With today’s digital marketing reach, even small businesses need to create greater brand awareness.  Here are some tips on how to measure this type of marketing campaign.

Most small business owners like ROI focused campaigns with identifiable metrics.  That is, they like advertising campaigns that result in conversions that clearly show how they’re making money.

By this virtue, it also means that most small business owners dislike branding campaigns.

Because branding campaigns are notoriously difficult to track, particularly as they pertain to direct ROI.  Data gathering can go on for months with nebulous results.

It used to be that a typical small business didn’t really do much in the way of brand advertising.  The channels that allowed them to get adequate reach didn’t exist.

But digital changed this.  Today, most SMBs, and in particular eCommerce businesses targeting widespread audiences, need to create brand awareness.  Furthermore, informational channels like YouTube videos and informational blog posts, which target people in the awareness phase of the buying cycle, are branding by their nature.

Multiplying the potential of branding even further is social media marketing.  Sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat have unprecedented reach as brand channels.

In this post, we’ll outline several important metric sets that will help you gauge the impact of your branding efforts.  And – just for all those ROI minded small business people – we’ll finish it with metrics that directly connect to your conversion data.

 

Social Media Engagement and Followers

When it comes to social media marketing, you measure your growth in followers and engagement metrics.

Engagement metrics, such as Facebook likes, retweets, or Instagram comments will show you how an individual post did.  The more reaction a post gets, the more it gets shared across other people’s accounts.

For example:

This Facebook post got 164 reactions.  That means the post showed up in the news feed of all those people, exposing the post the all of their followers.

177 people directly shared this post with a friend they thought would be interested.

In total, 18,063 people were reached by this post.

This is a combination of “eyes on the brand” with the stronger level of engagement as people engage directly by entering the giveaway.

Most social media campaigns don’t have a direct sales call to action, because those goals don’t tend to do well on social media.  But 18k more people know about this brand, with awareness generated by a core audience that fits their main sales demographic.

That’s brand marketing.

 

YouTube Videos

YouTube videos are an excellent place to introduce your brand and provide useful information to prospective customers.

YouTube also provides a great deal of data on engagement with your brand, such as:

Over 180 days, the videos on this account had a total of over 371k in views, adding 2321 subscribers.

None of this data directly translates into conversions.  The videos are tutorials, not sales pitches.  This is brand exposure.

However, we can track YouTube as a referral source, with direct conversions from this source:

With YouTube, we have both branding and conversion data.

 

Informational Blog Articles

You can capture a lot of new traffic and gain brand awareness by optimizing blog articles for long-tail searches.

Long-tail search queries are longer phrases people use when doing informational searches.  Often, these are in the form of a question.

When you optimize a blog article for these phrases and provide an article with information that helps the searcher, you get valuable brand exposure.

For example, at Marketing 360®, we work with many business verticals, including carpet cleaning services.  We wrote an information blog with tips on how to market a carpet cleaning business.  It ranks in position #1 for searches like “carpet cleaning marketing ideas” or “how to market a carpet cleaning business”.

This article is not a sales landing page.  Instead – like our YouTube videos – it provides useful tips to help owners of a carpet cleaning service get started with marketing.  The primary goal is to expose people to our brand and build trust by providing value upfront.

Now they are aware of Marketing 360®.  We’ve become a brand option for them as they consider how to market their business.

 

Retargeting

An important tactic with all of the branding channels we’ve discussed is retargeting.  Retargeting serves up ads and content to people who have already visited your website, reacted to your social media, or watched part of your video.

For example, we can create a campaign based on people who watched one of our videos with a duration time of at least 2 minutes.  Likewise, we can serve up ads to people after they visited our blog page, or if they liked a Facebook post.

The importance of retargeting for branding should not be underestimated.  One visit to your website or one view of a video is usually not going to be enough to get people to remember an SMB brand.

When you retarget, you keep your branding message in front of people as they continue their activities online.  These ads often have a call to action, but they also serve as banners that keep your brand name in front of people.

That’s an important component to getting more leads through branded search.

 

Tracking Conversions With Branded Search

This is the part that business owners love.  When branding turns into conversions.

After exposure to your content and retargeting, the lead knows who you are, what you offer them, and why they should hire you.

Then comes decision time.  Their need becomes active and they’re ready to spend.  What do they do?

If you’ve done a strong job with your branding and informational marketing, they’ll look you up by name.  That is, they’ll go on Google and their query will be your brand name.

At Marketing 360®, we use these branding tactics effectively.  It shows in our search data.  For impressions and clicks, “marketing 360” with variations is our highest volume keyword:

We also have data that our branded keywords get the second most conversions with the highest conversion rate of any keyword:

In addition to these searches, we have direct traffic, where people type in (or autofill) the domain name.  This is also a high converting channel, with 2377 conversions and 15.78% conversion rate.

None of this type of traffic happens unless the user is already aware of your brand.  They come back to you via a direct, brand targeted method, with high click through and conversion rates because transactional intent is so high.

This is how branding pays off for SMBs on digital channels.  Get your name out there and earn people’s trust with upfront value.  When they come back, searching for you by name, it will be your most valuable traffic.

For more, please read this case study.