A single brand evaluation metric such as 'brand awareness' can get a bad press as a marketing KPI. It's easy to see why, after all, just because I'm aware of your brand, it doesn't mean your marketing has been all that successful in driving demand or sales for a product.
To give a trite example, I'm aware of Donald Trump, North Korea and Protein World. It doesn't mean I like any of them. Nor does it mean I'd ever buy from them. Oh and before you say 'You can't buy from North Korea Rob you idiot'- I think you'll find you can.
Strategic brand evaluation runs much deeper. It's time to aim for strategic marketing beyond a single campaign metric.
"Strategic marketing beyond a single campaign metric"
Boosting brand awareness isn't pointless, far from it. But awareness is only the first step on the journey to a sale. What you want to do is make those unaware aware, make those aware consider, and make those 'considering' take action.
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Generally speaking, your audience will either be unfamiliar with a product, on the fence about a product, or ready to act. In other words, they will fall into one of these three categories:
Depending on which point on this journey your customers are sitting at, you'll need to frame your messaging differently, and use different KPIs to properly measure the effectiveness of the activity.
The table below from Google relating specifically to brand videos does a great job of breaking down which KPIs to use depending on your objective for your brand evaluation reporting.
In relation to video marketing, which is a key tool for brand marketing campaigns, there are a number of tools built into YouTube which you can use for KPI evaluation.
Moreover, personas and customer journey maps help to 'operationalize' KPI evaluation by making them more applicable to improving customer-focused content marketing.
Using personas is a powerful technique to better understand your audience. Customer journey maps give a dynamic, moving journey of their characteristics, goals and pain points.
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Learn MoreAny marketer worth their salt will of course already be aware of YouTube Analytics, Google Analytics and AdWords. But you might not have come across brand lift before. This is the spiel Google uses to describe 'Brand Lift':
Brand Lift measures the direct impact your YouTube ads are having on perceptions and behaviors throughout the consumer journey. Within a matter of days, Brand Lift gives you insights into how your ads are impacting the metrics that matter, including lifts in brand awareness, ad recall, consideration, favorability, purchase intent, and brand interest, as measured by organic search activity. You can easily optimize your campaigns mid-flight, based on these near real-time results, broken out by demographics, frequency, and more.
It's a useful tool, and one you might want to use if you're considering a major YouTube based Marketing campaign. Those interested in using Brand storytelling can check out our Brand Storytelling guide.
So, you've set your brand evaluation KPIs and considered the user journey from awareness to conversion. After running your marketing campaign, don't forget to run post-campaign review! A post-campaign review simply summarizes the effectiveness of a campaign by reviewing results against what you had forecast.
Post-campaign review
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Why and how to complete a post-campaign review activity
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By Robert Allen
Rob Allen is Marketing Manager for Numiko, a digital agency that design and build websites for purpose driven organisations, such as the Science Museum Group, Cancer Research UK, University of London and the Electoral Commission. Rob was blog editor at Smart Insights from 2015-2017. You can follow Rob on LinkedIn.
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