. These metrics are called Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Make sure you and your team (and your boss!) have agreed-upon goals and a list of KPIs before launch. It’s important that everyone has the same criteria for evaluating and measuring the campaign.

Brand Awareness KPIs:

• Increase in brand mentions: Mentions measure the size of a social conversation around a specific search term or phrase—in this case the name of your brand. Mentions are simply the number of times your brand name was used across social media, helping you understand just how much (or little) attention you’re receiving.

• Extended impressions: Impressions measure the size of your brand’s potential audience. Impressions are based on the number of followers that are in the networks of the authors that generate mentions of your brand.

• Increased engagement: Engagement metrics represent how much and how often people interact with your content on social media. A subset of engagement metrics are sharing metrics, which represent when people amplify your content.

• Improved Share of Voice: Share of voice helps you understand how you are performing on social in comparison to your competitors. The metric details what percentage of mentions within your industry or space are about you and what percentage is about the competition.

2. Benchmark

Once you decide on your KPIs, document the starting point for each metric so you’ll be able to track any changes throughout the campaign. Establish the length of the campaign and record your benchmark metrics with the same range. For example, if you’re going to run your brand awareness campaign for three months, determine what your average number of mentions were for the three months prior to the start of the campaign.

In addition to your KPIs metrics you’ll also want to benchmark other metrics to see how they change over the course of your campaign. Not all of these metrics will necessarily help evaluate the success of campaign, but it’s important to understand any shifts the campaign causes for your brand on social.

Pre-Launch Campaign Metrics Checklist:

• Total number of mentions of your brand name
• Exposure
• Share of Voice
• Engagement: average number of RTs, Likes, Shares, Comments, Repins etc.
• Followers/Fans on each platform
• Sentiment
• Geographical breakdown: In what city, state, country do you see the most mentions?
• Gender distribution

If you want to see how your awareness campaign performs on each social platform, isolate these metrics for each platform and benchmark.

3. Set up additional monitoring

In addition to monitoring your brand name on social you’ll also want to set up a campaign-specific monitoring plan before launch so you don’t miss out on mentions and important metrics. Isolating for what’s being said specifically about the campaign and not just your brand will help you evaluate how the messaging and positioning are being received.

Pre-Launch Campaign Monitoring Checklist:

• Campaign name or title with brand or company name
• Campaign name or title without brand name
• Hashtags or other elements specific to the campaign

4. Monitor the brand awareness campaign

Once the campaign launches keep a close eye on mentions of your brand and what’s being said about the initiative so you’ll be able to respond quickly to any issues that arise or make adjustments as necessary.

Look Out For:

• Dramatic shift in mentions.
  • Find the cause. Was it due to one of your tweets, or post by an advocate or influencer?
• Sentiment level: are you seeing an increase in positive or negative mentions?
  • If people are responding negatively, make adjustments based on the feedback or consider halting the campaign.
• Are the topics shifting?
  • Are the conversations around your brand changing? Are people talking about what you want them to talk about? Is the campaign getting any traction?

5. Report up

After your brand awareness campaign has ended it’s time to report on the effort. Create a report that features all the social data you’ve collected over the course of the campaign.

Brand Awareness Campaign Report Elements:

• Your brand’s social metrics pre-campaign and during the campaign timeframe listed side by side. Show the percentages of change where possible. (ex: Brand mentions increased by 10%)
  • Total number of mentions of your brand name
  • Exposure
  • Share of Voice
  • Engagement: average number of RTs, Likes, Shares, Comments, Repins etc.
  • Followers/Fans on each platform
  • Sentiment
• Geographical breakdown: pre-campaign vs. campaign timeframe
  • Did the city, state, or country you previously saw the most mentions from change?
  • Can you tie the change to a specific cause?
• Gender distribution: pre-campaign vs. campaign timeframe
  • Did the ratio of male to female mentions change?
  • Can you tie the change to a specific cause?

• A breakdown of campaign-specific metrics: This will include data from your three monitoring searches* (Campaign name or title with brand or company name; Campaign name or title without brand name; Hashtags or other elements specific to the campaign)
  • Total number of mentions of the brand awareness campaign
  • Exposure
  • Engagement: number of RTs, Likes, Shares, Comments, Repins etc.
  • Sentiment
  • Geographical breakdown
  • Gender distribution

*You can also compile the data from each specific search if you want to evaluate if how people chose to talk about the campaign affected the performance.

6. Evaluate and analyze the campaign

After you’ve gathered and reported on all of the campaign’s data, it’s time analyze your findings to determine if the campaign was successful in increasing brand awareness. Evaluate your KPIs: Did you see an increase in brand mentions, exposure, engagement and Share of Voice? Highlight where you were successful and where you weren’t.

The next step is to take a deep dive into the metrics and the campaign and analyze what aspects of the campaign worked and what could have been improved upon. Should you have posted more or amped up engagement? Did you see positive or negative reactions to your messaging? Take the time to analyze what worked and what didn’t in regards to each KPI and the overall sentiment levels and mentions of the campaign. Use the social data behind your brand awareness campaign to guide changes to your ongoing strategy or to reinforce what’s working for your brand.